Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (17 page)

‘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.
^fn12
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 who the audience would recognise as powerful. The film even tweaks and literalises 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 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 emphasises 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 it’s one that doesn’t only respect men by any means.

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 their 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 rumour (‘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 sceptical outsiders among the Ghostbusters – Venkman and Winston – which always felt like an 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 that they realised 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.

Ham-fisted handling of racial issues aside, it is, really. But 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, wailing and wanking, 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 Sandler
^fn13
and filmmaker Adam McKay (
Anchorman
,
Step Brothers
), has been at the forefront of popularising 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. With one exception –
Diner
, Barry Levinson’s 1982 film set in 1959 about a bunch of young men hanging out in 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 emphasise 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 for ever – they’re just mean.

The guys in
Ghostbusters
, by comparison, behave like recognisable 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.
^fn14
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
’s 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 centre 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 backwards from the comparatively enlightened likes of
Three Men and a Baby
.