The new Ghostbusters is everything I expected it would be: a comedy sci-fi movie about a bunch of people shooting cartoonish ghosts. I got exactly what I wanted. In fact, I think it was better than the original, and it wasn’t because of the fact that they Rule 63ed it. The writing was a bit more clever. I like my movies to have a little banter, and that is exactly what it had. After all, I was watching a movie about kooky scientists beating up ghosts. The premise was shaky, but the product was good.
The other thing that made the movie so good was the delicious White Male Tears™ that had built up since the announcement of the cast. I have never seen such a flow of pathetic whining form men who just hated the mere concept of an all woman Ghostbusters movie.
“This is going to ruin my childhood memories!”
“Hollywood is too politically correct!”
“Men are under attack in this country!”
Mmmm...male tears...There were so many that were they not so salty, we’d have solved California’s water crisis for the next 20 years, at which point maybe Hollywood could gender swap Blade Runner or something and keep the flow going. You’d think that Sony broke into all these guys’ houses and forced them to watch as they digitally erased the stars of the original movie and replaced them with talking uteri. Men jumped on movie sites to give the film the lowest rating possible before it was even released in the US! Yummy tears! One review said this:
“My biggest gripe; every man in this movie is portrayed in this movie as incompetent, a creep, or dumb. There is not a single male character in here that a young boy can look up to. Yet another disturbing trend on today’s culture where people feel a need to make men look bad in order to elevate women. You know its possible to show strong, independent women without having to put men down.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!! Sweet Woman Jesus! How oblivious can one person be? Dude is mad at the movie for portraying men in the film the way women have been portrayed in movies since the invention of movies! I’ll bet he wept into his sad little hands when they kind of fridged Chris Hemsworth’s character! This is a Rule 63 review! It’s extra funny because he’s complaining about inept dudes, but his grammar is inept AF! Oh, the tears! So delicious!
The other complaint that I heard about the movie was how racist it was, because the only person who WASN’T a scientist was Leslie Jone’s character, the only black star. One writer describes the role, Patty Tolan, as a Sapphire style token negro. I respect that it is frustrating that the black main character’s role isn’t a scientist like the other main characters, but tell me how this choice is any more racist than the 1984 Ghostbusters, where not only was Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zedmore NOT a scientist, but editors actively decided the omit the background detail that he’s a retired marine with combat tactical experience? He just kind of showed up and was like, “Hey, I need a job, and you guys need a token ethnic to distract from all the Middle Eastern cabbie jokes!” So Patty was an MTA employee. BUT, at the when she saw her first ghost, she didn’t resort to the patent “scared negro” role or the “1st one dead” role that is usually trope for a token in a Hollywood film. She just calmly bantered. She also provided the broke ass group with a mode of transportation. They were schlepping around town with their equipment in shopping carts before Patty was on the team. Usually she was the reasonable one in the cloud of the other three panicking. Throughout the movie, Leslie Jones was being Leslie Jones: 20+ year comic veteran who thrived on making people laugh by being herself. The woman is FUNNY. At worst, it is exactly what the original was: racially oblivious, like Girls or Friends. So by all means, be disappointed that Patty wasn’t a scientist, but save that racist hellscape talk.
If you want to see a racist hellscape, look at Leslie Jone’s Twitter feed. People attacked her as if SHE wrote the show. They compared her to a gorilla, an orangutan, I saw more use of the word “nigger” than 15 pages of a Quentan Tarantino script! Anonymous dick-lints even photoshopped Tweet images to make it look like Leslie Jones herself had sent out racist, homophobic tweets. It was horrible. It was so bad that Jones bowed out of Twitter. Twitter actually suspended the head troller’s account because of the abuse. And of course, the racist fucktrumpets lamented that Leslie Jones was the REAL racist, pointing out tweets where she said something like, “White people”, with a picture of a white dude trying to kiss a hippo or something. Not exactly on the level of bombarding one person, who ISN’T EVEN THE WRITER, with images and slurs minute after minute. And why weren’t Kat McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, or Melissa McCartney attacked like this? Why only Leslie Jones? She was the “easy” target, because she is black.
This Ghostbusters movie has hopefully opened up people’s eyes to how fragile masculinity and fragile whiteness often go hand in hand. The rhetoric is just as vitriolic, and it exposes how pathetic the “men” who espouse it are that they feel the need to go on the offensive to hide their insecurities. Whenever I hear of trolling attacks like this, I like to conjure an image of some pimply loser in his parents’ finished basement apartment wearing a tightly fitting polo and high-water khakis, masturbating in a pool of his own tears while furiously typing racist/sexist epithets, but I know the reality is that some of these “men” are probably my co-workers, going about society as a supposedly stable guy, but behind closed doors waves around his white straight male sense of entitlement on the internet like it’s an aryan uber-dick. And they still can’t dress well.
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