[For this year’s
April
Fool’s series, I decided to AmericanStudy a handful of classic 1980s comic films. Leading up
to a special weekend post on one of the best comedies, and films, from 2019!]
On two distinct
ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic scary comedy.
First things
first: Ghostbusters (1984) is a really fun, funny, scary,
entirely successful film, full of great performances, great music, and lines and moments that
have stuck with me to this day, and that seemed to hit my sons equally hard when
we watched it for the first time over this past holiday season. (The less said
about Ghostbusters II [1989], the
better; I’m not even gonna hyperlink that one.) It’s important, in the course
of these kinds of analytical series, not to lose sight of the fact that both
comic films and summer blockbusters are designed and intended, first and
foremost, to entertain—that doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t also be
smart or interesting (none of that “It’s not supposed to be Shakespeare” crap
here, bud), just that we can’t overlook the qualities that make them fun and
make them endure. And Ghostbusters
has endured as well as any summer blockbuster I know, and indeed largely
created (and certainly popularized) a new genre—the
horror comedy—that to my mind has never been done any better than it was
done here.
But if you think
that means we can’t also analyze Ghostbusters—well,
you clearly didn’t read my
post on Baywatch! And when we start to turn our analytical attention to the
film, it seems to clearly take a side within the longstanding and ongoing
debate between science
and the supernatural (or spiritual). The film opens with our heroes getting fired from their
university research job because of their focus on the supernatural. Its
main antagonist (yes, Zuul is the climactic villain, but this guy’s hostility
drives much of the film) is William Atherton’s
incredibly annoying EPA agent Walter Peck. And when the Ghostbusters
convince the Mayor to side with them over that EPA agent, they do so by arguing that what’s going
to happen to New York is “a disaster of Biblical proportions… Old
Testament, real Wrath of God type stuff.” Just as Weird
Tales did in their own era, the film suggests that all our modern science
isn’t sufficient to engage with another side of the world, an older and perhaps more
primal supernatural side that demands its own understanding—and its own
heroes to combat it.
Yet at the same
time, the way those heroes combat the supernatural is precisely through
science: their energy
streams and containment units, all that they had been working on in that
university research role and brought with them to their “private sector”
alternative. That is, we could read the film’s attitudes as divided not between
science and the supernatural, but rather traditional vs. experimental science,
cautious and bureaucractic perspectives such as those of staid academics and
the buttoned-up EPA vs. the more liberated and forward-thinking ideas of Egon
and his partners. Those latter perspectives are certainly willing and able to
engage with the world’s oldest and deepest spiritual truths, but they are also
much better equipped to come up with modern answers for those supernatural
threats. In that way, we could see Ghostbusters
as an example of a modern American Gothic—recognizing a world full of darkness
and the supernatural, but ready to push back with courage and rationality. Who
else you gonna call?!
Next comedy
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 80s comedies (or other comic films) you’d highlight?
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