I’ve read a lot of film books and they’ve taught me a few things about how film books should be written if they are to be taken seriously, and these are lessons that I feel are as useful in life:
1. Drop in random French phrases wherever possible so it looks like you’re quoting from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, because even if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, nobody will be able to tell;
2. When in doubt, start waffling on about Godard;
3. Never describe a film as your “favorite film.” This looks unprofessional and childish. Instead, claim—in ringing tones comme les écrivains de Cahiers du Cinéma—that it is the Greatest Film.
Zut alors! Malheureusement, not all the French in the world could convince anyone that I am more interested in Godard than The Goonies, so that’s a nonstarter. But I shall make use of one of these handy life lessons and state that the best, most brilliant, most extraordinary, the most deftly created piece of auteur film work of all time is Ghostbusters.
For pretty much most of my life, I’d assumed that this was a fact accepted by everybody: Ghostbusters is the greatest movie ever made. Sure, people tend to say random words like “Citizen Kane!” and “Vertigo!” when asked by Cahiers du Cinéma for their favorite film. But I thought they did this just as, when asked who they’d like to have at their dream dinner party, they say, “Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela!” as opposed to who everybody would actually like, which is, obviously, Madonna and Bill Murray.
Now, one could take my massive assumption that my tastes reflect those of everyone else on the planet two ways:
1. I have an ego the size of Asia coupled with a narcissist’s complex and incipient sociopathic tendencies;
2. Ghostbusters is so good that even if it’s not everyone’s FAVORITE movie, it is probably in their top ten and so whenever I mention my love of Ghostbusters people say, “Oh yeah, everyone loves Ghostbusters.”
For the purposes of this chapter, we will go with option 2.
I never thought of my Ghostbusters obsession—and it is, I fully admit, an obsession—as remarkable. If anything, I saw it as a perfectly natural response to a great work of art. Devoting an entire shelf to books and articles by or about the people involved, however tangentially, in the making of this movie? Commendable intellectual curiosity. Spending two hundred dollars on a book about Ghostbusters that came out the year the film was released, just because it finally explains why the character of Winston is squeezed out of the movie? Hey, that’s an investment piece! Refusing to go on a second date with someone because they failed to recognize a completely random (and not, to be honest, wildly relevant) Ghostbusters quote over dinner?I Well, why waste time with losers? It wasn’t until I found myself awake at 2 a.m. at the age of thirty-three on a Tuesday scrolling through eBay in search of a rumored copy of Bill Murray’s original Ghostbusters script, which obviously was not going to be on eBay, that I felt it might be time to look at what, precisely, was going on here and why, after all this time, Ghostbusters still feels so special, maybe even more special, to me.
There is sentimentality, for sure, not exactly for my childhood but for the city of my childhood. Ghostbusters is as much a love letter to New York as anything by Woody Allen, and a less self-conscious one at that, showing New Yorkers reacting with relative normality to an invasion of the undead.II Many of the jokes in Ghostbusters stem from the idea that, ghosts aside, Manhattan itself is an out-of-control Wild West place, a Gotham city where a man could collapse against the windows of the Tavern on the Green, the ritzy restaurant that used to be in Central Park, and the diners would simply ignore him. Trash is piled on the sidewalks and Checker cabs whizz around corners: this re-creation of New York, 1984—the New York of my childhood—is still how I think of the city, even though it has, for better or worse, changed a lot since then.
Even the hilarious anachronisms give me a sentimental frisson: Louis being mocked for his love of vitamins and mineral water; Ray and Peter snarfing down cigarettes while toting nuclear reactors on their backs; Larry King in a cloud of cigarette smoke while chatting drily on the radio; the bad guy being the man from the Environmental Protection Agency. These all look particularly out of date in the Manhattan of today, and I can’t help but feel the city is a little poorer for it. But my absolute favorite New Yorky moment in the film is at the end, when a doorman brings Ecto1 round after the Ghostbusters have saved the world—or at least Central Park West—from destruction. Despite having battled a giant marshmallow man, Dan Aykroyd still has a couple of dollar bills in the pocket of his ghost uniform with which to tip the doorman. You cannot get more New York than that.
But there is something else in Ghostbusters that makes me sentimental, something else that I love in it that doesn’t exist anymore. That is, its depiction of how a man should be.
• • •
Just in terms of sheer variety, one could do a lot worse than turn to eighties movies for lessons in how to be a man. When most people think of masculinity in eighties movies, they probably think of that strange genre that sprouted and bulged up in that decade like Popeye’s biceps after eating spinach, consisting of men who look like condoms stuffed with walnutsIII speaking their lines in confused accents and emphasizing random syllables, strongly suggesting they’d learned the words phonetically: Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Stallone,IV and, toward the end of the decade, Van Damme. Chuck Norris, too, can be included here, despite his lack of walnutness, but he earns membership in this group with his similar lack of obvious acting talent and strong fondness for right-wing messages in his films.V
But there is more to eighties men than that. For a start, there are the men who raise babies and children (Mr. Mom, Three Men and a Baby, Uncle Buck), which some feminist critics argued at the time was a backlash against feminism because the films seemed to mock the idea of feminized men.
In fact, in retrospect, these films look more like movies awkwardly coming to grips with feminism (Tootsie, too, can be included here, with a man pretending to be a woman, and occasionally looking after a child, and becoming a better person for it). Mr. Mom (1983), in which Michael Keaton loses his job and looks after the kids while his wife works, is clearly none too sure what to make of this “feminist” thing: the movie’s message is that the swapping of traditional gender roles will probably destroy the marriage and almost certainly the house (somewhat dismayingly, the film was written by John Hughes).
But by 1987, Three Men and a Baby was getting much more of a handle on things. The men (Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson) are unexpectedly lumbered with a baby girl and, by the end of the film, very much want her to stay with them in their bachelor shag pad, even after the baby’s dippy English (foreigners—tchuh!) mother turns back up. It turns out that, unlike Mr. Mom, they are capable of looking after a baby without causing havoc to domestic appliances (men—amirite??). The men in Three Men and a Baby are notably much less obnoxious than les mecs in the original French version, Trois Hommes et un Couffin, who have a pact never to let a woman stay more than one night in their flat and have a tendency to call the baby “a swine” when it has an accident on the sofa. Ahh, les Français—ils sont tres masculins, ooh la la!VI
Which is not to say that the American version is without its anxieties. Three Men and a Baby goes to such lengths in order to reassure audiences of the übermasculinity of the three guys, despite their TERRIFYINGLY FEMINIZED baby-raising skills, that they become hilariously camp. Peak camp is reached, for me, when Selleck goes out jogging wearing little more than a tiny pair of shorts and an enormous mustache, and he picks up a sports magazine full of photos of muscled-up half-naked men. Now, if that isn’t the definition of throbbing heterosexual masculinity, I don’t know what is.
Yes, the eighties were a different time and American movies in that era seemed to think that homosexual was merely Latin for “psycho killer or flouncy interior decorator.” But nonetheless, whenever I watch this movie (which is more often than I’m going to commit to print) I think it’s a shame the director (who was the late Leonard Nimoy, very pleasingly) didn’t just go with the obvious option here and make the guys gay, living in a happy yuppie ménage à trois. After all, this would explain why three apparently very solvent guys in high-flying careersVII in their thirties would choose to share an apartment in midtown Manhattan as opposed to getting their own American Psycho–style bachelor pads. And for heaven’s sake, have you looked at that Broadway-themed mural Steve Guttenberg paints of the three of them in the atrium of their apartment? No amount of references from Selleck to his love of sport can obscure the fact he and his two friends are living in the campiest New York apartment north of Fourteenth Street. These guys—the actor! the architect! the cartoonist!—are basically the eighties yuppie version of the Village People.
And let’s talk about that homoeroticism! Accidental homoeroticism is yet another one of the great joys of eighties movies, and it was the last decade that would be blessed with the pleasure because from the nineties onward, gay culture and references would be too mainstream and recognizable to slip past studios unnoticed.
The plethora of eighties buddy movies easily and frequently tip into accidental homoeroticism, with the female characters being explicitly excluded from pretty much the whole film and all sorts of intense emotion between the two male leads. Lethal Weapon is one example and an even more obvious one is Stakeout, in which Emilio Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss spend an entire movie living together in faux domesticity and, in the case of Estevez, voyeuristically spying on his male partner’s sexual encounters.
The Lost Boys is the most blatantly homoerotic mainstream movie ever made for teenage boys. In this film, young Michael (charisma vortex Jason Patric) is initiated into the manly life of a new town by going into a cave with Kiefer Sutherland and his male buddies (none of whom seems the least bit interested in the fact that a half-naked Jami Gertz is wandering around drunkenly in front of them) and drinking their body fluids. Sure, why not, right? Vampires are inherently homoerotic and the director Joel Schumacher (who later homoeroticized Batman—not difficult, admittedly—by sticking nipples on the batsuit) revels in the connection in this movie in a way Twilight later determinedly, somewhat dismayingly avoids. Michael does at some point have what looks like deeply unsatisfying sex with Jami Gertz, but the person he gazes at with the most intensity is young Jack Bauer. And I haven’t even mentioned that Michael’s little brother Sam (Corey Haim), who dresses like he’s trying out for Wham!, has a poster on the door of his closet of Rob Lowe lifting up his shirt. Because sure, why not, right?
The Lost Boys is not the only eighties movie to suggest that the way a man becomes a man is by rejecting the world of women and gazing lustfully at other men. Now, there are lots of things I’ve never understood about Top Gun—namely, who on earth Maverick is fighting at the end of the movie. But I do pride myself on recognizing homoeroticism when it’s waggled right in my face. Top Gun is officially the most homoerotic thing that has ever existed, and I say that as someone who spent eight years covering men’s fashion shows in Milan.
Most of überproducers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson’s films—including Flashdance, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, and, in the nineties, Days of Thunder and Bad Boys—are, at the very least, camp because they are, as the late producer Julia Phillips put it, “a series of soundtracks in search of a movie.” More simply, they are extended music videos—in fact, some of the scenes are nothing but music videos, with montages set to a power ballad—and, to my mind, that is not a criticism. I love eighties music videos, I adore montages, and anyone who doesn’t thrill to a power ballad is lying to themselves. These movies are fun (well, except for Days of Thunder) because they are about pure sensation. But they also easily become camp because camp is about exaggeration and surface aesthetics, which is a perfect description of Simpson and Bruckheimer’s films.
Simpson himself was known for the kind of exaggerated macho posturing similar to that of his films: the drinking, the hedonism, the voracious use of call girls. And so, as is always the way with self-consciously macho men, there was something extraordinarily camp about him. This is especially true of macho men in the eighties, when straight men dressed like George Michael, blow-dried their hair, and took an open interest in bodybuilding. Simpson himself was the Liberace of eighties heterosexual Hollywood: he was obsessed with plastic surgery and body image, he spent ridiculous amounts on clothes and cars, and he cultivated a self-image that included fabricating stories about his own childhood. His films almost invariably feature an especially close and yet emphatically platonic male friendship—in Top Gun, most famously, there’s the tortured triangle of Maverick’s (Tom Cruise, obviously) intensely loving relationship with Goose (Anthony Edwards) and his lustful one with Iceman (Val Kilmer). Even Maverick’s alleged girlfriend, Charlie (Kelly McGillis), has a male name.VIII All of this, unsurprisingly, reflected Simpson’s life off-screen. His relationship with Bruckheimer was extremely close and while neither man was or is gay, there was something bizarrely camp about them as a duo. During the making of Top Gun, they bought matching black Ferraris and matching black Mustang convertibles, they designed their houses to match, and, as if to ensure they definitely looked like evil camp villains, they hired identical twin secretaries. They reveled in supermacho displays, ones that frequently seemed to disguise their own insecurities or outright lacks: every Friday night during the making of Top Gun, the cast and crew would throw a huge pool party to which Simpson would bring dozens of young women he picked up on the beach. One particular Friday, the cast and pilots working on Top Gun decided to throw Bruckheimer and Simpson into the pool. Bruckheimer relented—but only after he prissily took off his expensive cowboy boots. Simpson clung desperately to metal railings but he could not fight off the pilots and they threw him into the pool. Simpson promptly “sank to the bottom, having been too embarrassed to tell anyone he could not swim.”
Bruckheimer loyally remained colleagues with the increasingly out-of-control Simpson, until even he could no longer tolerate his friend’s excesses. And then, like that other image of camp American heterosexuality, Elvis Presley, Simpson eventually died, bloated and battered and far too young, on his own toilet.
In fact, if anyone wanted to learn how to be the ultimate eighties movie man, the obvious place to start would be, not Ghostbusters, but Top Gun. Besides homoeroticism, this movie features the two other major takes on masculinity in movies from that decade: a fist-pumping love for the American military, and the celebration of the maverick.
The eighties was the decade when American politicians, led primarily by President Reagan, began to rewrite the story of the Vietnam War, pitching it not as a tragic and wasteful period in America’s history, but rather as “a noble cause,” to use Reagan’s favored phrase. Reagan followed up this revisionism by launching a series of military ventures in Central America and Libya, acting as palate cleansers to wash away the old taste of Vietnam loss and replace it with, instead, newfound American militarism.
Hollywood happily reflected this switch, with movies such as Red Dawn and Top Gun. Even films like Rambo: First Blood Part II and Predator, which are ostensibly about the failure of the American military top brass in Vietnam, celebrate the strength of individual soldiers over dubious natives. These films looked like pure propaganda, which is precisely what they were: many were made with assistance from the military in exchange for script approval, as the Pentagon saw these movies as an excellent means of recruitment. Which, again, they were: according to David Sirota, recruitment went up 400 percent when Top Gun was released, thanks in part, as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, to the navy’s clever wheeze of “setting up manned tables outside movie houses during Top Gun premieres to answer questions from would-be flyboys emerging with a newfound need for speed from an F14 warplane.” Of course, most of these young people didn’t realize that they were watching what were little more than ads for the military, nor did their parents, whose taxes were partially subsidizing the tanks and guns featured in these movies to tempt their children to enlist.
Hollywood had collaborated with the military plenty of times before the 1980s, going all the way back to 1927 with the film Wings, the very first winner of a Best Picture Oscar, which the military helped to produce. But given Top Gun’s enormous success, the number of collaborations between Hollywood studios and the military increased exponentially in the eighties, with studio bosses convinced that churning out pro-war propaganda in exchange for access to military equipment was a guaranteed winner of a formula, and the military was now fully persuaded that recruitment through movies was the way forward. And so, alongside anguished films about Vietnam such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Good Morning, Vietnam came what Movieline describes as “hyper-macho, bazooka-toting fantasy fare,” like Top Gun.
This is one movie lesson from the eighties that is still very much alive today. Michael Bay’s deadening Transformers franchise, the laughable 2012 flop Battleship, which starred Rihanna as a weapons specialist, and the 2012 film Act of Valor (which Movieline describes as a “Navy SEAL porn flick”) were all underwritten by the Pentagon, and all dutifully present a defiantly macho, determinedly pro-military message. Nor is it just bad films that get made this way: 2013’s Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks as a captain taken hostage by Somali pirates, was also made with the military’s cooperation and it, too, presents an utterly sterling view of the Americans in uniform. “When you know that you’re going to need the military’s assistance, and you know they are going to be looking at your script, you write it to make them happy right from the beginning,” writes David Robb.
But of course, Top Gun isn’t just about falling in line with the military. Hell no! It’s about (somewhat contradictorily) rebelling against it, too! Because that’s what real men are like, you see. A real man isn’t a pencil pusher—he’s the lone wolf, the renegade, the MAVERICK. Women have sex with the mavericks, but men ARE the mavericks, and they ride their motorcycles against a sunset into the danger zone. High-five, low-five! Yeah! And just in case that isn’t entirely clear in the script, Cruise’s character’s name is, of course, Maverick (real men also don’t bother with fey subtlety).
The idea of the male rebel outsider was hardly coined in the eighties, but the idea of the rebel outsider fighting against the inept or even evil American government was one that not only gained enormous traction in the eighties, but was encouraged by, of all things, the American government—or, to be more precise, President Ronald Reagan. “I’ve always felt that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’ ” Reagan said in 1986. Reagan had cannily picked up on this national mood that had been burgeoning in the seventies in the wake of the disaster of the Vietnam War and the humiliation of the Watergate scandal. Antigovernment moral mavericks started to emerge in films of that time, including Han Solo (another character who, like Maverick, was blessed with nominative determinism), the sexy outsider who made money working against the Empire, and, of course, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Tellingly, Reagan—a B-list actor through and through—was especially fond of using references from the films of both those characters, referring to the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire,” much to George Lucas’s horror, and notoriously telling tax increasers in 1986 to “go ahead—make my day,” echoing Harry Callahan’s statement in Sudden Impact. Movie nerds like myself around the world sympathize with this tactic of Reagan’s: if you can’t get cast in the movie, quote the movie.
Thus, the mentality of the eighties in America began to take shape: government collectivism is bad, the male renegade outsider is good, even if both are ultimately working toward the same goal, that is, to protect America. It was this idea that was instantly reflected in TV shows (The A-Team, Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard, Moonlighting) and movies. Wild buccaneer-for-profit Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) in Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile is a straight rip-off of Han Solo. So is Indiana Jones, for that matter, the renegade archaeologist, trying to save cultural and religious artifacts from collectors and Nazis. As if Spielberg wanted to make this point extra clear, he then cast the same actor who played Han to play Indy. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Beverly Hills Cop also play on this idea of the rule-breaking maverick, with, respectively, crazy ol’ Riggs (Mel Gibson), sweaty ol’ John McClane (Bruce Willis), and wisecrackin’ Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) determinedly giving ulcers to their fat superiors with their maverick—and ultimately CORRECT—ways.
E.T. is probably the most obvious and—for those who saw it as kids—most formative example of a movie that pitches the U.S. government as actually nefarious. In the film, faceless government agents tear through Elliott’s home like zombies rampaging through the family’s sleepy suburbia, in a classic horror movie trope. The government then doesn’t just kidnap sweet and innocent E.T. (and, ostensibly, Elliott)—it nearly kills them both, and they are saved only by Elliott’s pure childlike nature, not the clumsy, oafish ways of the evil government. Splash and Project X completely ripped off . . . I mean paid heavy homage to E.T. with their distinctly similar plots featuring, respectively, in place of an alien, a mermaid and monkeys that had to be kept safe from meddling government agents.
But it’s in Top Gun where this trope that the rule-breaking maverick is awesome is at its most ridiculous because it is so heavily and paradoxically tied to the theory that the American military is awesome. And this means the movie’s ending is utterly insane.
The filmmakers were so averse to making Maverick’s maverickness seem in any way misguided that they refused to give the movie the story arc it so obviously needed: for him to be the reason his partner Goose dies. But despite Maverick’s guilt after the crash, Goose’s death has nothing to do with him—it was due to faulty equipment. Maverick’s brash arrogance and reckless selfishness turn out to have been the correct instincts all along, so there is really no message. Music videos feature more interesting emotional journeys than Top Gun. The only lesson Maverick (and audiences) learn from this incident is that Maverick should not have let the death of his best friend cause him to lose his confidence, because that is when he is at his least manly, repulsive both to his girlfriend (Charlie) and his boyfriend (Ice). It is only when he gets his confidence back that he becomes a triumphant “flyboy” again and Ice invites him to ride his tail, again.
This, the movie suggests, is how the military will survive, just as the police are dependent on rule-breakers like Riggs in Lethal Weapon, McClane in Die Hard, and Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop. These movies aren’t arguing for the dismantling of institutions, just for the triumph of the unleashed individual within, and that’s because these movies were made in the eighties: the era of selfish individualism, yes, not full-on revolution.IX
Being a man the Top Gun way is still very much a popular message in today’s American movies and, for that matter, politics. The Tea Party is explicitly based on the premise that federal collectivism is deeply suspect and individualism is the way of the future. If the U.S. government nearly killed E.T., no wonder millions of Americans don’t trust it to look after the national health-care system. Has President Obama forgotten how E.T. turned a crusty shade of white when the government got its hands on him? White, for gawd’s sake! It’s not natural for an alien!
To be a true man in these films is ultimately about breaking the rules in order to restore the conventional hierarchy: the bad guys in jail, the police chiefs in charge, the flying instructors still instructing flying. Maverick behavior in pursuit of civic responsibility, in other words. Another movie demonstrated this better than any, and it did so without recourse to homoeroticism, the military, or howling lone wolves. Its version of masculinity might have something to do with looking after kids, but that wasn’t its main point. And yet, unlike the Top Gun way, it’s one that’s hardly endorsed at all by today’s movies, or, indeed, any American pop culture at all, even though it is far, far preferable. And that is, the Ghostbusters way.
• • •
Ever since I saw this movie at the age of six, sharing my fold-down seat in the cinema with my mother’s big purse for added weight so the seat wouldn’t snap back up and swallow me up like the killer plant in Little Shop of Horrors, the Ghostbusters have represented to me an ideal of masculinity. This is not just because I fancy all of them, which I definitely do—the Ghostbusters are all total hotties, although this fact is rarely noted, for some mystifying reason. Young Aykroyd, for a start, is very much in my top five, maybe even my top three, and the only thing hotter than him greeting the crowds at the end of Ghostbusters with a cigarette in his mouth on Central Park West is him looking all sweet and poor and forlorn in Trading Places (mmm, sweet poor forlorn Aykroyd . . .). ANYWAY, I digress.
It might seem odd, this idea that a bunch of dudes running around Manhattan wearing cartoon insignia on their uniforms and car represent masculine goodness, and some people would disagree with me.X In fact, some dark souls have accused Ghostbusters of sexism, and to be fair to these people and their souls it’s not wildly difficult to see why: the ghosts are all female (minus Slimer, of course) and are trying either to kill the Ghostbusters (Zuul, Gozer) or give them oral sex;XI Venkman sexually harasses or patronizes any woman in his path. Read this way, the film sounds like a terrible precursor to a terrible Adam Sandler film—and it could have been, had it starred and been written by anyone else. (Just imagine if it were a Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor film. Or, you know, don’t.) While defending the movie from such accusations, writer and Ghostbusters mega-fan Adam Bertocci writes that the confusions come from the fact that the film is actually about “ancient power struggles in which the boundary was between two worlds, masculine and feminine, and all that they represented: Apollo versus Dionysus, yang versus yin, sun versus moon, fire versus water, ego versus id, reason versus emotion, science versus magic.” This is sweet, but it does also emphasize the alleged gender distinctions in the film. Journalist Noah Berlatsky puts it a little less forgivingly, describing Ghostbusters as “totally sexist” because it “denigrated and (literally) demonized women” and “bodily fluids are viewed as ectoplasmic ick.”
Now, leaving aside the fact that it isn’t, last time I checked, only women who produce bodily fluids, I can (just about) see Berlatsky’s point—but he’s wrong. Damn wrong! To accuse Ghostbusters of sexism is to apply a very basic algorithm to determine its sexual politics. This means, then, that the subtle and very sweet ways Ghostbusters subverts the sexist tropes of male-led comedies, made both in the eighties and still very much made now, are overlooked. There is a reason, in my personal and objective experience, why women love this film as much as men, and it isn’t that they’ve been possessed by Zuul and turned into dogs.
First, there’s the depiction of male friendship. The three primary Ghostbusters—Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis)—are all friends. Good friends. They like each other, they’re amused by each other, and they stick together when they’re fired at the beginning of the film from their university jobs. There’s nothing eroticized about their friendship, no overcompensation of machoness, no competitive banter. No cruelty, in other words (although Peter is a little cavalier about making Ray mortgage his parents’ house to fund the business). Nor is there any suggestion that male friendship is so special it must be protected from all outsiders who threaten it—namely, women.
In Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, Ray and Egon are nice to Dana: they welcome her into their group and they try to protect her from Peter’s excesses. Compare this to the treatment meted out to the female love interests in modern-day equivalent movies such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Anchorman, and Knocked Up, or less broad bromance films such as Sideways, in which the male friends are all, without fail, horrible to the women (read: INVADERS). While Venkman might tease some of the women in his orbit (mocking Janine for her “bug eyes,” lusting after Dana), he always immediately apologizes, and neither the film nor his buddies praise him for his foolishness. This strikes me as a lot more significant than the gender of ghosts.
The Ghostbusters also never fall out with one another. This, too, is appealing and makes them rarities in the world of male friendship in movies. In today’s more recent male-led comedies, such as I Love You, Man and Anchorman, the male friends always fall out at some point, followed by an emotional reunion. That’s because, in those films, the friendship between the male leads has become so celebrated that it is a (barely) platonic romance and therefore the trajectory of the friendship is like that of a clichéd film love story: boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy back. The Ghostbusters never fall out with one another, because they are friends—just friends—and they are grown-ups. I’ll return to this point later.
Just as the overly close friendships in Top Gun were a reflection of the one between the filmmakers off-camera, so the relationships in Ghostbusters were an expression of those behind the movie. The original idea for the film was born out of one particular friendship: the one between Aykroyd and his best friend and former Saturday Night Live castmate, John Belushi. By the time Aykroyd sat down to write what would be the first draft of the movie, the bearishly sweet but wildly self-destructive Belushi had been flailing around in film flops and drug addiction since the pair’s last film, 1980’s The Blues Brothers, and Aykroyd pictured his ghost film as the dual project his best friend needed: “Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis—everyone did a ghost picture,” Aykroyd said. And yet, despite those comic precedents, Aykroyd did not envisage the film as a comedy.
Instead, he saw it as a semiserious look at the paranormal and parapsychology, an idea that makes a tiny bit more sense when one takes into account that Aykroyd is a spiritualist and grew up reading journals from the American Society of Psychical Research. In fact, some of his ancestors were mystics and his father wrote what Vanity Fair describes with an apparently straight face as “a well-regarded history of ghosts.”XII For Aykroyd, this was a deeply personal project on several levels: on the one hand, he was exploring what he calls “the family business”; on the other, he was trying to rescue his best friend. But on a warm and bright March afternoon in 1982, just as Aykroyd was at home in New York writing a line for his friend, the phone rang. It was Belushi’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, calling from Los Angeles: Belushi had died in the Chateau Marmont hotel after overdosing on cocaine and heroin. He was thirty-three years old.
Aykroyd was devastated. Photos from Belushi’s funeral on Martha’s Vineyard show a shocked-looking Aykroyd leading the procession on a motorcycle—and a young Bill Murray, who revered Belushi, grimacing while placing a flower on the dead comedian’s coffin. Aykroyd soon after decided that his Saturday Night Live castmate Murray should play the part he had written for Belushi, and it was the part that ultimately truly made Murray’s name, just as Aykroyd once hoped it would make Belushi’s. But he would still keep his late friend in the film in his own way: Slimer is a direct homage to Belushi, who, like the green blob, would steal food off room service trays in hotel hallways and generally cause chaos. More obliquely, the movie would be made by Black Rhino Productions, which is Aykroyd’s production company—named in honor of a dream he had after Belushi died, in which his friend’s face was on a charging rhino.
It’s easy to overstate the influence of Belushi on eighties American comedy, just out of sentimentality and sadness for his premature death. But it’s equally easy to underplay it because he died so young and so long ago. The impact of it heavily affected the movie that would soon become the most successful comedy of all time, giving it a sweetness that other comedies from that same era, starring the same actors and made by the same director, do not have. “Belushi’s death was the soul of the film for Danny, and it played into my own sensibilities of friendship and humanity,” says the film’s director, Ivan Reitman. “I went in knowing that what was important was that the audience had to care about these guys, they had to want to be friends with them and to care about their friendship.”
Aykroyd’s original script, which he showed to Reitman, was set in the future, on various planets and over several dimensions. “My first draft,” Aykroyd later said, “was written in a way that your basic acceleration physicist might have enjoyed more than the mass audience.”
“Danny’s first draft,” Reitman recalls, “was basically unfilmable.” But Reitman loved the script’s basic premise: a bunch of guys acting like firefighters but catching ghosts. So he took Aykroyd out to lunch and suggested some changes, such as setting it in present-day New York (“It became my New York movie,” Reitman says with a smile). The always amenable Aykroyd agreed to all the changes. Murray had already told Aykroyd that he liked the script and made characteristically vague noises about maybe committing to it. Reitman then suggested hiring Harold Ramis, with whom he’d made the 1981 army comedy Stripes, which also starred Murray. After getting Columbia to commit to a $25 million budget—which was seen then as an obscene amount of money to invest in a comedy—Ramis, Aykroyd, and Reitman decamped to Martha’s Vineyard to rewrite Aykroyd’s script. All these men were already old friends and would soon become even better ones. “Those weeks on Martha’s Vineyard,” Reitman recalls, “were two of the most fun weeks of my life.”
First, they created the different character traits for the three Ghostbusters who before had, in Aykroyd’s original script, been pretty much interchangeable: “Put [the characters of Peter Venkman, Raymond Stantz, and Egon Spengler] together, and you have the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man,” Aykroyd said.
“For actors, especially in group comedy, those kinds of archetypes always seem to work,” said Ramis.
They also used character traits from each other, with Venkman taking on Murray’s already well-honed sarcastic outsider tone and Stantz becoming the paranormal nerd, just as Aykroyd was and is. It is impossible not to take delight in watching an actor play a role that he was seemingly born to play, whether it’s Clark Gable as Rhett Butler or Humphrey Bogart as Rick. With Ghostbusters, you get that three times over: Murray as the wiseass, Ramis as the egghead, and Aykroyd as the lunkish geek. From then on, any time any of them branched out of these types—Murray as the depressed father in Rushmore, Aykroyd as the southern good ol’ boy in Driving Miss Daisy, Ramis as the stoner dad in Knocked Up—it felt to me both daring and unsettling, as though I’d caught my father cross-dressing.
Next, they jettisoned all the interplanetary time travel from Aykroyd’s script, wisely cutting out all the spiritual woo-woo stuff but keeping in all the geeky science: the proton packs, the containment units, the streams that must never be crossed. Geeky science was already becoming one of the defining characteristics of eighties movies, particularly in male-led comedies, and would feature in films from Weird Science to Short Circuit (aka E.T. as a robot) to Batteries Not Included to Bill and Ted’s time-traveling phone booth in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to the greatest eighties film science experiment of them all, the DeLorean with the flux capacitor. This is my kind of sci-fi, and my kind of masculinity: gleefully, nonsensically, sweetly nerdy.
Notably, this kind of sci-fi and accompanying special effects—the nerdy nonsense kind—has endured a lot better than the more grandiose visions of, say, Star Wars, with all those tediously phallic light-sabers. At times the film makes fun of its tackiness, such as Egon using a colander to read Louis’s (Rick Moranis) mind. But with the exception of the demon dog that crashes Louis’s party, which was done using stop-motion puppets, the special effects in Ghostbusters still look just as good today as they did in the eighties, just as they do in Back to the Future, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and the grievously underrated Young Sherlock Holmes. And this is at least partly why these movies have lasted so well and why they still attract audiences who weren’t even born when DeLoreans were being manufactured.
Murray, meanwhile, was in India filming another movie. The day he arrived back in New York, Reitman and Ramis met him at LaGuardia Airport and took him out to a restaurant in Queens to show him the script. But Murray trusted his friends so much he barely looked at it, said “about two words about the script,” Ramis later recalled, and flew back out again. “It was trust. Ghostbusters was the first film he committed to without fighting like crazy,” Ramis said.
But of course, Ghostbusters does not only star the Ghostbusters themselves. Other actors and actresses had to work within this already existing strong friendship. When Aykroyd wrote the script, he envisaged a role for John Candy, and Reitman approached him to play Louis. When Candy suggested playing the role with a heavy accent and two dogs, Reitman decided he was going too broad, even for Ghostbusters. So instead, he cast the Canadian comedian Rick Moranis, then little known to American audiences.
“My career was completely luck,” says Moranis. “Different things would come up and I would pick what I felt was the most fun and who would be the most interesting to work with. I wasn’t being offered a lot of the Schwarzenegger parts: you have a round Jewish face and you don’t wear contacts and you’re five foot five, you’re going to get certain parts. People always thought of me as the nerdy guy, even in non-nerdy parts.”
Because the part of Louis had been written for Candy, Moranis set about shaping it more to his image: he suggested that Louis be an accountant and be more nerdy and less lecherous over women, as they’d written originally. “Ivan let me work with my character, which was wonderful. They were all extremely friendly and supportive guys and really encouraged my input, even though they’d all known each other for years and I was really the outsider,” says Moranis.
Sigourney Weaver also ended up shaping her role to the benefit of the film. She came in to audition for the part of Dana, “which I know sounds ridiculous—we made Sigourney audition, when she’d already done Alien and The Year of Living Dangerously,” says Reitman with a laugh. “But she’d never done comedy. Little did I know that comedy was her true love.”
Weaver proved her comedic skills by opening her audition with the suggestion that Dana become a dog in the movie, and she promptly climbed up on Reitman’s coffee table, got down on all fours, and howled.
“And I was just fascinated—it was so goofy!” says Reitman, sounding very much like he’s still recovering from the encounter more than thirty years later. “And I thought, you know, that’s a good idea, we should look at it.”
Weaver also suggested that Dana be a musician instead of a model, as was originally written in the script, and she made similar suggestions throughout the shoot in order to make her character more than a cipher. In the scene when Venkman first goes to Dana’s flat to check out her haunted refrigerator, Dana was written as very passive in the script: she doesn’t get it when Venkman is making salacious come-ons to her, and she seems scared of him, threatening to scream at one point. In the film, Weaver rolls her eyes at Venkman and clearly just finds him ridiculous and, in doing so, makes the scene a lot less creepy than it could have been—after all, Venkman is basically sexually harassing Dana in her own apartment. But because Dana stands up to him, and Murray himself looks and acts like such a tongue-tied nebbish next to Weaver’s patrician, cool glamour, the power tips more in her favor. The scene becomes sweet instead of stupid, therefore proving the rarely acknowledged fact that when female characters are allowed to be stronger than a wet rag, it does everyone in the movie a favor.
“Sigourney insisted, without being obnoxious in any way, on making her character real,” said Ramis. “Often in comedies, you see characters doing all these outlandish things while the people around them are acting like stooges, as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening. And so when Sigourney was able to stand there like a real person and say to Bill [in that scene], ‘You are so odd,’ it was totally genuine—and she came up with that line herself. I loved it, because it let the audience off the hook and allowed them to say, ‘Yeah, he IS odd.’ ”
Ramis also admitted, “We [Ramis and Aykroyd] had never written women very well,” which is a disappointing cop-out from him. Ghostbusters does, sadly, fail the Bechdel Test and is a classic example of Katha Pollitt’s Smurfette Principle. But at least they had the sense and ego strength to take Weaver’s suggestions and allow the main female character more agency than they’d written, which is a helluva lot more than the filmmakers behind today’s male-led comedies do.XIII Dana is more interesting than a generic love interest, largely due to Weaver, and the fact that Reitman cast the lead actress from Alien strongly proves he wanted an actress whom the audience would recognize as powerful. The film even tweaks and literalizes what is now an infamous trope in comic books and comic book movies, women in refrigerators, referring to the tendency for female characters to be killed or injured as a plot device. (The name derives from a storyline in The Green Lantern comic books in which a female character is killed and stuffed into a fridge, for no reason.) In Ghostbusters, Dana becomes imbued with the powers of her actual refrigerator, and lives to tell the tale (and snog Murray on Fifth Avenue).
Another factor here is Murray, who has been, from the beginning of his career in Meatballs (1979), the master of taking awful characters and tweaking them just enough so that their creepiness is undercut and they become palatable. Even in the opening scene of Ghostbusters, when we meet him at the university and he is trying to seduce the pretty female student, with his mugging and hesitancies he comes across as more laughable than a predatory creep. The fact that he is literally electrocuting a male student in order to get his quarry emphasizes that the film wants us to see this guy as, not cool, but a jerk. Later, Venkman refuses to sleep with Dana when she’s possessed and begging him to do so, proving there are, in fact, moral depths to this formerly lecherous university professor, and this is reiterated by his look of heartbreak when he thinks Dana is dead. Ghostbusters is a male-led comedy, for sure. But by no means does it respect only men.
In fact, the cast member who found it hardest to penetrate Aykroyd-Ramis-Reitman-Murray’s wall of white male friendship was not a white woman, but a black man: Ernie Hudson, who plays Winston Zeddemore, the fourth Ghostbuster, and this led to the biggest flaw in Ghostbusters, and in its depiction of masculinity. Back in the eighties, Hudson was a jobbing actor and a single dad, working hard to support his two sons. “As soon as I read the script I thought, Wow, this is really cool, this could change everything for us,” he remembers.
In the version Hudson read, Winston becomes part of the Ghostbuster team from almost the beginning of the film, but in the version that they ended up shooting he doesn’t appear until nearly the end, meaning most of his lines had been cut out. For years Ghostbusters fans speculated that Winston’s part was cut because Eddie Murphy turned down the role to make Beverly Hills Cop and they didn’t want to give so many lines to a relative unknown like Hudson. Others suggested that racism played a part, with white Hollywood once again stiffing the black guy. Reitman has denied the Murphy rumor (“Murphy was never a consideration”), but Aykroyd has said that he originally wrote the film with Murphy in mind as a Ghostbuster. Reitman also hastily dismisses accusations that Hudson’s crunched-down role feels uncomfortably like the Token Black Guy: “It was always written for these three guys, we grew up together, so this was the comedy troupe, so to speak. I cast Ernie because he was really different in his energy from the other guys.”
Hudson was devastated by the script change but tried to stay pragmatic about it: “I think the studio thought they could sell the guys as they were from Saturday Night Live, and they wanted to include Winston marginally. I don’t know. I blame the studio because in my mind it’s easier for me to say ‘some exec’ rather than the guy sitting next to me. I don’t think it came from the guys [Aykroyd, Ramis, and Reitman], the guys are great, but what do I know?” He tried, he says, “not to go to the racial side of it,” because he didn’t want to send a defeatist message to his sons.
The studio was almost certainly less excited about the bankability of Hudson compared to Aykroyd and Murray. But the truth is, it was Ramis and Aykroyd who cut down Winston’s part, for the precise reasons that Hudson feared—race and star power, but not quite as he imagined. According to Ramis:
As writers, we’d never done a black character. The Writer’s Guild sends out letters about this regularly—“Let’s see more women and minorities.” So when we wrote Winston, I think we had our own little reverse backlash going. We bent over backwards to make Winston’s character good—and in doing so, we made him so good that he was the best character in the movie. We looked at it and said, “Jesus! He’s got all the good lines.” At the same time, everybody was saying Bill’s character was a little weak. So, little by little, we started shifting Winston’s attitude to Bill’s character—which made perfect sense—and we also ended up delaying Winston’s introduction until much later in the film.
This explains why there are two skeptical outsiders among the Ghostbusters—Venkman and Winston—which always felt like overkill to me. It’s only because Murray plays the part “so odd,” as Dana says, that he doesn’t feel like an everyman, as Winston does, and the overlap isn’t more obvious than it already is.
Once they started shooting, Reitman says, they realized Hudson was so funny they decided to re-expand his part, but only up to a point. Winston does still get some good lines (“I’ve seen shit that’ll turn you white!” “I love this town!”), but his role is unquestionably squeezed. And Hudson’s disappointments continued after the movie: he was turned down to voice his own character in the cartoon of Ghostbusters (they gave it to Arsenio Hall instead), and his part was, once again, nearly pushed out of the (pretty meh) sequel to the film. “That was difficult for me because that I really didn’t understand. But once you get angry, it’s all over. So I stayed positive and kept working. And I can also say that the original Ghostbusters is a perfect movie as it is,” says Hudson.
And it is, and not just in the way it depicts (white) masculinity in opposition to everything else, from the government to women to black men. What makes it feel especially perfect today, particularly in regard to the subject of masculinity, is the fact that the guys in it are grown-ups.
It’s extraordinary watching eighties comedies now, especially ones starring men and featuring male friendships, such as Ghostbusters, Trading Places, When Harry Met Sally, Three Men and a Baby, even Three Amigos!, for heaven’s sake, because as silly as the men are in those movies—and they are often very silly—they still behave like adults. Not stunted adolescents, not misogynistic overgrown babies, but adults. They like women, they usually have jobs, they don’t wish they were nineteen, they don’t sit around smoking bongs all day, and they’re not jerks. This distinguishes eighties comedies strongly from today’s male-led comedies. Yes, contemporary male-led movies all show that this is because the guys are immature and need to grow up, but what they also show is that guys are a lot more fun whereas women are tedious shrews whose only function in life is to drag the poor menfolk away from their PlayStations and into the sad, drab world of maturity. These movies accept that men have to grow up, but they don’t like it.
“I don’t know anyone who wants to grow up,” says Judd Apatow, who, along with Adam SandlerXIV and filmmaker Adam McKay (Anchorman, Step Brothers), has been at the forefront of popularizing the trope of the overgrown man-boy. “For me it’s natural to tell stories about people who are resisting the maturation process—there’s nothing that’s fun about having responsibilities and dealing with real world problems. I’m always fascinated by the moment people are expected to define themselves as an adult. I also like stories about feeling time pressure. Everyone feels they need to get things done by certain stages—getting married, having kids. We all hear this ticking clock all the time and it drives us crazy so I write about that a lot.”
Even though Apatow cites eighties movies as his most formative source of inspiration, especially Ghostbusters, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, and the John Hughes films, he concedes that there are no films from that era that feature men resisting growing up. In fact, it’s often the reverse. In St. Elmo’s Fire, for example, which focuses on the usual Apatow demographic—twenty-somethings wondering what to do with their lives—the male characters are desperate to grow up, pleading with the various women to marry them (Judd Nelson, Jon Cutler), live with them (Andrew McCarthy), or at least have a relationship with them (Emilio Estevez). It’s the women (respectively, Ally Sheedy, Mare Winningham, Ally Sheedy again, and Andie MacDowell) who push them away. “Didn’t you think women were dying to get married?” asks a bemused Nelson, after being rejected again. It’s the male character in the film who refuses to grow up, Billy (Rob Lowe), who tries to stay a student forever, who is mocked most by his friends and the film.
There is one eighties movie that seems to exemplify Apatow’s theory—Diner, Barry Levinson’s 1982 film set in 1959 about a bunch of young men hanging out during the run-up to a friend’s marriage. “One of the things I love about Diner is that it shows the moment they have to grow up and get married. I don’t know why, but it is a moment I keep going back to in my movies because so much happens in that transition,” Apatow says. But in that film, Levinson takes care to emphasize the cruelty of the young men’s immaturity, showing how much they hurt their wives when they scream at them for not putting their records back correctly. This, the movie suggests, is a form of spousal abuse. When Pete is caught lying to his wife so he can play sports games, in Apatow’s Knocked Up, he’s just having, the movie says, immature, male-bonding fun. The men are not fun in Diner when they behave like jerks, and there’s no intimation that they’d be happier if they stayed that way forever—they’re just mean.
The guys in Ghostbusters, by comparison, behave like recognizable adults, and seem far more grown-up than men in most pop culture today. And when the Ghostbusters seem like relative paragons of maturity, then something weird is going on.
“Yes, exactly!” cries Reitman excitedly, as though he has been waiting to make this point for years.
As silly and as raw as those eighties films are, they’re not coarse. I think now, with the last few generations, these things have evolved. Kids stay in school as long as they can these days, and especially with the masculine gender, there seems to be a desire to put off settling down for as long as possible. So many of the ideas that go into these movies are about that—the childishness of young adult males. I think it’s funny enough for a while but I’ve seen it already and it’s time for something else. It’s one of the reasons I think those films don’t tend to hold up in multiple viewings in much the way that I keep hearing about those [eighties movies] that people tend to view over and over again.
Yes, kids do tend to stay in school longer and, yes, there is a melding between the generations that has never heretofore existed, with grandparents poking their grandkids on Facebook and mothers and daughters shopping together in Topshop. Never has it been easier to stay part of the youth culture for longer. But as much as I’d like to blame Facebook for absolutely all evils in the modern world, the truth is that young men today are no more like Adam Sandler in Billy Madison than they ever were (thank God). The telling thing here is that it’s men who are depicted as stunted adolescents, not women.XV And this is because the trope of the overgrown man-boy is simply the laziest and lowest answer to a question that has been building up in pop culture for decades: how to incorporate male-based storylines into a society that is increasingly enlightened by feminism.
Despite still getting the vast majority of starring roles and storylines, men do not get a great deal in pop culture today. A particularly popular trope for fathers on TV shows today, from The Simpsons to Modern Family to Peppa Pig, is to depict them as incompetent man-boys, haplessly trying to keep up with their far more mature wives. Compare, say, useless Phil Dunphy in Modern Family, always getting things wrong, always buying the wrong kind of car, always mocked by his kids, with Cliff Huxtable in The Cosby Show, the patrician doctor whose kids respected him despite his wildly questionable taste in knitwear. In American movie comedies today, men are not sweetly silly, as they were in the eighties, keen but not desperate for female attention—they are overgrown teenagers who regard women as bitches to humiliate or mother figures to worship. Women, bromance movies suggest, are a necessity in life, but it’s only by hanging out with one’s male friends, swapping porn films with them, taking mushrooms in Vegas with them, and making homophobic gags while playing computer games with them that a man is truly at ease with himself.
Why this has happened can be gleaned, not from films, but TV. The most celebrated recent TV blockbusters all depict the erosion of patriarchy: “Tony [Soprano], Walter [White] and Don [Draper] are the last of the patriarchs,” writes the New York Times’ film critic A. O. Scott. “[But] it seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown ups. . . . In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.” This genre of film, Scott continues, is “a cesspool of nervous homophobia and lazy racial stereotyping. Its postures of revolt tend to exemplify the reactionary habit of pretending that those with the most social power are really the most beleaguered and oppressed.” The man-boy, in other words, is a petulant temper tantrum about the demise of simple patriarchal structures, a giant shrug of confusion about how men should be if they can no longer act like Don Draper without being arrested. It is a form of rebellion when the only thing to rebel against is women and themselves, and it is a giant step backward from the comparatively enlightened likes of Three Men and a Baby.
One could easily argue that it was the eighties that started this trend of infantilization and especially infantilized men, which makes sense as this was the decade of the so-called backlash against feminism. After all, it was the eighties that saw a huge rise in youth culture, with MTV and teen movies dominating the pop culture, as well as the growth of high-concept movies, which are the definition of an infantilized art form. In his both fascinating and charmingly pretentious essay on 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Peter Biskind argues that George Lucas and, in particular, Steven Spielberg popularized in the seventies and especially the eighties “the echt lesson of the sixties: don’t trust adults, particularly those in authority.” Star Wars, most obviously, is a film about kids versus parents (that is, the Empire), with the kids being very much on the side of the good. Lucas then described Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a movie “for the kids in all of us,” and movies like Star Wars and Indiana Jones encourage a childlike unquestioning sense of awe in audiences of all ages (“I want a movie to overwhelm me,” Spielberg once said), bludgeoning them with spectacle and old-fashioned derring-do, replacing the more complex and anguished post-Vietnam films of the 1970s with something far more simple, with clear-cut good guys and bad guys.
Spielberg has been fond of the wisdom-of-children-versus-the-obtuseness-of-adults trope in his films for decades, and this is perhaps most obvious in the films he made in the eighties. In E.T., Elliott is shown to be the one who should control the situation, not his mother and certainly not the U.S. government. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy is emphatically in the child’s role, locked in an Oedipal battle with his father (Sean Connery), whom he resents but also wants desperately to please, like the neediest of adolescent boys.
The eighties saw a weird flurry of actual man-boys in a slew of utterly disposable films about fathers, grandfathers, and sons swapping bodies: Vice Versa (Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage), 18 Again! (George Burns and Charlie Schlatter), Like Father, Like Son (Dudley Moore and Kirk Cameron), and Dream a Little Dream (Jason Robards and Corey Feldman—not, I suspect, a film Robards looked back on with much pride). Yet all these movies show that being an adult is preferable: you get to have sex, drive cars, not go to school, and not listen to your parents. Being a kid, in these films, sucks.
The wonderful if deeply, deeply weird 1988 film Big comes closer to the current mentality that idealizes man-boys. When thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin asks the arcade game Zoltar the Magnificent to make him big, he becomes Tom Hanks, replete with Tom Hanks’s chest hair and Tom Hanks’s penis, which is more than I ever got from an arcade game. As an adult but with a child’s mentality, he charms women and work colleagues at his new job at a toy manufacturer, the insinuation being that his delightful innocence is just what the world of adulthood needs. This theory works well enough in the arena of Josh’s job—who better to come up with ideas for toys for kids than a kid?—but gets decidedly icky when it comes to Josh’s love life. The intimation here is that what a jaded thirty-something career woman needs in her life is a man who is—and acts like—a prepubescent virgin. If I ever went back to a man’s apartment with him and he suggested we sleep on different levels of a bunk bed, as happens to Susan (Elizabeth Perkins) when she goes to Josh’s loft for the first time, I wouldn’t think, Wow, what a sweet guy! I’m so girlishly excited about his innocent way of seeing the world! Instead, I would pick up the phone and say, “Hello? Operator? Put me through to the Weirdos on the Loose Unit.” This, however, is not Susan’s reaction and she eventually sleeps with and moves in with the dude Carrie Bradshaw would refer to as Bunk Bed Guy, which is weird in itself, but even weirder for the audience who knows that Josh—I repeat—is thirteen years old.
“It’s emphasized in the screenplay that it was a secret he was a little boy,” says Tom Hanks, a little defensively when I asked him about this. “And when we shot the scene when they’re about to be intimate for the first time and there’s that bit when he turns the light back on because I thought, Well, there’s no way a thirteen-year-old boy wouldn’t want to see this.”
Sure, the sex scene is believable but that doesn’t mean it’s not weird, right? He’s THIRTEEN. “Yeah,” he agrees. “It was weird.”
But at least in the case of Big and all the body swap films, the reason the man is acting like a boy is that he is, actually, a boy. In none of these films, no matter how much they celebrate George Lucas’s “the child within us all,” is there any suggestion that men should resist growing up, or that this is even their natural inclination. The reason the Ghostbusters represent an idealized sort of masculinity to me is that they’re neither patrician nor man-boys—they’re just funny, friendly guys whose funniness doesn’t depend on misogyny or insecurity. Is that really too much to ask for these days?XVI They were enough like my father when I was a kid to feel reassured by them (Harold Ramis), they were enough like me so that I wanted them to be my friends and giggle with them (Bill Murray), and they were handsome enough so that I wanted to do things to them I was only starting to understand (Aykroyd, obviouslyXVII). And those things still hold true, on-screen and, it turns out, off.
In early 2014 I was sent by the Guardian, where I work when I’m not watching eighties movies, to Los Angeles to cover the Oscars and the Vanity Fair party, the famous post-ceremony event. It so happened that Bill Murray had presented an award and had made an impromptu tribute to Harold Ramis, who’d died that year. When I saw him at the party, I didn’t even stop to think or take the time to feel shy. I just instinctively ran up to him in an unashamedly starstruck way.
“Mr. Murray, Ghostbusters is my favorite movie in the world. What is the secret of Ghostbusters’ everlasting appeal?” I burbled breathlessly, simultaneously terrified and elated in that way you are when you meet your heroes.
He looked down at me (Murray is surprisingly tall), his hair now gray, but still as skewwhiff as Peter Venkman’s after a ghost shoot-out. For a mortifying second, I thought he’d tell me to get lost.
“Friendship,” he replied without a pause. And then he gave me a noogie.
I. Failures to recognize quotes from When Harry Met Sally and Indiana Jones were also date deal breakers. It really is astounding I was single until the age of thirty-five.
II. The very English comic horror film Shaun of the Dead (2004), which depicts a north London overtaken by zombies, owes a pretty hefty debt to Ghostbusters.
III. Copyright: the great Clive James.
IV. Technically, if not obviously, a native English speaker.
V. During the 2012 U.S. election, Chuck Norris and his wife, Gena, made a video in which they issued a “dire warning” to America, suggesting that were Barack Obama to win the presidency, we would be sentencing “our children” to “a thousand years of darkness.” Action stars never fade away—they just become more themselves. See also: Steven Seagal.
VI. See? Random French words. They always work.
VII. More high-flying, incidentally, than the characters in the French version. Typical Americans! So career obsessed! So competitive! Bof.
VIII. In the best moment in the otherwise deservedly forgotten 1990s film Sleep with Me, Quentin Tarantino expands on Pauline Kael’s description of Top Gun as “a homoerotic commercial” at pleasing length: “Top Gun is a story about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man. You’ve got Maverick, all right? He’s on the edge, man. He’s right on the fucking line, all right? And you’ve got Iceman, and all his crew. They’re gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they’re saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways. Kelly McGillis, she’s heterosexuality. She’s saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They’re saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the gay way, all right? That is what’s going on throughout that whole movie. . . . He goes to her house, all right? It looks like they’re going to have sex, you know, they’re just kind of sitting back, he’s takin’ a shower and everything. They don’t have sex. He gets on the motorcycle, drives away. She’s like, ‘What the fuck, what the fuck is going on here?’ Next scene, next scene you see her, she’s in the elevator, she is dressed like a guy. She’s got the cap on, she’s got the aviator glasses, she’s wearing the same jacket that the Iceman wears. She is, okay, this is how I gotta get this guy, this guy’s going towards the gay way, I gotta bring him back, I gotta bring him back from the gay way, so I’ll do that through subterfuge, I’m gonna dress like a man. All right? That is how she approaches it. But the REAL ending of the movie is when they fight the MiGs at the end, all right? Because he has passed over into the gay way. They are this gay fighting fucking force, all right? And they’re beating the Russians, the gays are beating the Russians. And it’s over, and they fucking land, and Iceman’s been trying to get Maverick the entire time, and finally, he’s got him, all right? And what is the last fucking line that they have together? They’re all hugging and kissing and happy with each other, and Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, ‘Man, you can ride my tail, anytime!’ And what does Maverick say? ‘You can ride mine!’ Swordfight! Swordfight! Fuckin’ A, man!” In fact, Tarantino unnecessarily overegged the homoerotic pudding here. The truth is, what Iceman actually says to Maverick at the end is “You can be my wingman anytime.” But I think we can all agree that his point still stands.
IX. The result of this veneration of mavericks in eighties movies is that the villains of these films are often completely in the right: Iceman is completely right that Maverick is dangerous, just as the Environmental Protection Agency is right that the Ghostbusters look like unlicensed clowns and Mr. Rooney is right that Ferris should be in school.
X. Crazy people.
XI. The scene in which Ray (Aykroyd) dreams a ghost is going down on him in the film is, by some measure, the weirdest and worst moment in the film. It makes absolutely no sense, mainly because it was part of another scene that was cut. That it was written at all, and stayed in the film, serves as a handy little reminder that Aykroyd is, as we shall discuss, kind of an odd fellow.
XII. Incidentally, Aykroyd also has webbed feet and is married to the Dream Girl from Wayne’s World (Donna Dixon). Although he’s generally only spotted flogging vodka these days, there is no denying that Aykroyd is a pretty extraordinary dude.
XIII. When actress Katherine Heigl later—and rightly (if somewhat belatedly)—complained about the female characters in Knocked Up, her male costar Seth Rogen sneered on Howard Stern’s radio show in July 2009, “It’s not like we’re the only people she said some batshit crazy things about. That’s kind of her bag now.” The depiction of female characters in Apatow and Rogen’s films has remained unchanged ever since.
XIV. In fact, Sandler and Apatow shared an apartment when they were both starting out. Ladies, we can only look back and regret that we never got to hang out in Sandler and Apatow’s woman-repelling bachelor pad.
XV. Bridesmaids, Train Wreck, and the HBO show Girls, all produced by Apatow, depict young women struggling to grow up. But these remain anomalies and the amount of attention these projects received, when they were merely showing women do what men had been doing on-screen for decades, underlined the different expectations placed on male and female fictional characters.
XVI. Yes.
XVII. I’m sensing that I’m not really convincing you of my whole “Aykroyd = total hottie” argument.