Mean-Spirited: Ghostbusters II as Sensitivity Lesson
“So what do I have to do? Go on television and tell ten million people they have to be nice to each other all of a sudden? Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker’s God-given right!”
Crime, protesters, race riots, union standoffs, work stoppages and now I gotta deal with ghosts?
So says the mayor in Ghostbusters II. He was on the side of the Ghostbusters in the last crisis, when the specter of liberal hedonism came to town in the form of a trans woman whose demonic possessions turned average New Yorkers into frumpy Libertines. It was 1984. The social order had broken down and could only be exorcised by the Reaganite entrepreneurship of a ragtag group of yuppie exterminators after they’d bested their sniveling, party-crashing bureaucrat rival from the EPA. Now it’s 1989 and with this crisis, the mayor is not so sure.
Bear with me here. Movies can lead us to insights into real life. And vice versa.
The Mayor has to make a decision about a ticking time bomb in the form of an evil, psycho-reactive substance saturating the city and drawing strength and power from human animosity. I suppose no explanation is necessary about where the slime came from or why it’s the substance from which Vigo The Carpathian draws his power. The only thing we need to know about it is that its capacity to do damage and produce more of itself is based on negative energy from the immediate environment. It’s the worst possible luck for it to emerge in New York City, with all the global prejudices about the meanness and impatience of the average New Yorker still going strong.
Ghostbuster Winston Zeddimore (usually the audience’s inroad to understanding all the supernatural goings-on in layman’s terms) explains that the slime “actually feeds on bad vibes.” So all the anger and the shouting and unchecked aggression floating around the city activates the slime. It oozes up from the sewers. With enough provocation, ghosts and ghouls— our demons from the past — materialize from it.
In the movie, the Ghostbusters are the exterminators prepared to deal with this problem. Without them, I would argue this threat couldn’t be stopped. It can only be contained or avoided with citizens making an effort not to trigger the slime. In other words, a tacit social agreement to curtail those impulses and expressions which manifest negative energy. There are lots of social implications in this premise that may be worth a closer look.
This is a different type of crisis than before. The ghosts in 1984 were everywhere. There was no denying them. This time, the threat is vague and internal. Its capacity for destruction is based on its intangibility, like with all serious political issues. After all, a shocking number of people don’t seem too interested in understanding how greenhouse gases heat up the atmosphere, how economic and racial double-standards (and not the inherent badness of a whole cross section of the population) create the breeding ground for street crime, or for that matter, how viruses and vaccines work. But everyone sees how much more they’re paying for their prescription drugs or a gallon of gas at the pump. Bipartisan support in Congress for the lowering of the cost of these things I would argue is based on the visibility of these issues.
But the slime thing involves feelings, those things many Americans either suppress so as not to look weak, or overprivilege to the point of delusion. Add ghosts to this mix - which many people (like the judge) STILL don’t believe in despite what happened in New York five years ago - and you have a serious political crisis.
Let’s say that in the context of these movies, we’ll define ghosts as a residue of lingering unmediated energy from one’s Earthly life. They’re menaces who have sort of a symbolic nature as a manifestation of unholy or dark energy distilled or calcified into a galvanized para-psychic force, if you believe in that sort of thing. As a movie plot, this activation of supernatural dark energy by the negative energy of the living is nothing new. And anyway,Ghostbusters ghosts have always seemed pretty benign compared to what ghosts do to the living in movies these days. But in this sequel, it has a postmodern twist. Here, it’s not a single individual or dwelling feeding this unholy power, but an entire society.
The mild irritations of benign Ghostbusters ghosts
The slime in Ghostbusters 2 is nothing less than a temperature gauge for the internal life of a major city. It shouldn't be so hard to just live in harmony with one another - it’s what many upstanding people claim they want in a society. So in order for the slime not to gain its evil power, people have to suppress their anger, feel positive feelings and be nice to each other. Love unconditionally, right? And despite the obvious danger of the situation, the Mayor knows the government would be overstepping its boundaries in codifying gracious or mindful behavior into any kind of enforceable law.
Thus, the pink mood slime poses an ethical quandary for what a government can and can’t tell citizens with respect to how they regulate their emotional lives. What are the no-no’s? Actions that would involve hurting others? Yes. Temperaments and how people talk? No. Because how would this work? By creating an anti-slime-triggering task force that resembles the Tolerance-and-Sensitivity-Police that conservatives think progressive America wants? So how, in a city in which millions of people are jostling and fighting each other for money, status and space everyday, does a local government avoid this problem? It doesn’t.
Imagine there were no Ghostbusters. The threat would become so pronounced that inevitably other scientific bodies would be employed to study the problem and the Scientific Method would see to it that they’d likely arrive at the same conclusions. Without proton packs, and Egon’s development of the positively charged slime as a counter-weapon, citizens would be implored not to “trigger” the slime by being negative. No aggression. No flagrant expressions of hate or anger. We’d have to all walk around, “being nice to each other,” as the Mayor put it. Tiptoeing around the slime, as we would an individual suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (the term itself a form of tiptoeing around what in early 20th century military combat was more honestly and humanely referred to as “Shell Shock,” to use George Carlin’s great example)
It’s not easy staying positive. There’s so much to be legitimately irate about. People interpret kindness and the vulnerability they think it suggests as a weakness. People lead increasingly insular lives. If love is the thing that would weaken Vigo and his mood slime, teasing it out of late 20th century city dwellers is an uphill battle. Citizens are neurotic and afraid of each other. The movie was released in 1989 - I have to believe the AIDS crisis had undoubtedly contributed to this feeling. We see the fear and insecurity that causes people to build walls around themselves. Their capacity for real intimacy has to be teased out of them, the way a now surprisingly libidinous Janine has to coax Louis Tully out of his shell when they’re babysitting Oscar.
In The Mass Psycology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich explains fascism as a symptom of sexual repression. In Ghostbusters II, expressing love in the face of that repression, as a flow of energy that grand sensory expressions regulate is what weakens and kills the medieval ghost dictator who’s repulsed by love. Reich would have had a chuckle.
That’s what makes this problem politically insoluble. It depends on the cooperation of an entire major city opening up to itself. An entire body of citizens have to be tolerant and sensitive and mindful and curtail their anger. This is New York. If the ongoing COVID pandemic will likely be with us in the years to come, it’ll be because of the selfishness, ignorance and arrogance of a slice of the population that actively refuses to get vaccinated for whatever reason. If the tiny bit of understanding, empathy or mindfulness in getting a shot and wearing a mask is far too much to ask of so many people, how will it come off when a leader goes on TV and says people have to stop being negative in public? Again, in New York.
Apropos for the social climate into which Ghostbusters II was released, this destined-to-fail solution sounds like the challenge faced by political correctness. And political correctness is unprepared to deal with this kind of spiritual threat, for lack of a better term.
The Mayor is right. Government can’t legislate tolerance, politeness and sensitivity in individuals. In institutions, certainly . They serve the public. Institutions (questions of their legitimacy or relevance are another discussion entirely) should serve the purpose of helping maintain an economy, the only true goal of which is to sustain our lives. Within businessesmaybe those attitudes can be legislated and maybe not. It’s up for debate. It would depend on the functions of those businesses. But in individuals — no. That would be Orwellian tyranny. Not having to go get a shot. Real tyranny.
It IS your right to be an asshole AND a bigot. It’s your right to shout at people and be unpleasant. It’s not correct or humane, but it’s your right. You can’t criminalize an attitude, only its externalized outcome. This has always been the picture that hardline anti-PC groups and bigoted cranks have painted of political correctness since its gradual emergence into mainstream culture in the mid 80’s — the image of the Sensitivity-And-Tolerance Police. The fact that tolerance and sensitivity are two different ideas doesn’t seem to matter much to such parties. Some people simply want to get away with addressing others in the not-so-subtly prejudiced way they always did.
Ask someone who believes in political correctness to define it and though definitions will vary, you’ll find many people seem to conflate it with notions of courtesy - with simply addressing people as they want to be addressed. If only it were that simple. Personally, I always thought courtesy came naturally out of one’s disposition, and it seems a bit naive to ignore certain circles of American life in which certain expressions and attitudes are part of a standard to which people must conform. There can be a punitive and censorious nature to these standards, and those who don’t comply can face destructive social and professional consequences. That doesn’t strike me as courtesy.
The impulse behind the PC movement seemed like a noble one. I support its original goal. Traditional notions of race, gender identity, sexuality, social status, and religion inevitably break down. There are no eternal paradigms in any culture and this is a good thing. We have free will and our perceptions of ourselves inevitably evolve. And when this happens — when those models evolve or die out because their current forms are no longer relevant, it begins to matter more than before how we address one another. Primitive nomenclature can contain a lot of unsavory historical baggage. And addressing people how they’d like to be addressed is a good idea.
In the movie, the Ghostbusters are in court for posing as electricians and causing a power outage. Peter Venkman is asked a question by a prosecuting attorney who’s just doing her job. His response starts with patronizingly calling her, “kitten,” and trying to clasp her hand from the witness stand. As a character, Venkman's sort of a vulgar caricature of a baby boomer behaving as if it were still the 60’s and he could continue to get away with hiding his base impulses behind his live-and-let-live attitude.
But because the court case is an obstacle on the wrong side of our Heroes Journey and because he’s played by Bill Murray, we’re supposed to overlook his Tom Jones-ey gesture or even root for it. But earlier in the movie, the pram containing Dana Barratt’s baby rolls away on its own and into traffic after being pushed through a puddle of the slime. On their walk, they passed a man in the street yelling in a meter maid’s face over receiving a parking ticket. So this dumb verbal aggression triggered the slime nearby but Venkman’s subtler and more dehumanizing act of insensitivity doesn’t.
The difference in tone is a distinction. Because Venkman’s action in that moment is much more damaging and negative than the street argument, which is of no social consequence. Whether or not he was mocking that kind of talk, there should be consequences for that kind of speech, not to mention touching her in that way without her consent (it’s a courtroom, for fuck’s sake). But it’s an unrealistic double-standard for that to pass without comment while the kind of inconsequential shouting matches between strangers on city streets about trivial matters that happen every day are the red flags. There should be contextual distinctions, and the fact of those distinctions presents a challenge for any kind of enforcement of social attitudes.
These distinctions would mean the answer can’t lie in imposing top-down practices for policing speech. What has always seemed to me like an implicit guilt behind so much politically correct language is poorly hidden and efforts to quell hurtful behaviors by enforcing the use of their rebrandings speak of a need to assuage this guilt. Unfortunately, changing the way we speak doesn’t change the conditions of the people we speak about. Or give people more rights. Changing the language seems quick and reactionary, like an easy way of concealing unpleasant truths or guilt about the rampant injustice that’s prevalent in our society. Language always gives you away. We do think in language so the quality of our thoughts can only be as good as the quality of that language.
Despite this reaction formation, it would be a huge mistake to identify political correctness solely as a product of The Left. ANY guilty cover-up of blunt language with more padded and sanitized terminology can be classified as PC no matter what one’s politics are.
In fact, I would argue right-wing forms of political correctness actually abound in our society and are equally specious: I would submit Make America White Again as the plainspoken idea that “Make America Great Again” covers up. Same thing with “Alternative Facts” (a.k.a. Bullshit) or “Enhanced Interrogation Technique” (a.k.a. Torture). In its war against the people of El Salvador in the 1980’s, the U.S. government under Reagan referred to the deaths of over 80,000 people as “soft targets,” before the term, “collateral damage,” was invented.
So PC isn’t just nudging people to call people “African-American,” or “Native-American” (and honestly, tagging oppressed people with the name of their oppressors is pretty demeaning). And many polls have repeatedly shown a majority of left-leaning or progressive voters think political correctness routinely goes too far. But the mainstream media never criticizes or challenges any of the commonly held assumptions about PC culture. A big budget holiday movie with feel-good intentions on its mind can only scratch the surface.
Whether bigotry in both individuals and institutions alike is much more out in the open than it was when Ghostbusters II was released in 1989, or we’re just seeing more of it now because of social media, it’s tough not to feel a sense of defeatism about the failed promises of 60’s activism and the seeming impossibility of ripping bigotry out from its deeply rooted entrenchment in modern society. So I’ve always detected an air of powerlessness and political impotence within efforts to police speech and impose social standards and codes. They feel like a desperate by-product of the inability or unwillingness of those sympathetic to social justice movements to do what’s necessary to affect any lasting or meaningful change. Action and agency - the hard work - will be what saves us from our demons, not rewiring our mouths and ostracizing those who don’t.
Otherwise, hardline ideas about what is and isn’t acceptable speech become more stringent. Controlling the language begins to look like an attempt to control the debate — as if screaming in people’s faces about how wretched their ideas and attitudes are will make the world a better place. This certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with courtesy. Instead, the concept of taboo words, ideas and attitudes actually ossifies hatred and prejudice, endowing it with power. It creates bitterness, which breeds more animosity, and that can’t be good for the mood slime.
So I agree with the Mayor that forcing people to be nice isn’t going to solve the slime problem.
Human behavior can’t be codified so strictly. Enforceable codes about the treatment of others outside of institutions or workplace environments are ridiculous and would never work. It would be draconian and impossible. Human beings are ambivalent and inconsistent from one moment to the next. So much human behavior is fickle and situational. We are all of a piece. Besides, a mandated shift in communication standards towards kinder, gentler demeanor would probably lead to what Americans at their worst do best: form large groups and create a basis for castigating others for not conforming to an ideal. Just another new form of the old game .
The Ghostbusters also know the city council can’t force people to stop provoking the ubiquitous evil slime. So their solution takes its inspiration from the peace movements of the 60’s. They use Egon's new positively charged slime as a counterbalance (whatever that slime is, humankind - not “mankind” - needs it). They use it to activate the Statue of Liberty by blasting Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” and take it for a joy walk (I’m not sure how the Nintendo controller just syncs up to the statue like a bluetooth piece). It’s a campaign that takes the form of a Kindness Revolution to dissolve the threat 60’s protest style. It ends in the same way it started: by harvesting the internal character of the public.
For me, perhaps the best element in a so-so sequel like Ghostbusters II is this message. As cutesy as some of its moments are, there’s a refreshing lack of cynicism about the whole thing. Those coarse yuppie edges in the classic first Ghostbusters movie have softened a bit. This one has the nerve to tell us we must simply attack hate head-on with love. And action. Not language choices. Change the conditions. Sure, you should put yourself in other people’s shoes. Call people what they want to be called. But beyond that, the discourse will change when all of us make the conditions change. Not the other way around.
It’s lamentable but true: People can’t be forced by law not to regard each other from a place of hate. To do so would be to ignore the ectoplasmic residue welling up underneath us. Any new legislation seeking to correct this would be an oppressive denial of free will. People have to voluntarily come around to acceptance and benevolence on their own by seeing the rightness of acting kind and humane of their own volition. That’s it. Each individual has to make a choice. No, we should not tolerate intolerance. But in a democratic society, it’s true that you’re free to be spiteful and mean.
Had Vigo resurfaced in 2020, he’d probably be unstoppable, having all the negative energy he needed to take over.
I love the first Ghostbusters movie as much as the next elder millennial. I still get as much of a kick out of its conspicuous 80’s fixations and paranoias as I do out of its wit and invention. The sequel doesn’t match up but is interesting for being warmer than its predecessor. The premise is juicy and relevant. Hatred and negative energy bubble up and become malicious social terrors. The response is to deal with it directly, as one people. You’d not see a critique of some of the prevailing liberal attitudes of the times like this until John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, where the significance of being afraid to speak cannot not be ignored for its allegorical possibilities.
Maybe the connection I’m drawing here is desperate. The movie’s identification of a social problem is an abstraction on the margins of the plot and not very deeply explored. But it does depict a hopeful scenario in the form of a beautiful, uplifting, thrilling and spontaneous collective response to an invisible social threat. The fight against evil must harness enough of the collective power to take the immigrant-welcoming Lady Liberty for a real life walk and use her giant steel hands to smash the hateful power structure so far beyond recognition that it can never reassemble.
It takes pioneers like the Ghostbusters themselves to point the way. In the first movie, they were just some academic outsiders out to get rich. Snarky, brainy, ne'er-do-wells who had to become brave heroes, something much more than they imagined. By the end of the sequel, they’re akin to demigods who use their intoxicating cocktail of tech and moxie to unite millions of people in love and affirmation, their images as Etruscan gods emblazoned into a new surface on what used to be a painting of Vigo.
However, in the real world, we don’t have the Ghostbusters. We’re on our own. Besides, in the real world, our problems are not ghosts. They’re flesh and blood. They’re of this plane. They can’t be sucked into a black and yellow ectoplasmic floor trap.
And THEN, who ya gonna call?
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