up the punx

Ways that Ghostbusters 2016 is Better than the Original

The nerdy guy doesn’t get the girl. That was a standard trope in the 80s, and the Ghostbusters of 1984 was no exception. The lack of consent factor that makes all of the Zhoul-possessed Sigourney Weaver scenes difficult to watch is not an issue here, because there is no romance in the new Ghostbusters, creepily possessed or otherwise. Yes, Erin (Kristin Wiig) awkwardly hits on Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) but it’s generally met with disapproval from her fellow Ghostbusters (if not laughter) and Kevin seeming to be oblivious to it. And even better than the nerdy guy being the hero is the fact that the nerdy guy is the villain and the nerdy girls save the world. Boom.

An appreciation for their receptionist by the Ghostbusters. I loved Janine as a kid. As a child, I thought that Janine pining quietly for Egon was romantic. Now it pisses me off. That and the fact that nobody paid any attention to her, generally speaking, because she was competent and therefore invisible. As doofy and dumb as Kevin is, and even though Erin hits on him, the team still values him and learns to work with him because they genuinely care about him. That’s not subtext. That’s actual text.

Using the “ghost” as an allegorical commentary. One of the themes in this movie is the importance of being believed. Yes, in this movie, it’s about being believed about ghosts. Erin talks about how she saw a ghost when she was 8, every night for a year. Her parents didn’t believe her, and she went into therapy. Abby (Melissa McCarthy) was the only one who believed her, which was one of the reasons they became friends. It’s not that much of a stretch to think about all the things that women are also often not believed about, as children or as adults. And that part of the movie, thankfully, and pointedly, doesn’t devolve into comedy. It lets the moment of remembered trauma be serious.

Real friendship between the Ghostbusters. The other moment of seriousness that is allowed to be serious is at the very end, when Jillian (Kate McKinnon) stands up to give the gals a toast. Up to this point, the majority of Kate McKinnon’s screentime has been devoted to sight gags and making straight girls question their sexuality, both of which she excels at.

hoooo BOY let me tell you my Thoughts on this one, anon. Buckle your damn seatbelt.

Part 1: The Non-Sexualized Costumes

First of all, let me start by quoting from this post that I love from @cloama:

McCarthy, Wiig, Jones and McKinnon in this movie are not funny-hot, like Cameron Diaz dorky dancing in a pair of underoos in Charlie’s Angels.  They’re just funny and serving you soft-butch, wild-butch, nerd-chic and (albeit a little too stereotypical) cut-a-bitch realness

It was true before the movie came out and it somehow rings even truer now. How easy (and lazy) would it have been to make the jumpsuits sexy? Skintight catsuits with zippers down to show off maximum cleavage like a Sexy Ghostbuster ™ Halloween costume. Honestly it wouldn’t have surprised me, since even Black Widow and Wonder Woman apparently aren’t allowed to kick ass on screen without wedges are part of their costumes. 

But the jumpsuits were baggy and painfully practical and entirely unsexy, and so were the rest of their wardrobes. The way these women dressed was so real; it was work-appropriate and casual and most of it looked pretty damn comfortable. They wear cute rain boots. I love those rain boots. There were no ass-shots or gratuitous naked scenes or that godforsaken scene where Plain Female Character has to get dressed up Because of Plot Reasons and we discover she’s been Bangable All Along. 

This movie does not give two shits about the Male Gaze. It doesn’t care if you want to fuck these women.

Part 2: How did all this wlw fanservice even happen

Okay, so idk if ya’ll have noticed but I’ve been devoting a lot of time and blogging to the marvel of modern media that is Jillian Holtzmann, trying to figure out what the hell it is that makes her so appealing. And I think you just nailed the answer: the movie wasn’t trying to present her as sexy at all.

Despite the fact that sexuality and attraction is one of the most fluid, hard to quantify things in the entire world, there’s a very narrow idea of what makes a woman “sexy” in modern media.

…yep, there it is. Performing femininity is key, and that mean immaculate make up, push up bra, revealing clothing, long well-cared for hair. High heels factor into it a lot. And I’m not saying these women aren’t attractive or that they don’t look good, but…

As a woman who sometimes performs some degree of femininity myself, I understand what a pain in the ass it is. More often than not I look at a woman who’s meant to be a sex symbol and all I can think of is how painful those shoes must be, how long that makeup must have taken, is that bra hurting her back? The way most women are presented as sexual is laboriously unsexy, because it’s all so fake by nature.

(This is in no way a slam against real, non-fictional women who chose to present themselves in any of these ways. You look rad.)

You know that gif from Community where Donald Glover is talking about how he prefers women in pajamas over lingerie because he just wants to know that they’re comfortable? It’s like that.

ENTER HOLTZMANN.

Like I said, this movie doesn’t give two shits if you think Holtzmann is sexy. She’s not presented in any of the ways usually used to sexualize female characters. Her wardrobe choices are violently weird and mostly body-concealing (we never even got to see the crop top under those overalls), she makes a lot of weird faces and does weird voices, she’s not geeky in a cute feminine way but in way that likes blowing shit up and doing god-only-knows what with cadavers. 

(You’re an ENGINEER, Holtzmann. What the hell do you need a dead guy for?)

And yet. She’s completely and utterly confident in all of this. Kate McKinnon sells all of Holtzmann’s capital-w-Weird with so much confidence that you have, like, zero doubt this is Holtzmann exactly as Holtzmann wants to be. She’s loud and weird and really unapologetic about making sex eyes at her teammates and also at guns. She’s not sexy because she’s in underwear with perfect makeup; she’s sexy because she’s wildly magnetically strange and is having a blast doing it and you want in.

And, yeah, she’s sexy because she’s really REALLY obviously casually confidently gay and hits on her teammates with style and aplomb in charmingly odd ways. 

A taxidermy specimen of the critically endangered Iriomote cat (Prionailurus bengalensis iriomotensis) displayed at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, Japan.

This subspecies of the leopard cat only lives on the Japanese island of Iriomote, and there are thought to be fewer than 100 individuals remaining. In Japanese, it is referred to as Iriomote yamaneko (lit. “Iriomote mountain cat”), or in local dialect, yamapikaryaa (“that which shines on the mountain”).