The Great Ghostbusters Controversy
Paul Feig apparently has no sense of timing. Recently he wrote on Twitter that he would be happy to release the three-hour director’s cut of his controversial Ghostbusters reboot. Recently, as in during the end phase of another contentious election, in which one of the contenders is embroiled in a sex scandal, and in which the other candidate seems perpetually scandalized. As in during a pandemic that has everyone stressed and pissed and at each other’s ideological throats. No one, and I mean no one, wants to hear about a three-hour director’s cut of Ghostbusters.
Feig seems genuinely oblivious to the political climate, and I’m not inclined to blame him for being so innocent. I think he’s a nice guy, if somewhat arrogant and sheltered, and really meant no harm when he told fans of the 1984 Ghostbusters to fuck off. He was under a lot of stress; a movie is always a gamble, and Ghostbusters was unfortunately for him a bad one. So while there’s plenty of justified contempt to be thrown this way and that over the controversy, I want to say at the outset that I don’t personally hate Paul Feig nor think he’s responsible for the controversy entirely.
The long and nasty and hitherto unparalleled controversy that was Ghostbusters is an interesting thing, containing within itself a nexus of several issues that should never have been attached to a stupid movie about ghosts. Feminism, representation in film, toxic fandoms, sexism, film history, and the wage gap all found their ugly niche in the controversy and their ugly activists to gripe over loudly on social media in a furious riot that lasted for the better part of a year. There were several causes, and although the controversy has vanished, we should remember how some people behaved during it because – for whatever reasons – they decided to show their true colors and we shouldn’t forget how repulsive those colors were.
The main reason, I believe, that the controversy got so out of hand so quickly was the 2016 election during which the trailer was stupidly released. I had been hoping that Hillary Clinton would have the intelligence and the decency to avoid charges of sexism, but she didn’t and by the time the Ghostbusters trailer hit YouTube and became the most hated video of all time, there was already a battle of the sexes raging white hot that – frankly – Sony was purely idiotic not to have foreseen happening. Or perhaps did, and tried even more stupidly to exploit it.
It would be a good thing if a film scholar did a study of how the election affected Ghostbusters profits and how Ghostbusters in turn affected the election. I don’t have the time or resources or honestly the patience. Life is too short. A general survey and assessment is the best a satirical critic as myself can offer.
The trailer for Ghostbusters was objectively awful. I still haven’t seen the movie, nor probably ever will, but not because I still hate it – merely because I don’t care to see it. The trailer was bad enough. The jokes were lame and immature; there’s an audience for immaturity, as Adam Sandler routinely proves, but that audience isn’t mostly the same audience for the 1984 original. Making a Ghostbusters reboot was already going to be a controversial thing, no matter what it was: Harold Ramis was dead, and the hardcore fans would have been hard to please regardless. At best, it should have been left to die. But Sony already messed up by hiring Feig, perhaps the worst director for the tone and humor a Ghostbusters movie needs, and then messed up further by selling its all-female cast as a new and innovative social-justice triumph that it laughably was not.
It was the initial backlash to the trailer that started it all. Most rational people hated it because it looked awful. Then began the absurd argument that we aren’t allowed to hate trailers anymore, an argument that arose for Ghostbusters sake alone and then was forgotten when the controversy ended. I just bet the very same asshats who said we couldn’t hate the Ghostbusters trailer have continued their petty lives hating this trailer and that ever since. These two positions, one that hated the trailer and one that defended it for absurd reasons, was the initial phase of the controversy. It got pretty bad within days.
The trailer backlash was further aggravated by several web magazines – Cracked, the AV Club, etc... – calling everyone who hated the trailer a sexist because the movie had an all-female cast. This was a blatant attempt to cash-in on the controversy regardless of negative social consequences, and you’re free to look in your own soul and determine how far you want to hold those publications accountable. The article in Cracked was particularly narrow-minded and ill-reasoned trash. All of sudden, a proscription was imposed that refused to grant people the taste to determine what they liked and didn’t like, and the only rationale for this censorious horseshit was that the movie had an all-female cast.
As anyone who loves movies and is out of their twenties can tell you, women have been in movies since the dawn of film, and women have been leading movies well before Ghostbusters. Alien came out in 1979, and there have been countless romantic comedies and dramas and thrillers and horror movies since that have featured female protagonists, and some (Steel Magnolias, 19-godamned-85!) with an all-female cast to boot. That so many people of a sudden forgot this is a fascinating example of how reason and logic can be ignored when people want to earn brownie points by saying demonstrably wrong things. It was after the articles that two quite ugly types of people reared their heads and exacerbated the controversy to a level that no controversy over any movie ever should be to indulge in.
These two groups were, on the one hand, whiny man-babies who truly hated the movie for ridiculous reasons – the “ruined my childhood” crowd. The other group were white-knight male feminists seeking attention and probably sex by defending the movie in the most hilariously stupid ways. The first group was, as far as I could tell, rather small and confined to online forums like Reddit and Twitter; the other was perhaps even larger than the female feminists themselves and conflated everyone, from those of us who hated the trailer to those who merely disliked it, as a whiny man-baby who hated women in movies. If you were a woman who hated the trailer, it was your internalized misogyny that wouldn’t allow you to enjoy fart and belch jokes as you properly should.
As far as the main arguments go, the ones against the trailer were pretty straightforward and simple. It just seemed as a bad movie; it looked stupid, the CGI looked cheap and dated, the jokes were insufferably lame, and no one was wrong to want nothing to do with it. The intolerance of the dislike for Ghostbusters was so radical that it seemed at the time odd to need reasons for disliking a trailer at all. We’re free to dislike anything for no reason; movies aren’t people, after all, and we can hate them for any reason or no reason simply because they offend our taste. But because Ghostbusters was being marketed as a victory for women’s rights, which is silly, it was a sexist prejudice to judge a movie from a trailer – a trailer designed and fussed over by marketing and advertising executives precisely to appeal to an audience. Hating the trailer was not a fallacy of composition – judging the whole from its parts – because the parts in this case are representative of the whole. That logical fallacies should need to be mentioned in a debate about a raunchy comedy shows the extent to which people had lost their minds in 2016, and some of those people have not recovered them to this day.
The arguments defending the trailer were some of the more stupid arguments I’ve seen outside those proposed by Antifa members defending violence. I made the point in a Cracked comment thread that 2016 was the worst time to release a movie and market it with an all-female cast as a social-justice vehicle, and was asked “Oh so women aren’t allowed to make movies during an election?” You can almost hear the spittle in that, and that spittle was coming not from a love for Ghostbusters but rather a hatred for something else. I wonder whom that hatred could be for, don’t you?
Of course woman can make and release movies anytime they want. But filmmakers must face the reality of the context and market conditions prevailing when they release their movies. Women are freely able to release a movie and promote it with gender-politics when a Presidential candidate is on national television saying “pussy” as often as a porn star, and they are equally free to sit back and watch it flop as pathetically bad as Ghostbusters in fact flopped.
If you look deeper, the argument that women should be able to make incendiary gender-political movies and release them during factious times and make a profit lies at the heart of the Ghostbusters controversy. I don’t know if the movie itself was in fact political, but the marketing certainly was and that’s all that mattered in those rage-fueled early months. The people who made such bogus claims about Ghostbusters being a triumph for gender representation and called every single one of its critics sexist pigs are people who have problems both with themselves and reality. They are deeply unsatisfied with life, most probably for sexual reasons, and refuse to acknowledge the comfortable life they’ve been granted in a free society. In short, what they really want is the power to compel you to acknowledge their illogical hatred of whatever group it is the fashion to hate, and the force to compel you to spend money on their hateful products. You don’t have the right to dislike their products and better be quiet about it if you have an opinion that doesn’t suit their ideology.
But it would only be fair to point out that the man-haters have their counterparts in an equally hateful and controlling group of men. These men, for whatever reason, are unsuccessful with women and haven chosen to hate them wholesale rather than seek therapy or find the reason they are unsuccessful and fix it. It was this group in conjunction with the man-haters that made the controversy what it was, and they continue to hate one another as well as the rest of us, depending solely on our genitals, and will still try to drag us into other controversies so we too can scream and shout and be as miserable and unpleasant and lonely as they are.
What we learned from Ghostbusters, and should be thankful to Paul Feig in all seriousness for giving us the chance to learn, is that there is still a wide swath of the American public who hate the opposite sex, who have been seduced by hateful ideologies, and are best just left alone and watched occasionally to make sure they don’t get violent. Most people, I believe, didn’t really care too much one way or the other about Ghostbusters. The man-haters and women-haters didn’t either. They used the controversy to antagonize their opponents, and it was just unfortunate that we allowed ourselves to get in the dirt with them. This most likely would not have happened any year besides 2016. But we should above all remember that all that hate and divisiveness are still prevalent, and for the most part our elected officials have done little to nothing to stifle it. The Ghostbusters hate carries on into controversies as important as those over who our next president should be, to those as silly as the one currently going on over the coronavirus lockdowns. I’m a pessimist, and believe in my gut that America will grow more and more factious and violent and spoiled to the point where we no longer have our better angels to appeal to for help. I don’t want that to be the case, but I’ve reasoned this out for several years and it appears inevitable.
If you disagree, prove me wrong.
Paul Feig apparently has no sense of timing. Recently he wrote on Twitter that he would be happy to release the three-hour director’s cut of his controversial Ghostbusters reboot. Recently, as in during the end phase of another contentious election, in which one of the contenders is embroiled in a sex scandal, and in which the other candidate seems perpetually scandalized. As in during a pandemic that has everyone stressed and pissed and at each other’s ideological throats. No one, and I mean no one, wants to hear about a three-hour director’s cut of Ghostbusters.
Feig seems genuinely oblivious to the political climate, and I’m not inclined to blame him for being so innocent. I think he’s a nice guy, if somewhat arrogant and sheltered, and really meant no harm when he told fans of the 1984 Ghostbusters to fuck off. He was under a lot of stress; a movie is always a gamble, and Ghostbusters was unfortunately for him a bad one. So while there’s plenty of justified contempt to be thrown this way and that over the controversy, I want to say at the outset that I don’t personally hate Paul Feig nor think he’s responsible for the controversy entirely.
The long and nasty and hitherto unparalleled controversy that was Ghostbusters is an interesting thing, containing within itself a nexus of several issues that should never have been attached to a stupid movie about ghosts. Feminism, representation in film, toxic fandoms, sexism, film history, and the wage gap all found their ugly niche in the controversy and their ugly activists to gripe over loudly on social media in a furious riot that lasted for the better part of a year. There were several causes, and although the controversy has vanished, we should remember how some people behaved during it because – for whatever reasons – they decided to show their true colors and we shouldn’t forget how repulsive those colors were.
The main reason, I believe, that the controversy got so out of hand so quickly was the 2016 election during which the trailer was stupidly released. I had been hoping that Hillary Clinton would have the intelligence and the decency to avoid charges of sexism, but she didn’t and by the time the Ghostbusters trailer hit YouTube and became the most hated video of all time, there was already a battle of the sexes raging white hot that – frankly – Sony was purely idiotic not to have foreseen happening. Or perhaps did, and tried even more stupidly to exploit it.
It would be a good thing if a film scholar did a study of how the election affected Ghostbusters profits and how Ghostbusters in turn affected the election. I don’t have the time or resources or honestly the patience. Life is too short. A general survey and assessment is the best a satirical critic as myself can offer.
The trailer for Ghostbusters was objectively awful. I still haven’t seen the movie, nor probably ever will, but not because I still hate it – merely because I don’t care to see it. The trailer was bad enough. The jokes were lame and immature; there’s an audience for immaturity, as Adam Sandler routinely proves, but that audience isn’t mostly the same audience for the 1984 original. Making a Ghostbusters reboot was already going to be a controversial thing, no matter what it was: Harold Ramis was dead, and the hardcore fans would have been hard to please regardless. At best, it should have been left to die. But Sony already messed up by hiring Feig, perhaps the worst director for the tone and humor a Ghostbusters movie needs, and then messed up further by selling its all-female cast as a new and innovative social-justice triumph that it laughably was not.
It was the initial backlash to the trailer that started it all. Most rational people hated it because it looked awful. Then began the absurd argument that we aren’t allowed to hate trailers anymore, an argument that arose for Ghostbusters sake alone and then was forgotten when the controversy ended. I just bet the very same asshats who said we couldn’t hate the Ghostbusters trailer have continued their petty lives hating this trailer and that ever since. These two positions, one that hated the trailer and one that defended it for absurd reasons, was the initial phase of the controversy. It got pretty bad within days.
The trailer backlash was further aggravated by several web magazines – Cracked, the AV Club, etc... – calling everyone who hated the trailer a sexist because the movie had an all-female cast. This was a blatant attempt to cash-in on the controversy regardless of negative social consequences, and you’re free to look in your own soul and determine how far you want to hold those publications accountable. The article in Cracked was particularly narrow-minded and ill-reasoned trash. All of sudden, a proscription was imposed that refused to grant people the taste to determine what they liked and didn’t like, and the only rationale for this censorious horseshit was that the movie had an all-female cast.
As anyone who loves movies and is out of their twenties can tell you, women have been in movies since the dawn of film, and women have been leading movies well before Ghostbusters. Alien came out in 1979, and there have been countless romantic comedies and dramas and thrillers and horror movies since that have featured female protagonists, and some (Steel Magnolias, 19-godamned-85!) with an all-female cast to boot. That so many people of a sudden forgot this is a fascinating example of how reason and logic can be ignored when people want to earn brownie points by saying demonstrably wrong things. It was after the articles that two quite ugly types of people reared their heads and exacerbated the controversy to a level that no controversy over any movie ever should be to indulge in.
These two groups were, on the one hand, whiny man-babies who truly hated the movie for ridiculous reasons – the “ruined my childhood” crowd. The other group were white-knight male feminists seeking attention and probably sex by defending the movie in the most hilariously stupid ways. The first group was, as far as I could tell, rather small and confined to online forums like Reddit and Twitter; the other was perhaps even larger than the female feminists themselves and conflated everyone, from those of us who hated the trailer to those who merely disliked it, as a whiny man-baby who hated women in movies. If you were a woman who hated the trailer, it was your internalized misogyny that wouldn’t allow you to enjoy fart and belch jokes as you properly should.
As far as the main arguments go, the ones against the trailer were pretty straightforward and simple. It just seemed as a bad movie; it looked stupid, the CGI looked cheap and dated, the jokes were insufferably lame, and no one was wrong to want nothing to do with it. The intolerance of the dislike for Ghostbusters was so radical that it seemed at the time odd to need reasons for disliking a trailer at all. We’re free to dislike anything for no reason; movies aren’t people, after all, and we can hate them for any reason or no reason simply because they offend our taste. But because Ghostbusters was being marketed as a victory for women’s rights, which is silly, it was a sexist prejudice to judge a movie from a trailer – a trailer designed and fussed over by marketing and advertising executives precisely to appeal to an audience. Hating the trailer was not a fallacy of composition – judging the whole from its parts – because the parts in this case are representative of the whole. That logical fallacies should need to be mentioned in a debate about a raunchy comedy shows the extent to which people had lost their minds in 2016, and some of those people have not recovered them to this day.
The arguments defending the trailer were some of the more stupid arguments I’ve seen outside those proposed by Antifa members defending violence. I made the point in a Cracked comment thread that 2016 was the worst time to release a movie and market it with an all-female cast as a social-justice vehicle, and was asked “Oh so women aren’t allowed to make movies during an election?” You can almost hear the spittle in that, and that spittle was coming not from a love for Ghostbusters but rather a hatred for something else. I wonder whom that hatred could be for, don’t you?
Of course woman can make and release movies anytime they want. But filmmakers must face the reality of the context and market conditions prevailing when they release their movies. Women are freely able to release a movie and promote it with gender-politics when a Presidential candidate is on national television saying “pussy” as often as a porn star, and they are equally free to sit back and watch it flop as pathetically bad as Ghostbusters in fact flopped.
If you look deeper, the argument that women should be able to make incendiary gender-political movies and release them during factious times and make a profit lies at the heart of the Ghostbusters controversy. I don’t know if the movie itself was in fact political, but the marketing certainly was and that’s all that mattered in those rage-fueled early months. The people who made such bogus claims about Ghostbusters being a triumph for gender representation and called every single one of its critics sexist pigs are people who have problems both with themselves and reality. They are deeply unsatisfied with life, most probably for sexual reasons, and refuse to acknowledge the comfortable life they’ve been granted in a free society. In short, what they really want is the power to compel you to acknowledge their illogical hatred of whatever group it is the fashion to hate, and the force to compel you to spend money on their hateful products. You don’t have the right to dislike their products and better be quiet about it if you have an opinion that doesn’t suit their ideology.
But it would only be fair to point out that the man-haters have their counterparts in an equally hateful and controlling group of men. These men, for whatever reason, are unsuccessful with women and haven chosen to hate them wholesale rather than seek therapy or find the reason they are unsuccessful and fix it. It was this group in conjunction with the man-haters that made the controversy what it was, and they continue to hate one another as well as the rest of us, depending solely on our genitals, and will still try to drag us into other controversies so we too can scream and shout and be as miserable and unpleasant and lonely as they are.
What we learned from Ghostbusters, and should be thankful to Paul Feig in all seriousness for giving us the chance to learn, is that there is still a wide swath of the American public who hate the opposite sex, who have been seduced by hateful ideologies, and are best just left alone and watched occasionally to make sure they don’t get violent. Most people, I believe, didn’t really care too much one way or the other about Ghostbusters. The man-haters and women-haters didn’t either. They used the controversy to antagonize their opponents, and it was just unfortunate that we allowed ourselves to get in the dirt with them. This most likely would not have happened any year besides 2016. But we should above all remember that all that hate and divisiveness are still prevalent, and for the most part our elected officials have done little to nothing to stifle it. The Ghostbusters hate carries on into controversies as important as those over who our next president should be, to those as silly as the one currently going on over the coronavirus lockdowns. I’m a pessimist, and believe in my gut that America will grow more and more factious and violent and spoiled to the point where we no longer have our better angels to appeal to for help. I don’t want that to be the case, but I’ve reasoned this out for several years and it appears inevitable.
If you disagree, prove me wrong.