‘Ghostbusters’ does it for the sisterhood
‘Women are made of stronger stuff than some think’
I’M a big fan of the action movie. I’ve seen them all — pretty much everything that Marvel, DC or Lucas have ever made. You name it, I’ve seen it. I’d like to pretend that it’s because I’ve got loads of kids. It’s not. Ever since I fell I love with Han Solo aged five, I’ve been hooked on the shoot ’em up, good-guys-versus-bad-guys escapism. My favourite game as a child was being thrown down the stairs in a sleeping bag (don’t worry it was stuffed with teddies for health and safety reasons) to the cry of “Millennium Falcon — Light Speed!” by my older siblings. It was the 1970s, I was the youngest. We did stuff like that.
So I was quite excited at the prospect of a new Ghostbusters movie. I loved the original. (Not the sequels, obviously.) Bill Murray and Co. made a classic, and even though my kids had seen it and it hadn’t dated too badly — a reboot was a cool idea.
I wasn’t too pushed about the fact that it was an all-female cast to be honest. The feminist in me liked the idea but I did wonder was it a bit gimmicky. And I was actually more concerned about it being a good movie than it striking a blow for the sisterhood.
I’d seen but not paid huge attention to the controversy online about it. Leslie Jones, the black female lead, had been viciously trolled on Twitter to the point that she closed her account ‘in tears’. And Milo Yiannopoulos, the right wing, libertarian, gay conservative (there’s a mouthful) was banned from Twitter for his role in her persecution. Spurring his men’s-rights-activist followers to start the hashtag #FreeMilo, as if he had been imprisoned rather than merely excluded from a social media website. Although I suspect he was happy enough about his exile as he appears to thrive on attention. Any attention at all.
So, I went to Ghostbusters knowing there was baggage there but genuinely more interested in if it was a good movie. AND IT WAS! It was brilliant.
It was fast-paced, funny, exciting, thrilling. The acting was good. The characters were great. The irony of the dim, male secretary being treated as pure eye candy, was wonderful satire. It was a great, great action movie. And my whole family — mostly boys — loved it. I didn’t even really notice it was all-female because the movie was so good — that that wasn’t what it was actually about.
Until I did notice. And then I realised that I’ve never really seen a movie before where it was all women who battled against the odds in that genre and were so awesome and central to the movie. It’s usually, of course, all men — occasionally with the odd woman thrown in. And I was ridiculously happy both for my 14-year-old daughter watching it with me, but also for my sons.
And the fact that even in 2016, in the West, that it’s considered controversial to have an all-female cast (when it wasn’t remotely controversial that the original cast were all men) outside of a romcom or some drippy type of movie, says feminism still has a long, long way to go. The fact that this Ghostbusters was made is a big step along that road.
I tweeted about how good the movie was and about poor old Milo. And immediately received a post from a very angry man who suggested I should be fired from my job and then executed. Men’s Rights Activists are most reluctant to give up an iota of their privileged position on or offline, to us pesky women.
But luckily, as I sit here writing this with my favourite Batman v Superman pen and having just watched Ghostbusters, I know women are made of stronger stuff than some people think. And we aint ’fraid of no posts.