Monday, July 25, 2016

Ghostbusters (movie review)

Although superficially a light comedy and midsummer entertainment, this film gave me much to think about and when people asked me for my views, like my mom, I'd say "still thinking about it".

There's a lot about symmetry, left and right, dead and alive, with this bridging of two worlds.  Male and female.  Flipped roles.  The receptionist is the airhead bombshell.  The girls are geeking out.

Girls are good at geeking out, we knew that.  I was probably more thrown by a guy bombshell.  I tend not to see them that way, though I could digress into a longer psycho-social profile and make this review more of a selfie.  I'll forgo.

Lets just say I identified with the dead behind the mirror.  That goofy blob guy seemed to be having the most fun throughout the movie.  Maybe I could be him.

Mostly what I learned about was New York (again) and the Victorian convergence of electricity and negative Universe (meant in a spooky sense).  Edison was not the only one to think these phenomena might have something to do with the soul.

There's sense in that really, in that we're already bio-electrical devices in an Internet of Things, as high tech as we don't know how to make, which is the highest of all.  Us, the not-ghosts.  We think we're less spooky than if we floated.  We're wrong.

Anyway, haunted world, and politics.  The Mayor is as close to a father figure as we get, and he's savvy about (A) the need for ghostbusters and (B) the need to deny it.  His operative, another smart cookie, keeps us attuned to another sense of "two worlds" (one to keep the public happy, another that's more real).

The physics lady, the first person we follow (omniscient camera), is caught in that bind between upholding Victorian science against the evils of abhorrent or heretical beliefs, and her actual experiences.  What happens to Bill Murray's character again?  How was his going missing smoothed over?  Plot hole?

The mirror people remind me of The Zero Theorem, which I've been thinking about quite a bit.  They get sucked down a vortex, but before long they've come back for more.  There's an eternal return implied here.

But like I said, it's summer fluff and great ethnography, a memes-on-parade reminder of where we stand with the paranormal (or whatever) in 2016.