Dissecting "Ghostbusters"

In the preamble to this blog, I proposed that the essence of a narrative is a thesis and an antithesis. Both can be expressed as simple propositions. Of course, I do not want to be too simplistic: a story can be dedicated to more than one thesis - although, as a general rule, all stories have a central thesis to which the other themes are subordinate. A good example of a film with more than one thesis is Ghostbusters. Like many kids’ films, Ghostbusters has a thesis aimed at adults and another aimed at children and different audiences will take different lessons from the same film. In this posting, I shall discuss the film from the adults’ perspective first and then the children’s.

Ghostbusters obviously features ghosts; ghost stories are an established genre in literature and in the general culture. The typical ghost story features haunted houses in which solitary people are witness to eerie and inexplicable occurrences, immaterial visitations and bumps in the night. Ghosts are an integral part of childhood nightmares and of fear of the dark. One example, among many, of the ghost story genre is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Sometimes featuring in ghost stories are the people who try to vanquish the ghosts through magic or prayer, such as the catholic priest Lankester in The Exorcist (although of course this film should more rightly be classified as a story of demonic possession than ghost story) or the paranormal investigators of Poltergeist. Typically, in these narratives, the combatants fight the supernatural on its own terms, in ways magical and irrational. There are exceptions. One of the things that sets Ghostbusters apart from the tradition of supernatural narratives is that the ghostbusters fight the ghosts with science.

The beginning of the film gestures toward the traditional idea of what constitutes a ghost story. Floating books and flying catalogue cards spook a middle aged bespectacled lady in the basement of a library. The library’s manager brings in our heroes to deal with it, a bunch of academics with an interest in the paranormal. When confronted by a genuine ghost, they have no idea what to do. One of them, Ray, says, “Catch it!” This plan fails miserably when the ghost turns on them and, panicked, they flee the building. Shortly thereafter the three academics, Venkman, Ray and Egon, are laid off by the university. They are left at loose ends. Ray points out to Venkman that he has no experience “of working in the private industry” and that he has “no idea what it is like”. Despite Ray’s misgivings, Venkman suggests that nothing happens without a reason and that being thrown out of the university serves a higher purpose. “What?” says Ray. “So we can go into business for ourselves,” replies Venkman.

This is the hook of the film, what McKee calls ‘the inciting incident’, the concept that makes this story unique. The three academics are going to go into business ‘busting’ ghosts. The trio pay for equipment, renovate a fire station, hire a receptionist and set up a company as professional ghost eradicators, all paid for by Ray getting a second mortgage. Before long they are advertising their services on television. The whole scenario is a metaphor for entrepreneurial capitalism. The three men have turned their backs on academia to become blue-collar workers, self-employed small business operators. In their overalls, they resemble tradespeople, builders and plumbers. At one point, during their first job, Venkman facetiously tells someone that they are pest exterminators. The trio, soon joined by a fourth who when hired says, “If there’s a steady pay cheque in it, I’ll believe anything you say” are symbols of New York ingenuity and entrepreneurial-ship, of big-city savvy. They fight and defeat government bureaucracy in the form of a spiteful official from the Environmental Protection Agency, are endorsed by the mayor and end the film as the heroes who saved New York. All in all, from an adults’ perspective, the film is a panegyric to the municipal workers, trades-people and small-time business owners who keep New York running.

The thesis of the film could well be expressed as “New York pragmatism can triumph over anything, even an evil Sumerian god from another dimension bent on world destruction”. It is a victory of science and common sense over the supernatural. However, this interpretation does not do the film justice and, to get a fuller appreciation of the film, we need to look at it from another perspective. We need to look a bit deeper. Ghostbusters is more a kids’ film than an adults’ film and like many other kids’ films it is really an exercise in defusing anxiety about passage into the adult world, particularly with respect to sex.  Such films teach prepubescent children that sexual feelings are natural and not something to be afraid of.

This theme is explored principally through a kind of sub-plot. One of the first characters who contacts the Ghostbusters is Dana, a woman who lives in an apartment building at the epicentre of the spectral epidemic. She is the love interest not only for Venkman but for Louis Tulley who lives on the same floor. Louis is a poster-child for arrested development and is frequently depicted early on in the film locked out of his apartment and yelling, “Let me in!” Later, when pursued by a demonic wolf, he runs into Central Park and is shown pressed against the window of a pavilion again crying “Let me in!” Rather than being admitted into the adult world inside, he is attacked and possessed by the supernatural entity represented by the canine.

The monstrous dogs that attack and possess both Louis and Dana seem to me likely to be symbols for the libidinal changes that occur at puberty. When Venkman visits Dana later that evening he finds her now possessed by an evil spirit and in highly amorous mood; she asks him if he is the “key-master” and when he says yes she says “Take me now” and “I want you inside me”. Venkman refuses to take advantage of Dana, telling her that she obviously already has someone inside of her. Louis meanwhile has found his way to the ghostbusters’ premises. Louis and Dana have both become vessels for immoderate sexual desire; he is the “key-master” and she is the “gate-keeper”; the Freudian connotations of these titles are too patent to require clarification. Separated by circumstances, Louis and Dana are drawn together later, kiss, and (perhaps) have sex. This carnal act is the trigger that brings Gozer the Destroyer into the world.

In this way, the film associates sexual desire with the malign supernatural. It falls to the ghostbusters to tame the frightening aspects of sex on behalf of their audience; it is inevitable, therefore, that when the four men confront Gozer, Gozer takes the form of a woman. How can one overcome one’s own squeamishness about sex? One way is to retreat from the situation into the false security of childhood. Temporarily dematerialised, Gozer asks the boys what form their destruction should take. Ray thinks of the Stay-Puff Marshmallow man. His explanation runs as follows: “I tried to think of the most harmless thing, something I loved from childhood, something that could never ever possibly destroy us. The Stay-Puff Marshmallow man.”

The Stay-Puff Marshmallow man appears and sets about destroying the city. Apparently retreating from the adult world into the comforting illusions of childhood is not the right strategy. Ghostbusters is precisely about the need to reject childhood with its fear of the dark and things that go bump in the night in favour of adulthood; the right approach to take is to just ‘fuck it’. The four men aim their positron cannons at the portal through which Gozer has arrived and “cross the beams”. I know this seems a stretch but I believe this scene to be a metaphor for sex - the energy bolts phallic symbols and the portal a metaphor for the vagina. (It is interesting to note here that male sexuality is constructed in mimetic terms – you do what the other boys are doing.)

Ghostbusters is principally a kids’ film and a male film at that. Rhetorically it is, at its deepest level, trying to persuade preadolescent boys that sex is not something to be afraid of. Of the two men who desire Dana, one, Louis, is excluded from the adult world by his neuroses but the other, Veckman, is presented throughout as being very sex-positive - and it is Veckman with whom the film is asking the audience to identify. This theme of confronting and exterminating sexual squeamishness was, by the way, quite common in the ‘eighties (in films such as Weird Science and Labyrinth) but it may interesting to observe that it is not common now.

To sum up, Ghostbusters can be viewed in two ways. From the first perspective, it is an encomium to small-time capitalism. Small business owners can beat anything, even government bureaucrats. But at a deeper level, it is telling its audience that the childhood fears can be overcome and that the adult world is not so frightening. Ghostbusters was an important film to me as a child, as it was for many who grew up in the ‘eighties, and it was important for a reason.