When I went and saw Mad Max: Fury Road, I
saw it with a few people I had just met during
a game jam that same weekend.
Seeing trailers in the months leading up to
release I’d thought, “ugh, looks like
another cash-in, boring, whatever” and I
was only really interested in the film when
I started hearing good buzz along with learning
that people were Mad On The Internet About
Women in a Movie in regards to it.
So we took a break and went and saw it and
we were all absolutely blown away and so hyped
up and in love with it and it was a fun sorta-surprise
and bonding moment with new friends.
In retrospect the talk of Fury Road enraging
MRA types seems to have been exaggerated,
especially by progressives wanting to feel
good for liking a movie.
The film was a critical and commercial success
and the vast majority of people that I saw
discussing it were either talking about how
rad it is or had normal, legitimate criticisms
that come with any film or with any other
piece of media.
The hatred for Lady Ghostbusters, though,
was at no point exaggerated.
Any discussion of it anywhere was way more
overtly politicized than talk of Fury Road
and either way more negative or way more stiltedly
positive.
I love film and media.
I got a degree in them and I work in video
production as a career.
The thing I’m best-known for has “film
nerd” in the title.
Film is important to me personally and I also
feel that it’s important in a wider cultural
context.
Representation of certain groups within film,
both in front of and behind the camera, is
also important.
So in saying “stiltedly positive”, I am
not at all saying “female characters onscreen
don’t matter”.
They do matter.
On top of being a woman, I have short hair
and don’t really feel comfortable in makeup
or dresses.
I’m neurotic and I’m not a very emotional
person and I have a really morbid weird sense
of humor.
The amount of overlap between my life experiences
and the life experiences of the women I see
in media is close to zero.
It’s so, so alienating and frustrating to
look at my favorite medium and many of my
favorite films specifically and have to really
search to see anything like myself and it’s
a special joy and a genuine moment of human
connection when I find that.
I almost always find it through characters
who are dudes in films made by dudes (because
most films are made by dudes starring dudes)
but I’ll take it where I can get it.
Back when most of my wardrobe was graphic
tees and blue jeans I had two Ghostbusters
shirts that I wore so often that at least
one of them had holes in it.
My love for Ghostbusters kind of emerged when
I was a teenager from my obsessive love for
The Blues Brothers and the crush I had on
Dan Aykroyd.
Aykroyd came up with huge, dense tomes for
these characters and these stories, like he
wrote up pages and pages of backstory and
mythos for both movies, which is so weird
and so fascinating considering that by wider
cultural perception he was just a Saturday
Night Live guy making 80s comedies.
Blues Brothers is a profoundly strange movie,
"SELL ME YOUR CHILDREN!"
both in structure and in content, and it’s
worthwhile if only on that level, and Ghostbusters
is a fun, solid lightning-in-a-bottle comedy.
Elements of it are clunky or problematic and
if I re-watched it right now I might feel
a little differently about it, but it was
definitely important in my film nerd genesis.
But, y’know, the new one came out and suddenly
Man Ghostbusters is and always was bad.
Anyone who likes it or has any kind of emotional
attachment to it is a manchild.
The new one is good because it has women in
it.
Women like it and men don’t like it, so
it’s good, and if you’re a woman you should
like it.
Did you know that women never liked the original
Ghostbusters, only idiot manchildren did?
Yeah, that was news to me too!
Again, representation is important.
I want more women-led comedies to come out.
I want more women-led films to come out.
I was really hoping for another Fury Road
here because it felt SO GOOD to see a woman
with power and agency in a film.
I don’t love The Hunger Games or Frozen
(more than anything I’m apathetic towards
them) but I feel like they’re a step in
the right direction.
When I was ten I wanted to be Ash Ketchum.
If you were as into Pokemon as I was, there
was no girl equivalent to Ash Ketchum (Misty
was fine but I had no interest in being her).
Seeing little girls wanting to be Elsa or
Katniss is pretty great and it’s something
that wasn’t afforded to me not that long
ago.
So if people get something out of this movie
because it stars women and it has a positive
impact in that way then that’s wonderful.
That makes me happy.
But something I never saw touched on in the
feel-good tweets and thinkpieces is the fact
that Paul Feig has said that studio interference
prevented Kate McKinnon’s character in Ghostbusters
from being openly gay.
In 2016 you could get gay married but Sony
was still freaked out by the prospect of a
lesbian Ghostbuster.
Ah, yeah, we’re breaking ground here and
trampling all over convention and doing something
new and cool and progressive, but if you want
a lesbian actress to be able to play a lesbian
character in a big movie then you gotta slow
down.
I’m not going to let a single person try
and guilt me into liking or supporting a big
release film that isn’t allowed to have
a Dreaded Gay in it under the guise of feminism.
I really wish that any number of weirdo female
directors or just any number of genuinely
alternative stories from people in marginalized
groups got this amount of outpouring of love
and press.
I would love to see this level of passion
for whatever modern equivalent of A Question
of Silence or Jeanne Dielman or Meshes of
the Afternoon lies in wait that might never
get made because studios wanna keep rebooting
old ideas and cashing in on free press derived
from controversy.
Yes, the people hurling disgusting racist
abuse at Leslie Jones and completely losing
it over a Hollywood reboot ~’cause women~
were significantly worse than people who were
excited about it and pushing for it and sharing
photos of happy girls dressed as Ghostbusters
or Kate McKinnon dressed as Scully for Halloween
as a kid on social media.
I am legitimately happy for those girls and
for the apparent incremental change towards
more diverse representation in media.
The takeaway from this essay should NOT be
“both sides are just as bad” because they
are not and I am not here to play into misogynistic
vitriol or argue against representation.
I’m not saying Feig and whoever were setting
out to cynically manipulate audiences or politicize
their film, either.
Whether the studio planned for this kind of
reaction all along I really don’t know.
I also never saw it and probably never will.
I was exhausted from all of the controversy
when it came out.
Though that’s not the
fault of the movie itself but rather of how
toxic our culture is and how much stock we
put into a person liking or not liking a thing
as identity.
It’s definitely a part of a wider cultural
problem.
Did you know that if you’re a young woman
who didn’t support Hillary Clinton, you
probably just hate your mom?
Or it was because you wanted to have sex with
Bernie Bros?
Did you know there’s a special place in
hell just for you??
To people like this you don’t like or dislike
a candidate or film based on its own merits,
you like or dislike it based on how well you’re
performing your gender or political affiliation
as they see it- a more recent example is the
new Wonder Woman film, where even screenings
of the movie became huge, divisive news items,
while, AGAIN, legitimately weird and subversive
films made by women get no attention or funding.
While probably not the case for Fury Road
or Wonder Woman, I also don’t doubt that
there are people way further to the right
who felt pressure to say they hated Lady Ghostbusters
even if they liked it because it became a
feminist lightning rod and any discussion
of it was inherently tainted by divisive rhetoric.
It feels similar to how I’m not a big fan
of Feminist Frequency and didn’t think Gone
Home was a particularly good game, but the
amount of hate those two sincere, benign things
have gotten because of where they are politically
is legitimately frightening, and I feel like
discussing them in a negative light summons
the kind of people who give a woman death
threats because she made some dry academic
videos about women in video games.
I wrote a version of this essay last year
when I got riled up about Ghostbusters and
needed an outlet but ended up posting it to
Medium instead of recording an essay because
everything was too tense at the time and youtube
rage clicks aren’t worth what comes with
them for me.
I just get grossed out when political rhetoric
is used by consumers to shame people into
or out of liking a film, especially in a way
that reinforces gender binary MAN VS WOMAN
garbage, alienates people, and is profitable
for a studio who was hailed as being brave
and feminist but was too scared to let Paul
Feig put an explicitly gay lady in a PG-13
comedy.
Kate McKinnon realized that she was gay while
watching the X-Files growing up.
"I figured it out-" "Right." "-by watching The X-Files"
"Oh, that's right!"
"And noticing my physiological reaction to -- it",
"I thought at first that my physiological reaction was a product of David Duchovny's face
"but, no, it was Gillian--" [both] "Anderson!"
"Who still is the queen... of my heart"
That’s really powerful and that kind of
awakening and moment of self-realization and
affirmation thanks to media, especially weird
cult media, is common among marginalized people.
The power of representation and affirmation
in film is a beautiful thing and it shouldn’t
be lessened or cheapened.
So don’t ever let the kind of movie where
Paul Feig had to pull a Dumbledore ‘cause
Sony was so scared of gay people cheapen it
and don’t let that kind of movie be the
best that you’re willing to hope for.
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