If there was ever a moment in which I had a Hayao Miyazaki-like cognizance that, despite participating and enjoying it, “nerd” culture was a mistake, it would have been when I watched some video years and years ago in which a commentator was droning on about some sort of geek controversy and accidentally lapsed into seriousness. I don’t think it was about Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot, but it might have been – anyhow, the narrator, who was chirping away as YouTubers do, lowered his voice, and summoned up his dark prophecy with the gravitas of John foreseeing lakes of fire and Babylonian whores while imprisoned on Patmos. The terror that awaited all of us was… a Back to the Future remake. Conviction practically dripped from his words, a frothing terror only viewers like you could prevent, and it was fundamentally silly in just how human and relatable it was. We are, after all, the kind of people who smash televisions when Mecole Hardiman Jr. runs it in for that championship-clenching touchdown or burn down a city when our hockey team loses the Cup. Still, the thing that remains difficult to grasp is why ‘80s fantasy comedies have assumed a status once reserved for scrolls in golden arks and why Ghostbusters is at the forefront of that, to the point that we’ve now received two legacyquels that miss the fucking point.
The latest, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, at least passes on the director’s mantle to someone other than a Reitman (it remained incredibly weird that Ivan Reitman’s son Jason took over the mantle as if he had a blood-staked claim to the Ecto-One). That person is Gil Keenan, who did the ‘80s pastiche pretty well with Monster House, back before the multiplex got so stuffed with likeminded titles it’d have made a foie gras-bound duck think it was cruel and unusual punishment. He’s given a mandate that Reitman the Younger (who is a co-writer here) wasn’t bound to – after all, he’d uprooted the franchise’s setting and moved it to Flyover Country, despite it not making a ton of sense thematically or from a storytelling perspective – which is that Busting Is Back In The Big Apple, and that the Ghostbusters are connected to the New York paranormal in some sort of pre-ordained ways, mostly through their firehouse. Yes, that’s right – Reitman and company wanted the untold origin story of the run-down spot the crew picked up on the cheap back in ’84 told. I imagine the next film in the franchise will be a prequel about the Ecto-One’s days in service in an ambulance service, and now that I think about it, it’s probably bad that I mentioned it, because there’s a better relationship to death there than at the Firehouse.
We’re once again following the Spengler clan, best summed up by narrative function than by name: There’s Precocious Teen (McKenna Grace), our protagonist and the legacyquel franchise’s attempt at deflecting claims of sexism following Feig’s failure; there’s Angsty Brother (Finn Wolfhard), who is given screentime with Slimer to ensure he has something to do; there’s Stern Mom (Carrie Coon), doing her best to hold the family business of bustin’ together; and there’s Step-Father Figure (Paul Rudd), who has moved with his cooler-than-him girlfriend and her kids to the big city and into the firehouse of his childhood dreams. Now, all movies are filled with archetypes and cliché, but the narrative and thematic functions of these characters are more important than their characterization, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Frozen Empire opens with them chasing a ghost through the streets of New York, causing property damage and the like (apparently, one of the big mandates behind this new franchise is that the Gunner Seat in the Ecto-One is the coolest thing that has ever existed, so Precocious Teen spends a good amount of time there), before capturing it with high-tech – re: drones – technology, supplied by Winston Zeddamore (Ernie Hudson), who is a sort of Robert Bigalow-type here. The property damage pisses off the Mayor (William Atherton), who was once a lowly EPA agent that was told off by the ‘Busters. He has no dick, still. Anyhow, his strict no-fun, no-child-labor policies mean that Mom and Not-Dad have to tell our Teen not to bust anymore – she’s only 15. But when a Dude With A Past (Kumail Najiani) walks into the curio shop owned by Ray Stanz (Dan Aykroyd), it sets off a chain of events that will end with New York encased in ice – in the middle of summertime, and an ancient evil unleashed on the streets. Oh, and Venkman (Bill Murray) and Janine (Annie Potts) are back. They’re essentially two-scene guest stars.
Frozen Empire is cognizant that it’s not a Reitman-directed film, so it goes out of its way to include more recognizable nostalgia bait into its canon – Ghostbusters II is once again on the menu, as well as the Ray Parker Jr. song and its video and real-world ads for things like Ghostbusters cereal. Hey, this ‘Buster knows his stuff! But the tradition of mediocrity established with that sequel is well-maintained, only this time Keenan is forced to hit notes that Reitman the Younger couldn’t the first time. The humor still falls flat (aside from a sequence in which Murray throws pens at Nanjiani to provoke him), the action is still uninteresting, and the mythos remain as formless and plain as it’s always been. What it’s replaced by is warmed-over treacle and not the kind you’d put on a Cornish Pasty at Christmastime – the smarmy, sticky kind that wants you to feel things, even when you’re cognizant of its cynicism. A lot of this reheated nostalgia is a kind of walled garden meant to only let certain members of the audience in, the key coming from their history with the product. It shouldn’t be a shocking observation that the real audience here is the dads in the families that will flock to see this opening weekend, not the children or young adults, but other films that take a similar tack are rarely this nakedly craven about their intentions.
Those functional character roles I mentioned above can be assembled into a kind of psychological profile of Frozen Empire’s ideal viewer – not the legions of people who like Ghostbusters or have a T-shirt or a toy or even work on restoring old ambulances to look like Ecto-One so that they can go make the days of some sick kids at hospitals, who are just regular old fans of varying shapes and stripes, all of whom will walk out of this disappointed on a scale from “Well, the popcorn was pretty good” to abject frustration. Rather, this targets a man in his mid-30s-to-40s who feels unfairly slighted by life and needs fantastical fulfillment and recognition, so much so that you can call him the Target. Perhaps he’s like Precocious Teen and has been kept away from the things he loves by some tangled bureaucracy or other force despite being the most qualified person in the room. Or maybe he’s Not-Dad, who has everything he could ever want from his childhood dreams – except the kind of love and respect one gets from their family and through the security of their title. He’s attached to the things of childhood at the hip from never growing up, either from self-imposed stasis or from being insulated from it. He’s not so much moved by art as he is satisfied, which was why he liked Afterlife. It treated the unserious thing he was serious about with the respect it deserved. It granted him his metaphorical wish: To be young again and to be acknowledged and respected by his heroes, who have been preserved in stasis so that they can be immersed in his remembrance of the past — more so than the experience of it – alongside him.
This is why the gender of Precocious Teen doesn’t matter – Keenan and Reitman engage in some aggressive, foreign-exhibitor-friendly queer-baiting when she meets and is enchanted by a ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), who is charming and tragic in the way that some first loves are and, for some relationships, are doomed to be through their portrayals in media. Her betrayal is almost regarded as an afterthought because we know it’s coming – by her nature, as a Ghost, she is inherently antagonistic to the living in the rules of this universe – and her hurt, as well as the guilt she feels over hurting Precocious Teen, is a dagger straight to the Target’s heart, a reminder of an amber-preserved love lost to the sands of time. Replace her with a boy, and the effect is the same. Not-Dad’s gender, however, is essential. He shares dual fantasy-fulfillment responsibilities in being an idealized father figure, the imaginary dad who showed the Target the original on VHS back in the ‘80s or ‘90s, and an ideal mirror, who is as interested and obsessed with the source as the Target is but who doesn’t have to explain to his kids why they should care, all while getting bemused pats on the back by mom, who will never tell him to stop talking about proton packs.
I’ll point out, once again, that the Target doesn’t have any basis in reality – it’s a collection of traits deployed in service of ephemeral emotional resonance – and that this isn’t my fantasy of a Ghostbusters moron or whatever. All kinds of people will see this movie, and they’ll have their opinions about it, and that’s all grand. However, Frozen Empire’s service to this imaginary person, constructed from opinions from focus groups and other risk-management methods, is inherently self-limiting. It can’t provide ways for these stories to expand or grow for the devoted fans or for them to attract a new audience who might not even care about the original (legacyquels that do this – be it Creed or Halloween – are the ones that wind up being the best) but who, one day, might sit down and watch it because they enjoyed this one as a standalone feature. It ceases being functional entertainment and becomes a form of validating absolution for the Target, whose fulfillment comes exclusively from the satisfaction inherent in finding themselves recognized on-screen through large overtures or small details. The original Ghostbusters never had to worry about this, as it was a gag centered around a “what if” elevator pitch – what if the crazy shit that Dan Aykroyd actually believes in was real, and what if he and his SNL co-stars were the only people who could save the world? It’s a great idea for a comedy but not one for an era-defining foundational text, given that similar world-sprouting works have some amount of imagination or creativity birthed from them in a storytelling sandbox like the Star Wars or Star Treks of the same era.
This ultimately leads to the questions the Target has to contend with: Does he want his children to play in his sandbox? Does he want them to pull his action figures off the shelf and do things with them that might not adhere to canon? Does he want them to sit in awed reverence at the movies like they’re trapped in the pews he once might have been in as a child? Would he get mad at them if they fell asleep? Or does he want them to have their own stories and fables, some of which he could participate in, some of which will have an appeal that will remain unknowable to him, as all things do? And, God forbid, will he ever crave novelty and consign Ghostbusters to the dead texts of “favorite movies,” content never to see another new one? Frozen Empire is praying for him to remain as he is because it is terrified of what he might become if he realizes that, like everything else in the multplex, it is just a movie.