“Ain’t No Bitches Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”
2016 is Terrible, So Go Watch Ghostbusters, Laugh, and Let Feminism Save Us All
Dear Ghostbuster boys. Sit down and close your mouths. Stop talking. Stop leaving your stupid Rotten Tomatoes reviews, and your comment threads, and doing your misogynist, racist, sexist tweeting and mansplaining. Just. Stop. First, you drove Leslie Jones off Twitter with your vile, fermented spew, and for that alone, you deserve to be reborn as a dandruff flake on Donald J. Trump’s head. Secondly, you have missed the entire point. Not just part of it. The. Entire. Thing.
Sure, on the surface, the Ghostbusters remake is mostly just silly fun and a nice distraction from the dumpster fire that is 2016 geopolitics (please explain Turkey to me — I’m still confused).
Directed by Paul Feig and starring Kristen Wiig as scientist Erin Gilbert, Melissa McCarthy as fellow scientist Abby Yates, Kate McKinnon as zany engineer Jillian Holtzmann, and Leslie Jones as subway employee Patty Tolan, the film gives us plenty of summer blockbuster fodder, complete with in-your-face special effects, gonzo fight scenes, and dumb laughs.
The various plot points are at least mildly entertaining. Chris Hemsworth seems to be reveling in playing handsome bimbo Kevin, in a tongue-in-cheek twist on the secretary trope. Those of us of the academic persuasion will laugh sympathetically over Erin Gilbert’s not getting tenure because her department chair finds out she used to research the paranormal. And history and museum folks will particularly enjoy the opening scenes set in one of New York’s Gilded Age mansions.
But there’s a reason women are standing up and cheering for the film. It has nothing to do with the franchise, the acting, the set design, the special effects, or any of the stuff that movie critics generally talk about in a review.
It’s because it’s for us. Women. Men can enjoy it, support it, champion it, but they can’t know the feelings it evokes for the women who watch it.
Much the way that Beyonce’s explicitly political “Lemonade” is for black women, Ghostbusters addresses the inner life of women and is therefore revolutionary. Yeah, that’s sad, isn’t it? It is somehow pathetically radical to have a film with an all-female cast, where three of them are engineers and scientists. I mean, barf.
The Washington Post’s pop culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg pointed this out in her latest op-ed on the film, writing,
[gblockquote]It’s not just that the vision of girl power in “Ghostbusters” doesn’t feel particularly empowered to me. What I’m truly angry about is that half a decade of vigorous discussion about feminism and mass culture has brought us to a place where the battle lines are so stupidly defined and are drawn in a way that any possible victory isn’t worth claiming. The people who are inexplicably immiserated by the prospect of women fighting ghosts may hate “Ghostbusters.” But they’ve succeeded in creating an environment in which this anodyne bit of corporate recycling gets positioned as daring, and where its box-office success or disappointment may have meaningful implications for other, more truly innovative, more explicitly feminist and certainly more funny movie projects.[/gblockquote]
Eileen Jones over at Jacobin calls bullshit on the Ghostbusters-as-feminist-film-savior thing too, scoffing, “Don’t believe the hype. The Ghostbusters publicity campaign has used puling fanboy misogyny — which is always worth ignoring — to whip up a furious counter-reaction promoting the film as a feminist cause célèbre.”
And the film is certainly self-consciously feminist. There’s not a single reference to the women’s bodies or appearance, except when Wiig solemnly asks her department chair if her clothes being too sexy was the reason she didn’t get tenure (something all women have to think about in a way that men don’t). Most of the men who make appearances in the movie are losers, doofuses, or geeky villains (resembling their Twitter-troll basement-dwelling actual counterparts), and more than once, the actors break the “fourth wall” to reference the geek/fanboy controversy. At one point, Gilbert, Yates, and Holtzmann are watching YouTube videos of news coverage and one of the comments reads “Ain’t no bitches gonna hunt no ghosts.” Meta!
At another point, Leslie Jones gets mildly hurt during a concert scene and people drop her on the floor as she attempts to crowdsurf. She quips, “OK, I don’t know if it was a race thing or a lady thing, but I’m mad as hell.”
Indeed, Leslie, INDEED.
Obviously, this comment about gender and race can’t make up for all the film’s shortcomings in that area. It would have been far better had Feig addressed the racial politics surrounding Jones’ character. Many black women have pointed out that they are uncomfortable with the fact that Patty’s dialogue and plot sequences appeal to racist tropes of black labor and lack of education. Feig should have noted this and at least made her a trained historian or museum professional. After all, she knows all that stuff about the old New York buildings!
Despite these very real problems with race, Ghostbusters does matter to many female viewers because representation matters. According to the New York Times, from 2007 through 2014, women (of all races) made up only 30.2 percent of all speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films released in the United States.
The story is principally about the deep friendship between the four women, who get to be stupid and silly and dance crazy together, while fighting evil with cool weapons and saving the world. It’s important for us to see female characters that depict us as we really are. In real life, we’re scientists, we’re engineers, we’re MTA workers. We dance to cheesy rap songs with our buds, cook dinner for our kids, go to school and work, clean the house, wash the soccer gear, pay the bills, and save the world. The ghosts and cool weapons and proton packs are simply fun trappings to a real life and set of relationships that we women recognize on the screen, and that we don’t see often enough.
That’s why women everywhere are cheering Ghostbusters. It’s why we don’t give a crap about the sanctity of the franchise, or the finer points of the film-making. It’s why my friend who works for a reproductive rights organization felt so elated at the end of the movie. She remarked, “Well, I can quit my job. Feminism has won.”
An oversimplification? Maybe. Maybe not. In the meantime, damn it feels good to be a (lady) ghostbuster. And with apologies to the New York Times for stealing their headline: Girls rule. Women are funny. Get over it.
Lauren MacIvor Thompson is a Faculty Fellow in the Georgia State University College of Law's Center for Law, Health, & Society. Her research centers on the forces of law and medicine, and their role in the early history of public health and the birth control movement. She has a background in Public History and before returning for her doctorate, worked for various history museums and state agencies on historic garden preservation, public history projects, and Section 106 federal and state historic resource protection.
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