So much discussion of the new “Ghostbusters” has centered on the Ghostbusters themselves, and particularly on their gender, that we have forgotten about the ghosts. And yet ghosts are so rich in metaphorical significance. In the reboot, Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig’s characters have co-authored a book called “Ghosts from Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively.” The title invites us to ask: What fears and desires do the ghosts represent? What spaces do they haunt? What is signified by their eventual bustedness?
To learn more about ghosts, I recently watched the original “Ghostbusters.” It became clear to me, as it had not been when the movie came out, in 1984, when I was seven years old, that ghosts congregate around the enemies of free-market capitalism. When the original Ghostbusters lose their cushy academic posts in parapsychology, they mortgage Dan Aykroyd’s mother’s house, invest in fixer-uppers (an abandoned firehouse, a 1959 Cadillac ambulance-hearse), and start a ghost-extermination business. They find that ghosts haunt the New York Public Library, traumatizing a librarian, whose salary is paid by the taxpayers, and that demons inhabit the frail frame of a penny-pinching accountant, played by Rick Moranis. (“Who does your taxes?” Moranis bleats, when rescued by the Ghostbusters.) An Environmental Protection Agency lawyer, who shuts down the ghost-containment unit, triggers a ghost Armageddon. Ghosts infest the refrigerator of an uptight cellist, played by Sigourney Weaver, whose beautiful body is the rightful trophy of some enterprising capitalist. The Ghostbusters bust the ghosts, humiliate the E.P.A. lawyer, release Weaver’s libido, and make a fortune.
If the original Ghostbusters was about the thrill of the free market, the new one is about its consequences—about the people it disenfranchises, and the possibility that they will try to take violent retribution. To get anything, in the new New York, you have to take it from someone else. When the new Ghostbusters try to move into a cool former firehouse in Chinatown, they learn the monthly rent is twenty-one thousand dollars. (As Alexandra Schwartz wrote, their New York is also a ghost town of empty real-estate investments.) The vehicle they drive is a “steal”—not in the sense that they get a good deal on a car that nobody else wants, but in the sense that they steal it from Leslie Jones’s uncle. This vehicle is a hearse. It may have a dead body in the back. They have to figure out what they would do with a body. Eventually, the uncle, an undertaker, turns up and wants his hearse back.
Whereas the ghosts of 1984 were Sumerian shape-shifting demons transplanted to Central Park West, the ghosts of 2016 are the dispossessed souls of people whose rights were trampled in the making of New York. The remake opens with a tour of “Aldridge Manor”: a Simpsons-style parody of a nineteenth-century mansion with “every luxury, including a face bidet and an anti-Irish security fence.” (“In this very room,” the tour guide tells visitors, “P. T. Barnum first had the idea to enslave elephants.”) It’s no wonder the house is haunted by the patriarch’s repressed daughter, who went crazy and murdered all the servants. Her eruption from the basement causes the tour guide, a young white man, to soil his pants.
Everywhere ghosts appear turns out to be the site of a historical wrong. Most of these wrongs are explained to the white Ghostbusters by the one black Ghostbuster, Patty (Leslie Jones), an M.T.A. worker and history buff. The subway station where Patty works is beneath the site of an old prison, where inmates were executed by electric chair. The electrocution would go on and on, and still the prisoner wouldn’t die, until finally someone shot him, to save electricity. Obviously, this subway station is haunted by a ghost wearing an electric-chair headpiece. The Ghostbusters try to bust him, but he escapes on a train to Queens. “He’s going to be third-scariest thing on that car,” Patty observes, suggesting that the discontented people who commute on crowded trains to the outer boroughs will someday be the ghosts of rich Manhattan.
The final ghost battle takes place at a faded old hotel in Times Square, built on land that was stolen from the Lenni-Lenape, Patty tells the other Ghostbusters. (The hotel is cannily called the Mercado—Spanish for “market.”) In the basement, a malcontented janitor, Rowan, turns out to be building bomb-like “devices” to catalyze ghost energy, while chortling things like, “You have been bullied your entire life. Now you_ _will be the bully.” Armed with a copy of “Ghosts from Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively,” Rowan turns out to be channelling historical discontentment, literally, as a way to express his own sense of having been wronged. Interpreted by some feminist critics as a personification of hostile male commentators on Reddit, or on the Internet in general, Rowan’s character is perhaps even more suggestive of the most often white, male, teen-aged mass shooter. (“It’s always the sad, pale ones,” McCarthy’s character muses.)
As a summer blockbuster, the new “Ghostbusters” must ultimately discredit the revenge fantasy of the dispossessed. McCarthy’s character, Abby, is the spokesperson for this message, which she delivers in a confrontation with Rowan.
In other words, if the four Ghostbusters—a black woman, a gay woman, a plus-sized woman, and Kristen Wiig—can keep striving, despite the injustices of the world, then so can anyone. (Wiig, the thin, white heterosexual, is paradoxically the most disadvantaged of the four, hampered by both her high heels and her persistent desire for the prizes held up by the patriarchy: tenure at Columbia, a boyfriend who looks like Chris Hemsworth.) One feels certain that new liberal, feminist, intersectional Ghostbusters, having dispatched the ghosts of radical feminists, prison activists, and angry white populists, will go on to vote for Hillary.
“I get it,” Abby tells Rowan. “You don’t like people. People can be terrible. The thing is, though, there’s so many terrific things out there. There are wonderful things that are worth living for. I mean, you got soup.” (It is a recurring joke that Abby always gets only one wonton in her soup, and always hopes for more.)
For a moment, we’re invited to wonder whether we’re all being duped into compliance with an unjust world order by the promise of more or better soup. But the movie rejects this conclusion. It stands behind soup. When Rowan and the ghosts are ejected into another dimension, all of New York is so grateful to the Ghostbusters that Abby’s soup comes with many wontons. Soup turns out to be not the arena of frustration and embattlement that it once seemed to be but, rather, one of gradual, hard-earned change.
As “Ghostbusters” moves toward its optimistic conclusion, it increasingly casts doubt on the vengeful spirits. Most of the murdered were also murderers. “I’m glad I didn’t know any of you people when you were alive, because I don’t enjoy you,” Abby tells the busted ghosts: a reminder that having suffered a wrong is no guarantee that you aren’t also some kind of asshole. The ghosts do get to run amok for a night in Times Square, which transforms for the occasion to the grimy Times Square of the nineteen-seventies: a suggestion to viewers of how the city might look if the status quo were overturned, and of how little we might like it. The new Ghostbusters’ New York is partly the result of profiteering and exploitation, but it also represents the hard work of many competent and well-intentioned people. (The rebooted Mayor, unlike his 1984 predecessor, never doubts that the ghosts are real or that the Ghostbusters are doing important work, although he at first pretends to reject them for political reasons.)
The energy of the ghosts, their volatile discontent, which can so easily be co-opted by any living sociopath, turns out not to be politically useful. There’s nothing historically cogent or productive about the ghost army that swirls around Times Square, with its murderous pilgrims, Revolutionary soldiers, and green blobs that want to overturn the hot-dog carts. Such ghosts of history, “Ghostbusters” seems to say, can’t be allowed to monopolize the conversation: progress is about overcoming them, both literally and figuratively.
