Davis Aurini - Why Ghostbusters Was Doomed from the Start
Aired: 2016-05-09
Duration: 10:53


=== Problem With Ghostbusters (02:17) ===

[00:00:01]  The new Ghostbusters film hasn't even been released yet, and it's already turning into a disaster.
[00:00:06]  Audiences are panning the trailers, heads are rolling at Sony, and the director, Paul Feig, is blaming it all on misogyny.
[00:00:15]  The problem with this film should have been obvious from the beginning.
[00:00:18]  There's a reason audiences have reacted so negatively even before the rumors of the lame duck script were released.
[00:00:24]  It's not just that they got the music wrong, turning 80 synth into modern orchestral.
[00:00:29]  It's not just that the outfits look dumpy, and the jokes are lame.
[00:00:33]  There's a far more fundamental problem which poisoned this film from the get-go, which no amount of creativity could have compensated for.
[00:00:41]  The problem with Ghostbusters 2016 is that the main cast is all female.
[00:00:48]  Now am I saying that an all-female cast in a comedy adventure movie aimed at general audiences is an inevitable death knell?
[00:00:56]  Am I confirming Feig's accusations of misogyny, that audiences are just angry because they can't deal with strong female characters?
[00:01:04]  No, not at all.
[00:01:06]  In fact, if you took the four women playing the Ghostbusters and put them into another film, it could have been incredibly successful.
[00:01:12]  In fact, the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids had much the same cast and the same director, and it was received extremely well.
[00:01:20]  If instead of Ghostbusters, the four of them had starred in a sequel to, say, Jumanji.
[00:01:26]  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.
[00:01:35]  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.
[00:01:44]  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?
[00:01:55]  Not exactly.
[00:01:56]  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.

=== Strong vs. Powerful (08:49) ===

[00:02:05]  The reason Ghostbusters doesn't work with a female cast is because at the core, it is a male story.
[00:02:14]  Now I'd like to step back for a moment and consider the term strong female character.
[00:02:19]  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.
[00:02:29]  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.
[00:02:38]  Strong female character, as opposed to powerful female character.
[00:02:45]  Strength, physical strength, is one of the defining aspects of masculinity.
[00:02:51]  When you contrast the sexes, there's no contest.
[00:02:54]  The average man is stronger than 95% of women, and even female bodybuilders don't get much stronger than your part-time gym rat.
[00:03:02]  This is why hitting women is such a universal taboo.
[00:03:06]  We expect men to use their physical strength to protect women, not abuse them.
[00:03:12]  Someone who's strong is someone who's powerful.
[00:03:15]  But strength isn't the only form of power.
[00:03:19]  In Game of Thrones, neither Tyrion nor Varys are strong physically.
[00:03:23]  Tyrion because of his dwarfism, Verus because he was gelded.
[00:03:27]  And yet both of them are powerful and admirable despite physical weakness.
[00:03:33]  This is why I find the phrase strong female characters so interesting.
[00:03:38]  It sets women up to fail, competing in an arena where men are the superior sex.
[00:03:44]  Or it requires that they be empowered by the director, who winds up giving superhuman abilities to 120 pounds Scarlett Johansson.
[00:03:54]  This results in cognitive dissonance for the audience.
[00:03:58]  In Avengers, Black Widow is tough enough to beat up hardened Russian mobsters at the beginning of the movie.
[00:04:04]  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.
[00:04:17]  Strength isn't the only difference between the sexes, though it's one of the most obvious.
[00:04:21]  Men and women differ in so many ways, in complementary ways.
[00:04:26]  Each sex is specialized to work well with the other.
[00:04:29]  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.
[00:04:40]  So let's return to Ghostbusters, the real Ghostbusters from 1984.
[00:04:46]  What's this movie really about?
[00:04:48]  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?
[00:05:00]  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.
[00:05:10]  This is a masculine story at its core.
[00:05:14]  Not because women aren't capable of inventing a proton pack, not because men have better instincts for what sort of businesses will succeed.
[00:05:21]  The reason it's a masculine story is because of the psychological inheritance we received from our ancestors.
[00:05:29]  Men evolved to go out and prove themselves to women, to take big risks to fight off more than they can chew.
[00:05:35]  Women evolved to find security in the home environment so that they could raise their children successfully.
[00:05:41]  Women who took risks wound up failing the test of evolution.
[00:05:45]  So did the men who played it safe.
[00:05:47]  Because of this, our ancestors were the risk-taking men who would do something like gamble on Ghostbusting being a successful business model.
[00:05:55]  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.
[00:06:05]  Furthermore, we tend to have more sympathy for women than we do for men.
[00:06:10]  We're more likely to give them help when they encounter difficulty.
[00:06:14]  There are good evolutionary reasons for this, reasons that are so obvious I won't even bother mentioning them.
[00:06:19]  But when it comes to Ghostbusters, this innate empathy undermines the conflict.
[00:06:24]  In the original film, Walter Peck, the EPA regulator, was an antagonist we loved to hate.
[00:06:31]  But he wasn't a villain.
[00:06:32]  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.
[00:06:41]  Yes, it's true.
[00:06:42]  This man has no dick.
[00:06:44]  But replace Dan Aykeroid with Melissa McCarthy, and we're right back to Hawkeye acting like a wife beater.
[00:06:51]  What was once a funny pissing match between a couple of guys is now an abusive misogynist who doesn't want women to succeed.
[00:06:59]  For most of us, the differences between the sexes are so obvious that they wind up being difficult for us to even notice.
[00:07:06]  Are men and women equal?
[00:07:08]  Of course they are!
[00:07:09]  What sort of savage would say otherwise?
[00:07:11]  Should you treat a gentleman in the same manner that you'd treat a lady?
[00:07:16]  Why, of course not.
[00:07:17]  What poppycock!
[00:07:18]  What an absurd suggestion.
[00:07:21]  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.
[00:07:33]  So if that's the case, how did Sony fail to realize that this was a disaster from the beginning?
[00:07:40]  It's time we looked at the director, Paul Feig.
[00:07:43]  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.
[00:07:54]  In another interview with Hollywood Reporter, he made a point of saying that his favorite color was purple.
[00:07:59]  It is clear that Feigue is a man who's deeply confused about the sexes.
[00:08:04]  Not because he's a dandy necessarily.
[00:08:06]  Oscar Wilde was a dandy, and he had a very deep understanding of the sexes.
[00:08:10]  But because, from the earliest of ages, he was encouraged to identify with the female, to seek female primacy.
[00:08:19]  He was a boy raised to be a woman.
[00:08:21]  And now that he is a man, he takes his malformed, stunted understanding of masculinity and projects it onto the other sex.
[00:08:29]  He wants to see women as saviors, as soldiers, as successful in business.
[00:08:34]  He wants a woman who will continue to overmother him, protecting and providing for him.
[00:08:41]  His latent masculine instincts are screaming that he ought to be protecting and providing for women.
[00:08:46]  But because he never grew up, he projects those roles on to women.
[00:08:52]  Well, a mother, a real mother, is the most wonderful person in the world.
[00:08:58]  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.
[00:09:07]  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.
[00:09:16]  Man is the storytelling animal.
[00:09:19]  All of our narratives are built off of rules and tropes embedded deep within our subconscious.
[00:09:24]  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.
[00:09:34]  When you flip the sexes, putting a woman in a position to rescue a man, the romance at the end of the story evaporates.
[00:09:41]  Instead of fighting to rescue a lover, she is fighting to rescue her younger brother.
[00:09:47]  Everybody understands this, even if they can't put it into words.
[00:09:50]  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.
[00:09:58]  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.
[00:10:11]  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.
[00:10:21]  It wasn't a bad script that killed this movie.
[00:10:24]  It wasn't problems during production.
[00:10:26]  And it certainly wasn't fear or hatred of women.
[00:10:29]  What doomed this movie from day one was the deep-set mental illness of both Feigue and Pascal.
[00:10:36]  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.
[00:10:46]  They went against the logic of the human soul, and because of that, Ghostbusters was doomed from the start.