An Ode to Ghostbusters (2016) and Gendered Geekery

Contains Spoilers

I watched the Ghostbusters remake yesterday, and in the moment Jillian Holtzmann tears two weapons from her holster and slides across the ground whipping ghostly backside, I suddenly understood. I understood how generations of little boys must have felt when they saw Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, and anything Vin Diesel has ever been in since the dawn of time. I got it. I finally understood. I felt like I was tapping into a realm of emotional responses to cinema I had never previously had access to — something that had categorically never been accessible to me. I knew what it was like to see myself on screen and watch myself be capable of incredible, powerful, mind-blowing badassery without caveat.

And it’s the caveat that’s important. I’ve seen women like me on screen doing badass things but there has always been an uncomfortable undercurrent. Why the high heels? Why the catsuit? Why is she doing that for him, of all people? Why is the camera zeroing in on her mammaries? How does that outfit stop the mammaries falling out? Why do I have so many questions about mammaries? Why do mammaries have to be such a key part of my cinema-viewing experience and my experience as a woman and when did ‘mammaries’ stop looking like a word referring to chesticle fatbags and start looking more like a reference to a mythological creature, potentially a cousin of the manatee?

This internal narrative understandably detracts from being fully immersed in the movie-going experience. Which was why it felt like sweet nectar in the driest of deserts to be able to see something gnarly and butt-kicking without having to don my analytical specs. Without a blog post on WHY THIS FILM MAKES ME HATE MYSELF stewing in the back of my brain. Something that treated the women on screen and the women in its audience as intelligent human beings deserving of respect, comfortable ass-kicking suits, and action sequences that downright refuse to dehumanise them.

I felt like I was suddenly in on a secret. That I could have access to mainstream, blockbuster media that is designed consciously to counteract the harm that decades of media has been systematically forging against women.

So here’s my top three countdown as to why Ghostbusters is so goddamn important, and why I sobbed like a baby as Jillian ‘Holtzy’ Holtzmann kicked ectoplasmic rear.

3. Academic Badassery

As an academic watching with a crowd of academics this film touched on a few raw nerves. The narrative opens with Erin, genius physicist extraordinaire, fighting for tenure at the University of Columbia. Charles Dance insists she needs a reference from a more reputable college than Princeton, leading to a groan of familial understanding rising from the crowd. The internal hierarchies and in-fighting of academia on screen! From the mouth of Charles Dance! Tywin understands our suffering.

Erin then expresses insecurity at her online presence impacting her professional reputation, and the anxiety that past pet-projects could make her current colleagues take her less seriously. Speaking to an audience of long-term fanfiction/fan-media-content generators, this small nod to how the internet stores the nerdiness of our youth was uncomfortably funny. The sequence culminates with a biting commentary on the passive aggression that surrounds the physical and aesthetic presentation of women academics (and indeed, women professionals everywhere), as part of a longer commentary on clothing. Later in the film Holtzmann asks Erin how she can walk in those shoes, to which Erin admits it’s horrible — the implicit question being ‘why should superheroines wear highheels?’, whether they’re superheroines behind the lecture theatre lectern or the reverse tractor beam. The narrative is possessed by anxiety over funding, office space, recognition, and being taken seriously as women in an academic field. Furthermore, it is about the academy’s reluctance to approach original — if risky — ideas, especially if they’re fronted by women. Ultimately, Ghostbusters can be read as a tale of researchers without institutional support taking a massive risk because the subject means something to them, and their emotional attachment to their subject makes their research BETTER, in a rational world that sees emotional expression and connection as a weakness and detriment.

2. Weird Badassery

Much more eloquent pieces than I could ever conjure up have been written on the wonderful weirdness (and queerness) of Holtzy.

With her snorting, garbling, grunting, screeching, singing, and repertoire of ridiculous voices, Holtzmann appears on screen as a woman possessed. In other words, she is myself and all of my friends. From secret handshakes to singing a song to make her friend eat a sandwich to her choked, robotic toast on friendship that manages to be funny and moving as opposed to schmaltzy (so aware it is of its own schmaltzy content and the schmaltz it is subverting), Holtz is the massive chirping, dancing, face-pulling weirdo within us all. Holtz isn’t trying to be anything but unashamedly, unabashedly, enthusiastically herself — there is no inkling of performativity or self-consciousness; not a single shade of give-a-fuck. Holtz’s garden of fucks, if it ever existed, is a barren wasteland, where no fucks shall ever grow. Furthermore, her friends are never embarrassed by her behaviour, and they never apologise for her rampant quirks — if anything, they try to join in, as Erin tries to participate (awkwardly) in Holtz’s dance, acknowledging the fun and wanting to share in it rather than demean it.

Ghostbusters presents a world where women can be clever and funny and weird but not in that infuriatingly cutesie Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (TM) way. Not in the Gamer Girl male fantasy way. There is nothing about Holtzmann constructed for the male gaze, nothing designed to be lisping and frilly to nullify the threat of a woman’s intelligence and make it more palatable. While we’ve had incredibly intelligent female engineers before, they often fall into twee patterns that appear to use exaggerated femininity to ‘compensate’ for their love of big machinery. While this may have been necessary at the time (hey, Firefly) for 2016 it feels dated, and Holtzmann is the answer. She’s not a tomboy, she’s not hypergirly, she resists those binaries and fails to see how they relate to her career — she’s just Holtzy, and that’s great.

1. Multidimensional Badassery (Both Literal and Figurative)

I’m not saying Ghostbusters is the best film ever made — it is loaded with plot holes, inconsistency, moments of hilariously weak scriptwriting, and poor dialogue. Nor am I saying that it is the first film to achieve any of the above fun feministy things, or the first film to present dynamic female sci-fi heroes (as Signourney Weaver’s cameo proves pointedly and self-consciously). What I am saying is that it is an Important Film. Because it’s a mainstream, big-budget blockbuster flagrantly lady-washing a man’s world without relying upon stereotypes of femininity. It would have been easy for Ghostbusters to fall into the trap of making a ‘girly’ version for ‘girls’ in the same way Bic have helpfully provided us with girly pens for our miniature doll hands and Argos gave us pink tool kits to build our pink wardrobes in our pink houses. But there is no exaggerated presentation of the media interpretation of archetypal womanhood — there is only honest, real, multidimensional women.

While Holtz is particularly important to me as a precious, nearly-canonically-queer, big engineering goofball, ALL the women are fantastic. Even the brief appearance of the Mayor’s media representative shows her as awkward and funny, if manipulative and slightly terrifying. Patty is given the gift of outright enthusiasm, again without a trace of embarrassment or shame. Her first shot is her happily greeting nonchalant customers with boundless energy, clearly amusing herself, a position anyone who’s worked mind-numbing hours in customer service will instantaneously recognise. She then waltzes into the office and insists she become a part of the gang, unfazed by their resistance, and utterly and totally sound in her own ability to contribute and participate.

Patty isn’t a scientist, but she knows that her skills and her presence are equally valuable. Patty is particularly fascinating as the ‘historian’ or researcher of the group, because old parlance would term her an ‘amateur’, which basically means she is massively knowledgeable, wildly intelligent and informed, as a result of sheer passion, enthusiasm, and dedication, but without the piece of paper from an institution to back it up (as far as we know). Patty’s knowledge of local history enables the gang to tie the threads together, but she’s not a professor or a doctor or a scientist, destabilising the privileging of science and the notion of the ‘expert’, rattling elitist associations with knowledge gatekeeping, and showing the multifarious forms that learning and dissemination can take.

In essence, they are all massive geeks. They care about things furiously and passionately without being a touch ashamed. They enable each other’s nerdery and support each other, and never mock each other. They are furiously enthusiastic and that, by definition, is being a geek. Their passion for their subjects motivates them through terrifying situations, unifies them, and ultimately changes the world, all because they unapologetically give a shit about things the mainstream doesn’t tend to give a shit about. They have no fucks to offer, but the shits are numerous. And this isn’t limited to engineering or paranormal-related shits — the entire section where Erin and Abby wax lyrical about the significance of Patrick Swayze movies is important to me and the world as a whole.

All four Ghostbusters are driven, weird, gentle, fierce, stubborn, wild, selfish, selfless, intelligent, ludicrous, powerful, vulnerable, frightened, brave, caring, funny, awkward, confident, ashamed, unashamed and confused in turns. They refuse to be pigeon holed or labelled and resist normative conceptions of femininity without disregarding femininity as a whole. While Ghostbusters isn’t technically the best film ever made, it is an important one to see, and an important one to me. Because it was the film where I finally ‘got it’ — I finally saw myself and my friends on screen, as weird, nerdy, academic goofballs, and for once we weren’t the butt of the joke.