Taking Up Space: Busting Ghosts, the Female Experience, and the Unabashed Queerness of Jillian Holtzmann
The reboot should be funny to just about everyone. But it’s really funny to some women.
For the most part, women are conditioned to take up as little space as possible. Both figuratively and literally. Men spread out all over public transportation; we curl into ourselves. We often apologize, sometimes unintentionally, for what we do. And some of us preface our big and amazing ideas with phrases like “This may sound dumb, but…”
I know all of this because I do these things — and I have spent a lot of my life trying to make my body smaller.
As of this writing, the aggregated ratings of Ghostbusters (Paul Feig, 2016) are “totally out of whack,” thanks to men who down-voted the film before its release.
If you’re panning a movie you haven’t even seen, and it stars four female leads, you’re probably sexist.
If you saw Ghostbusters and didn’t like it, that’s your prerogative. Comedy (especially broad comedy) is subjective, after all. But here are a few things about the remake that should make viewers take notice:
First, it does away with the original romance subplot, which, let’s be honest, was actually more stalking than romance.
Second, the women in the remake are never helpless.
Third, the four women never cater to the male gaze. In fact, Feig’s Ghostbusters actively repels the male gaze — mostly via Kate McKinnon’s character, Jillian Holtzmann, whose costumes include baggy overalls, wide leg trousers, and a jumpsuit. Holtzmann also laughs at their male secretary, Kevin (Chris Hemsworth), and she flirts with Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig).
The thing about McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann is how different she is in comparison to the other women, particularly Wiig’s Erin and Melissa McCarthy’s Abby Yates.
Holtzmann is what women would be like if we were never conditioned to take up little to no space. (Or at least, she has completely unlearned this behavior.) She dances around her desk, using her whole body — and the whole space. Also, when the ghostbusters visit the Mayor (Andy Garcia), Holtzmann “manspreads,” and then puts her foot on his desk. As well, she “calls dibs” on the entire second floor when the ghostbusters’ office gets an upgrade.
In contrast, Erin begins the movie in a professional skirt suit and high heels, and she’s fighting for tenure at Columbia by kissing “so many different kinds of [male] ass.” Similarly, Abby’s trying to get a proper wonton-to-broth ratio in her lunch order, and while she calls out the delivery guy several times, she’s mostly restrained and polite. Abby’s most hurtful joke is aimed at Erin’s mom, on which Abby backpedals immediately because she thinks the world of her.
Some male viewers will conclude jokes like this one fall flat. This is likely because much of Ghostbusters’ comedy speaks to a female experience. The jokes are about feeling small and spoken over. They’re about the little things women do to ensure they’re seen as nice and acceptable. Women viewers get these jokes because they’re riffing on our everyday lives.
McKinnon’s Holtzmann is another kind of female in-joke entirely: one that you’re really going to get if you’re queer.
Women who are attracted to men — and who are, therefore, looking to be seen as attractive by men — often perform for them. Holtzmann/McKinnon’s performance, however, isn’t interested in this.
In Feig’s Ghostbusters, Jillian Holtzmann is center stage, and McKinnon is doing queer performance. If you’re not attracted to men, you don’t need to be attractive to men. Thus, you can consciously work to unlearn the behaviors associated with what men find attractive. Holtzmann exemplifies what someone who isn’t trying to be attractive to men but who is still very attractive looks like: she’s queer.
Ask any women who even loosely identifies somewhere on the sexuality spectrum/Kinsey scale/your queer metric of choice: she’s queer.
Like most fellow queer women, I immediately recognized one of my own in Holtzmann, but not because of her flirtations with other women or her wardrobe made up almost entirely of suits. Those are what make straight women know she is, or at least could be, gay.
I knew Holtzmann was queer because she was comfortable in her own body. Because of how much space that body occupies onscreen. Because one of her first significant lines is a queef joke. Because she’s sexy and alluring in a way that queer women understand but those who perform “sexy” and “alluring” for men, do not. For the record, Feig never confirms Holtzmann is queer, but many of us are assuming she is. At minimum, she’s not interested in blanket approval by men.
It is easy to say that Holtzmann is queer because she’s played by a lesbian. But McKinnon is currently a fixture on Saturday Night Live. It’s safe to say that most of her characters, while likely not written with any sexuality in mind, default to straight.
Further, McKinnon is a good actress; she can play straight. But she clearly isn’t doing so here. Her Ghostbusters character is reminiscent (and the logical extension) of her Justin Bieber on SNL, which has a queer seductiveness to it snuck right onto network television. If her version of the Biebs is drag king, Holtzmann is the queer lady who moonlights as him when she’s not busy busting ghosts.
Ghostbusters was one of the most talked about, thinkpiece’d, and shit-upon movies before it was even released. Now, reviews are calling it a fun film that doesn’t take itself nearly as seriously as everyone else has. I’m inclined to agree: it’s a funny action movie, that happens to star four women.
But Ghostbusters is also more subversive than critics are giving it credit for. When women headline a movie, it’s called a “chick flick” and the audience expects romance. Aside from Erin shamelessly and awkwardly flirting with Kevin, which does not pan out, there are no men who take away from the real relationships of Ghostbusters — which are all female.
You’re rooting for Abby and Erin to reconcile. You love that Patty calls Jillian Holtzy. You’re endeared to Holtzy when she gives a monotone, no-breaks toast about finding friendship and love as well as ghosts.
All four of the film’s protagonists can be read as queer (which is totally something I support). But whether you see Abby and Erin as ex-friends or just exes, men don’t play any sort of role in that relationship or in any of the film’s character development. To write that off as unimportant in both the pop culture climate and reality we live in is just not fair.
