Was Ghostbusters Meant as a Defense of Victorian Optimism?
Betteridge’s law of headlines dictates that when an article asks a question, the answer is never yes. Is this case, perhaps, an exception? No. Deep thinker as Harold Ramis was (see Groundhog Day), Ghostbusters was almost certainly not meant as a defense of Victorian optimism, but the comedy certainly works well as one. Faith in the explanatory power of science and the wealth creating potential of capitalism defined Victorian society. Meanwhile, the scientific class’s growing confidence in its own ability to categorize the universe characterized the Victorian era as an age of doubts about God. The film’s main characters hold similar attitudes. Science and free enterprise may merit better champions than an autist, a con-man, and a fool (not a god, after all), but the titular ghostbusters eventually vindicate these principles in the face of a threat of biblical proportions.
Ghostbusters begins with an apparition attacking one of New York’s most venerated institutions. Founded in 1895 by John Jacob Astor and subsequently endowed by Andrew Carnegie in the heady days of American capitalism, the New York Public Library represents both the Victorian views on learning and philanthropy. A public library assumes the ordinary citizen can grasp real knowledge if only the opportunity is made available. The specter thumbs her nose at this mission. She moves books from shelf to shelf before piling them into a tall stack. She throws all the notes out of the card catalog and then covers the drawers in ectoplasm, generally making a mockery out of the Dewey decimal system.
Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), and Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) hardly seem up to even this modest challenge, and they flee the library headlong after a hilarious confrontation with the apparition. They are an unlikely trio to act as scientist cum adventurer-heroes in the tradition of Verne or Wells. Venkman is a “poor scientist.” He perverts the only experiment we see in the film with a humorous combination of sadism and lust. Later, he pranks Egon by preventing him from listening for ghosts. Dean Yaeger (Jordan Charney) correctly calls Venkman’s methods “sloppy” and his conclusions “highly questionable.” It is easy to dislike the uptight, Bitterman-esque college don, but not to disagree with him.
Ghostbusters makes several references to the great interwar thinkers who overturned the model of the universe as a realm of rational predictability. Venkman brings up Einstein’s work as a patent clerk. Egon suggests the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious as a possible explanation for the haunted art deco apartment building. Despite this, Venkman believes in the orderliness of the universe: “Call it fate, call it luck, call it karma. I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe we were destined to get thrown out of this dump… to go into business for ourselves.” He never studied, after all.
In the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, the horror element of Ghostbusters enters the film as an unspeakably ancient being worshipped by frantic barbarians from before the dawn of civilization, some 6,000 BC. A more mundane antagonist than Gozer and Zuul, EPA junior administrator Walter Peck (William Atherton) represents all of American society’s unfortunate developments since World War I. The ghostbusters run their business as if they lived under a laissez faire regime, brushing off any EPA agent arrogant enough to show up without a warrant. Peck, for his part, proves persistent as a tumor, muscling in with a writ and a cop to shut down the containment unit. This government interference backfires immediately, as every imprisoned ghost is released and the EPA nearly causes the end of the world. Still a better depiction than they deserve. Allergic to personal accountability, Peck blames the ghostbusters and claims that they are con-artists who trick their clients with hallucinatory gas. You can’t believe your lying eyes. Together, Gozer and Peck represent all the postwar trends that challenged and destroyed Victorian society.
The near-apocalyptic advent of Gozer, as it happens, occurs as the result of the machinations of an interwar mastermind “Ivo Shandor.” Shandor never appears in the film. Egon introduces him in a few sentences and no one ever mentions him again. Nevertheless, Shandor is a better character than any introduced in the last three Ghostbusters movies. According to Egon, “After the First World War Shandor decided that society was too sick to survive. And he wasn’t alone. He had close to a thousand followers when he died. They conducted rituals… bizarre rituals, intended to bring about the end of the world.” Dead long before Ghostbusters takes place, the spirit of Ivo Shandor hangs like a vulture over the movie. The villain is not World War I per se, but the pessimism that World War I ushered in.
The threat seems too overbearing for our scientific heroes to face. When Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) asks Ray if he believes in God, Aykroyd’s character replies, “Never met Him.” However, Ray soon quotes scripture, a Tarantino-esque invented passage allegedly from Revelation, but slightly more believable than a Sonny Chiba quote. They even conclude that the Bible might be prophesying a real event: the forthcoming end of the world. Later, when the ghostbusters arrive at the apartment building for their final showdown with Gozer, they see more than just adoring fans: millenarians holding signs like “Repent and believe” as well as Hasidim swaying in prayer. The mayor even calls in the local archbishop as well as the ghostbusters. These believers outside the building grasp that the traditional response to a threat like Gozer is to humbly petition God, perhaps in sackcloth and ashes. The ghostbusters take a different approach, relying on their own pluck and new gadgets.
When the ghostbusters reach the top of the building, Gozer asks the heroes to “choose the form of the destructor.” Haven’t scientists faced this question for the last hundred years? They haven’t yet decided whether the answer will be machine guns, nuclear technology, chemicals, or engineered viruses, but they have tried all four. It probably won’t be carbon dioxide, but who knows? At any rate, for the last century we have lacked confidence that scientific and technological progress would bring about salvation instead of Armageddon. Egon himself presents an Oppenheimer-esque warning that misusing the proton packs could cause “all life as you know it [to stop] instantaneously and every molecule in your body [to explode] at the speed of light” (i.e. “it would be bad”). When all hope is lost, however, the proton packs prove useful rather than suicidal. There is nothing left to do. They cross the streams. And it works! At the end of the film, Victorian style science proves superior to religious belief and emotional horror at the eldritch inhabitants of deep space and time. Victorian enterprise defeats the threat that the regulatory state enabled. All in all, Ghostbusters works pretty well as a defense of Victorian optimism.