By Ben Bussey
In the last act of Ghostbusters (the supernatural comedy classic which just turned 30), there’s a scene which mostly went over my head when I was a kid, yet somehow made me sit up and pay attention. This particular scene had no Slimer, no devil dogs, no Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man; it was just the grown-ups talking, which obviously might struggle to hold the attention of a pre-teen. However, it made my Dad laugh – and that alone alerted me that there had to be something significant about it.
I’m referring to the moment in the mayor’s office once the shit has well and truly hit the fan, after Walter Peck turns off the ghost containment unit and kick-starts a supernatural Spring Break in Manhattan. In walks a Bishop (or maybe he’s an Archbishop or Cardinal? I dunno, he’s an old Catholic dude), who, following a formal greeting replete with ring-kissing (even as kid I found that creepy and weird), proceeds to talk to the Mayor as though they’re a couple of cabbies bonding over a beer. Up to this point, any role the Judeo-Christian God might theoretically be playing in all these ghostly goings-on hasn’t been widely discussed (aside from a brief chat between Ray and Winston, which we’ll discuss later), and our friendly neighbourhood religious leader Mike also purses his lips and sighs that the church, too, refuse to give an official position on the matter. However, he confides to the Mayor, “Personally Lenny, I think it’s a sign from God. But don’t quote me on that.” To which Venkman, ever in need of last word, drolly intones, “I think that’s a smart move there, Mike.”
Naturally, none of this made any sense to me on first viewing – but, as I said, it was enough to provoke a laugh from my father, whose opinion I inherently trusted (and do to this day, I might add) when it came to matters of intellectual and philosophical value, not to mention stuff that’s just plain funny. Although I don’t recall ever discussing it with my Dad, I’ve often pondered what seeds this scene may have sown in my young mind. For one thing, I’ve spent most of my life with a general mistrust of organised religion, and an overriding suspicion that its exponents – even those who are ostensibly decent and well-meaning, like good ol’ Mike – are ultimately every bit as clueless as the rest of us when it comes to (for want of a better phrase) the way things ‘really are’ in the spiritual scheme of things.
But even so, I’ve also spent my life with a nagging gut feeling that there must indeed be more to existence than that which we experience in our waking hours, day in day out. No, I’ve never witnessed anything as in-your-face as corpses driving New York cabs or phantoms jogging around Central Park, nor do I have any burning desire to witness any such vulgar supernatural display in real life – and yet, I cannot deny an overriding sense of there being something more. Let’s just call a spade a spade and have done with it: most of my life, one way or another, I’ve been contemplating God.
And with those words, I suspect I’ve lost some of you already. I know for many of us the prevailing wisdom nowadays is to declare ourselves atheists, mock the stupidity of the religious and defer our attention instead to more pressing, practical matters of life in the here and now. And to a certain extent I absolutely concur: practical concerns should of course take precedence over metaphysical speculations, we should all be focussed on making the absolute most of this moment rather than gazing off at some light at the end, and the rise of religious fundamentalism is without doubt a very serious threat in this day and age. But just because the atheist position might largely work for me on an intellectual level doesn’t mean I can completely accept it. Indeed, I think it’s generally good practice not to completely swallow any ideas you come across – nor to completely dismiss them, for that matter. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m a confirmed agnostic. Nothing I’ve ever read, heard or (rather more importantly) personally experienced has convinced me either way that there definitely is or definitely isn’t a God; and even if I were to have such an experience, I like to think I wouldn’t completely swallow that either.
Just so we stay on the same page, I should probably provide a brief spiritual background on yours truly. I didn’t have a religious upbringing, although my mother, grandparents and other relatives outside my immediate family went to church, and my school was essentially Church of England: a few hymns, Bible stories and the Lord’s Prayer were about the full extent of it. Down the line I took a casual interest in eastern mysticism (fuelled partly by my dad’s interest, partly by being into Bruce Lee and Kula Shaker), and later Wicca (fuelled primarily by Willow from Buffy). All this in turn led to a general curiosity about magic, meditation, yoga, Jungian psychology, Colin Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson, and sporadic attempts to get my head around quantum physics and the holographic universe theory; a tricky proposition, given I was in the bottom group for GCSE science. While much of what I’ve read over the years has set my internal bullshit alarms blaring, all this stuff still captures my imagination, though I mostly strive to approach matters from more of a Buddhist perspective nowadays, as the Yin Yang and Om tattoos on my wrist might indicate. (Corny clichés, I know, but symbols I feel an affinity with nonetheless.)
Since primary school, though, I largely lost interest in the Bible beyond the role it had to play in the movies. If as a child I ever had any interest in wearing a crucifix, it would have been for the purpose of fighting off vampires rather than anything to do with saving my soul; and were I ever to contemplate speaking to a man of cloth, I’d probably have wanted to ask about exorcisms. This all rather begs the question – was I curious about these things because of all those horror movies I was watching, or did I watch all those horror movies because I was curious about these things? I rather doubt I’m alone in this dilemma. Yes, I know, horror and genre movies in general are not to be taken literally; symbolism, metaphor, connotation and all that (my teenage self also took a more than casual interest in media studies, as you may have guessed). But even so, a huge part of the appeal of movies that deal with the supernatural is that they allow us to ask, what if these things really, truly existed? What if they were happening around us right now?
This, I think, was one of the reasons Ghostbusters really captured my imagination as a kid. It was perhaps the first movie I ever saw which presented the supernatural coming into play in a world which I recognised as my own; not long ago in a galaxy far, far away like Star Wars, or decades before I was born like Indiana Jones. Sure, Ghostbusters was set in that faraway fantasia New York City, but to all intents and purposes it took place here and now, in the real world, populated by men who – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – were breathtaking in their ordinariness. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson: not to be cruel, but these guys don’t look like a boy band, and they don’t look like the cast of Predator either. And thank (for the sake of argument) God for that, as that lack of conventional sex appeal and machismo is precisely what makes them such universal everymen, and as such makes it all the easier to relate to their battle with supernatural entities; a conflict which, as I expect you’ve figured out by now, I can closely relate to my own internal spiritual struggles. When you get right down to it, surely this is what Ghostbusters is all about: ordinary men in an age of technology trying to tackle the problem of the spiritual.
We can also hardly fail to note that, in their differing approaches to the matter, the Ghostbusters themselves embody the different manners in which we approach spiritual matters: Venkman, whose perpetual air of aloof cynicism hides a mind which, despite himself, is open and curious; Ray, wearing his over-eager schoolboy brand of pre-X-Files “I want to believe” optimism on his sleeve; Egon, with his detached, clinical, fact-finding approach; and Winston, with his workmanlike blue collar outlook, willing to believe whatever he’s told so long as there’s steady pay involved. On a side note – lately, I find myself thinking of their EPA nemesis Peck as a prototype Richard Dawkins, overzealously insisting the ghosts can only be bullshit and demanding the plug be pulled – which, of course, doesn’t turn out too well for them.
So – are the ghosts, as ol’ Mike suspects, a sign from God? It’s not a question that Ghostbusters dwells too heavily on, and that’s hardly surprising, given it’s a light-hearted comedy blockbuster designed for mass appeal. Even so, its quieter moments do give some pause for thought on the matter, notably the scene of Ray and Winston driving back to the Firehouse in Ecto-1. Winston is without question the least fully rounded of the core four; how could he not be, considering he’s only introduced midway, and seems to be there in most part as a point of audience identification to whom Ray and Egon can explain the mechanics of their whole ghost-catching shindig. By turn, however, Winston brings Ray at least to contemplate the widespread supernatural phenomena from outside the lens of pure science; to consider the possibility, just the possibility, that the alleged man upstairs might have something to do with it. They quote a particularly bleak passage from Revelations, then mutually agree to put on some music and stop thinking about it; man of God or man of science, truly contemplating the end is never a pleasant business. My personal favourite part of that scene, though, is how Ray responds when Winston asks if he believes in God: “Never met him.” I love that; neither a yes nor a no, but a simple and unabashed admission of ignorance on the matter. That’s agnosticism in a nutshell, and why I can’t help feeling it’s the most sensible position to take.
Of course, it puts a slightly different slant on things when we consider Dan Aykroyd’s outspoken position on the paranormal in real life. As has long since become common knowledge, Aykroyd is descended from several generations of spiritualists, and is a whole-hearted believer in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis (why yes, I did just cut&paste Janine’s question to Winston from the quotes section of the IMDb page, thanks for noticing), and reportedly a great deal of the parapsychological theory and whatnot in Ghostbusters is taken from genuine research on the subject. By contrast, Aykroyd’s notable co-star and co-writer the late, great Harold Ramis was by all accounts far more sceptical regarding the paranormal, taking more interest in the broader spiritual questions attached. Indeed, you only need to take a cursory glance at the films Ramis went on to make – Groundhog Day in particular – to get a sense of how deep his questioning mind got. We might also note Aykroyd’s public statement following Ramis’ death earlier this year: “May he now get the answers he was always seeking.” Knowing this about the duo, one gets the sense that this balance between wholehearted belief and logical scepticism is what makes Ghostbusters really work – and it seems to bolster the overall message of the film, that a balance of youthful imagination and adult rationality will get us where we need to be on the whole God thing.
After all – what is that finale, really, if not humanity facing off against God? Okay, so Gozer ain’t exactly Jehovah (oi, stop throwing stones), but let’s not nitpick; a god, the God, you say tomato etc. Whichever way you look at it, it’s men with machines measuring their strength against a deity – and, we can scarcely fail to note, emerging victorious. Are we to take this as an ultimate indictment of God, a bald-faced declaration that humanity is stronger and has no need of such a supernatural super-being? Perhaps; but it’s still acknowledging that supernatural super-beings exist.
But even if they do, what difference does that really make? Even if we all found out tomorrow beyond any shadow of a doubt that there absolutely positively is a supreme being from whom we all sprang forth who is ready and waiting to welcome us back once we pop our clogs, wouldn’t we all still have to put food on our table, pay the rent, put up with arseholes, get bored and lazy, and so forth? God may very well be great, but people are still just people. Maybe this, then, is the ultimate message of Ghostbusters: God or no God, humanity can and must do what it has always done and just get the hell on with it, finding practical solutions to get us through and – wherever possible – banding together to overcome common obstacles, lest we part too soon with this potentially quite nice thing we have called life. And for crying out loud, we have to be sure to have a few laughs along the way.
Oh, and of course, if anyone ever asks if you’re a god, you say yes…