It wasn't a bad script that killed Ghostbusters (2016); the movie was doomed from the start. Read the transcript here: http://www.staresattheworld.com/2016/05/ghostbusters-doomed-start/ BassFzz's Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD5CnCr_9Mo My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.youtubeconvert.cc/ Support my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DMJAurini
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| The new Ghostbusters film hasn't even been released yet, and it's already turning into a disaster. | |
| Audiences are panning the trailers, heads are rolling at Sony, and the director, Paul Feig, is blaming it all on misogyny. | |
| The problem with this film should have been obvious from the beginning. | |
| There's a reason audiences have reacted so negatively even before the rumors of the lame duck script were released. | |
| It's not just that they got the music wrong, turning 80 synth into modern orchestral. | |
| It's not just that the outfits look dumpy, and the jokes are lame. | |
| There's a far more fundamental problem which poisoned this film from the get-go, which no amount of creativity could have compensated for. | |
| The problem with Ghostbusters 2016 is that the main cast is all female. | |
| Now am I saying that an all-female cast in a comedy adventure movie aimed at general audiences is an inevitable death knell? | |
| Am I confirming Feig's accusations of misogyny, that audiences are just angry because they can't deal with strong female characters? | |
| No, not at all. | |
| In fact, if you took the four women playing the Ghostbusters and put them into another film, it could have been incredibly successful. | |
| In fact, the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids had much the same cast and the same director, and it was received extremely well. | |
| If instead of Ghostbusters, the four of them had starred in a sequel to, say, Jumanji. | |
| Just imagine it, the same four actresses fighting off giant insects and killer plants, while the great white hunter comes after them, hating them for no reason at all. | |
| That could have worked, as a comedy, as an adventure, and it wouldn't have traipsed all over the goodwill from the Robin Williams film. | |
| So is the problem with this film that it is a transparent feminist reboot, taking a beloved IP, sex swapping the lead roles, and pretending that this somehow makes women empowered? | |
| Not exactly. | |
| While it's certainly a blatant slap in the face to audiences, that's nothing more than the icing atop a concept that was fatally flawed from the beginning. | |
| The reason Ghostbusters doesn't work with a female cast is because at the core, it is a male story. | |
| Now I'd like to step back for a moment and consider the term strong female character. | |
| My colleague Zarius had a video where he discussed this topic at length, and he uses the term strong female character to mean good female character, complex female character. | |
| It's a great video, and I definitely recommend that you check it out, but I'd like to go in a different direction and consider the specific wording that is being used. | |
| Strong female character, as opposed to powerful female character. | |
| Strength, physical strength, is one of the defining aspects of masculinity. | |
| When you contrast the sexes, there's no contest. | |
| The average man is stronger than 95% of women, and even female bodybuilders don't get much stronger than your part-time gym rat. | |
| This is why hitting women is such a universal taboo. | |
| We expect men to use their physical strength to protect women, not abuse them. | |
| Someone who's strong is someone who's powerful. | |
| But strength isn't the only form of power. | |
| In Game of Thrones, neither Tyrion nor Varys are strong physically. | |
| Tyrion because of his dwarfism, Verus because he was gelded. | |
| And yet both of them are powerful and admirable despite physical weakness. | |
| This is why I find the phrase strong female characters so interesting. | |
| It sets women up to fail, competing in an arena where men are the superior sex. | |
| Or it requires that they be empowered by the director, who winds up giving superhuman abilities to 120 pounds Scarlett Johansson. | |
| This results in cognitive dissonance for the audience. | |
| In Avengers, Black Widow is tough enough to beat up hardened Russian mobsters at the beginning of the movie. | |
| But later on, when we see her fight Hawkeye, every healthy, well-adjusted person in the audience is subconsciously outraged that this big man is beating a tiny woman. | |
| Strength isn't the only difference between the sexes, though it's one of the most obvious. | |
| Men and women differ in so many ways, in complementary ways. | |
| Each sex is specialized to work well with the other. | |
| Men are good at some things, women are good at different things, and trying to judge either sex by the standards of their complement isn't just foolish, it's dehumanizing. | |
| So let's return to Ghostbusters, the real Ghostbusters from 1984. | |
| What's this movie really about? | |
| When you strip away all of the makeup, the setting, the ghosts, the gags, and the big-name actors, what is the kernel of narrative that you find? | |
| It's a movie about four friends putting together a small business and the difficulties they have to deal with, both from clients and from regulators. | |
| This is a masculine story at its core. | |
| Not because women aren't capable of inventing a proton pack, not because men have better instincts for what sort of businesses will succeed. | |
| The reason it's a masculine story is because of the psychological inheritance we received from our ancestors. | |
| Men evolved to go out and prove themselves to women, to take big risks to fight off more than they can chew. | |
| Women evolved to find security in the home environment so that they could raise their children successfully. | |
| Women who took risks wound up failing the test of evolution. | |
| So did the men who played it safe. | |
| Because of this, our ancestors were the risk-taking men who would do something like gamble on Ghostbusting being a successful business model. | |
| And our ancestors were the cautious women who would rather achieve a stable income on Etsy, even if that means that they'll never hit it big. | |
| Furthermore, we tend to have more sympathy for women than we do for men. | |
| We're more likely to give them help when they encounter difficulty. | |
| There are good evolutionary reasons for this, reasons that are so obvious I won't even bother mentioning them. | |
| But when it comes to Ghostbusters, this innate empathy undermines the conflict. | |
| In the original film, Walter Peck, the EPA regulator, was an antagonist we loved to hate. | |
| But he wasn't a villain. | |
| At the end of the day, he was just another man doing his job, even if he went about it foolishly, and his anger at the Ghostbusters was comedic. | |
| Yes, it's true. | |
| This man has no dick. | |
| But replace Dan Aykeroid with Melissa McCarthy, and we're right back to Hawkeye acting like a wife beater. | |
| What was once a funny pissing match between a couple of guys is now an abusive misogynist who doesn't want women to succeed. | |
| For most of us, the differences between the sexes are so obvious that they wind up being difficult for us to even notice. | |
| Are men and women equal? | |
| Of course they are! | |
| What sort of savage would say otherwise? | |
| Should you treat a gentleman in the same manner that you'd treat a lady? | |
| Why, of course not. | |
| What poppycock! | |
| What an absurd suggestion. | |
| This is all so obvious to us on a subconscious level that when something like Ghostbusters 2016 shows up on our radar, we just know it's wrong, even if we can't quite orchestrate why. | |
| So if that's the case, how did Sony fail to realize that this was a disaster from the beginning? | |
| It's time we looked at the director, Paul Feig. | |
| In a 2015 interview with Variety, he discussed how his world had been female-centric from a young age, how he never learned about masculinity from a father who was always working. | |
| In another interview with Hollywood Reporter, he made a point of saying that his favorite color was purple. | |
| It is clear that Feigue is a man who's deeply confused about the sexes. | |
| Not because he's a dandy necessarily. | |
| Oscar Wilde was a dandy, and he had a very deep understanding of the sexes. | |
| But because, from the earliest of ages, he was encouraged to identify with the female, to seek female primacy. | |
| He was a boy raised to be a woman. | |
| And now that he is a man, he takes his malformed, stunted understanding of masculinity and projects it onto the other sex. | |
| He wants to see women as saviors, as soldiers, as successful in business. | |
| He wants a woman who will continue to overmother him, protecting and providing for him. | |
| His latent masculine instincts are screaming that he ought to be protecting and providing for women. | |
| But because he never grew up, he projects those roles on to women. | |
| Well, a mother, a real mother, is the most wonderful person in the world. | |
| In their review of the Star Wars prequels, Red Letter Media pointed out that the biggest failures of those movies was that they didn't tell a human story. | |
| Audiences couldn't relate to the characters on the screen, and so once the dazzle of the special effects faded, there was little left to care about. | |
| Man is the storytelling animal. | |
| All of our narratives are built off of rules and tropes embedded deep within our subconscious. | |
| The reason that rescue the princess is a theme you find throughout all cultures is because women have always been attracted to men who are strong enough to defend them. | |
| When you flip the sexes, putting a woman in a position to rescue a man, the romance at the end of the story evaporates. | |
| Instead of fighting to rescue a lover, she is fighting to rescue her younger brother. | |
| Everybody understands this, even if they can't put it into words. | |
| And when you present them with a narrative that's broken from the get-go, they can all sense that something's wrong even if they can't put their finger on it. | |
| Both Paul Feig and Amy Pascal, the chairman of Sony Pictures, are deeply sexually confused, and as such, are obsessed with forcing female bodies into character roles designed for men. | |
| They want to see a strong princess go and rescue a weak man and then fall in love with him to everybody else's disgust. | |
| It wasn't a bad script that killed this movie. | |
| It wasn't problems during production. | |
| And it certainly wasn't fear or hatred of women. | |
| What doomed this movie from day one was the deep-set mental illness of both Feigue and Pascal. | |
| Rather than crafting a good film, they tried to force their sickness into the world, twisting reality with contradictions and demanding that reality accommodate them. | |
| They went against the logic of the human soul, and because of that, Ghostbusters was doomed from the start. |