Nostalgia is a helluva drug

Rating: 5/10 (7 April 2020)

Ghostbusters was one of my favourite movies as a kid in the early nineties. It had jokes, scares, great special effects, four nerdy cool guys shooting lasers, a scantily clad babe...what else can a young boy wish for?
Fast forward to twenty-five years later, with me viewing the movie for a second time. An uncomfortable truth wriggles it's way in my head as I watch: that some nostalgia doesn't stand the test of time. I notice my stubbornness to critique the movie but contemporary reality quickly illuminates how dated the movie is. Sure, it's still a big budget spectacle and some of the effects are still cool, but effects being dated can be forgiven. What ruined the overall experience is mainly how sexist and adult the movie is. I wonder how Bill Murray, obtrusively sleazebagging his way thoughout the movie, nowadays would reflect on his role here. What I used to look up to as child disturbs me now. The movie sets the sexist tone early, particularly with a bad joke that correlates menstruation with mental derangement. I watched with dumbfounded amazement. It might be pure speculation but I also got the impression that lots of cocaine where being used while making this movie. There's an exubarant vacancy to it all. A celebration of American culture that is loud, and too often cynical and hollow.
While watching I started to view the movie as a cultural time capsule that through it's charicatures exposes some of the more appalling aspects of American culture in the early eighties. Women are mainly being played as puppets and black people are at best 4th option sidekicks and are most often seen as background figures doing low level jobs. Maybe as a kid this black sidekick showed me that black people can actually contribute to saving the world. Or hang with the cool white guys. So, in defense of nostalgia, maybe there is a spin to thiis. Do I devaluate the movie too much using my contemporary lens? My younger mind was better suited to appreciate it as pure entertainment. My older self is better suited to view it as a ideological object of study. If I balance these two out I would rate it a 5, with my younger self giving it a 9, and my older self giving it a 2. The ghosts of this movie have been busted.