Roots and Beginnings: Ghostbusters (dir. Ivan Reitman)

Ghostbusters is the best thing in many different categories of things. It is the best horror comedy. It is the best science-fiction comedy. It is the best special-effects-driven comedy. It is the best Saturday Night Live cast-member movie in general, and the best Dan Aykroyd movie and (controversial, I know, but true) the best Bill Murray movie in particular.

But it’s also the best New York City movie. That’s a very very crowded category, I realize; you could make persuasive cases for Do the Right Thing and Manhattan, among many others. Both those movies do the same thing this one does, which is make the tone, the character of the city part of the story, a constant presence, like the score or the cinematography. Ghostbusters just happens to track more with my perception of the city growing up in it suburban shadow. It’s a teeming place, filled with different kinds of people and different kinds of places. There’s a university and a library and a park and a hotel and a concert hall and fountains and fancy apartment buildings and decrepit abandoned firehouses and a jail and a mayor’s office. There are scientists and students and punks and Hasidim and news reporters and snooty maitre d’s and crazy people and politicians and cardinals and cops who dismiss a demonic attack like it’s jaywalking.

You can hear entire an entire cultural mindset in “Some moron brought a cougar to a party and it went berserk” – in the accent, in the tone of voice, in the choice of words used to characterize the incident, in the way the information is shared with a curious passerby (who happens to be one of “those guys on TV”). I’m not such a chauvinist that I believe NYC to be the greatest city that ever was or will be (that’s obviously Qarth), but it’s the city I love and this is the one sentence I would use to explain why.

Why am I writing about this aspect of the film for this SFF tumblr? Because the SFF elements work as well as they do in Ghostbusters precisely because the setting is so vivid and lived-in. You could follow almost any bit part or extra in this movie a few blocks over to where they live and imagine the life they lead just from the few seconds you spend with them onscreen. (My favorites: the maid who says “What the hell are you doing?” when they blast her cart to pieces, and the old lady who pops out of her apartment, sees the Vinz Clortho demon dog, says “huh!” and runs back inside.)

Similarly, you can imagine a rock-hard edifice of pseudoscience behind all of the conceits Aykroyd and Harold Ramis devised for the science of ghostbusting – crossing the streams, ectoplasmic residue, the protection grid in the storage facility, etc etc. (Compare it to the fluffy, undercooked “mood slime” idea of the sequel, which let me down even as an eleven-year-old.)

I’ve been skeptical about worldbuilding as a metric for quality, but this is different – this is more like simply taking the time to build windows so that people who are visiting your story can look around on the way. The more they see, the better your story looks amid the view.