the fly in your honey

[sasha_feather]

Spoilers for Ghostbusters ahead. Overall I loved this movie but there was some weird racist stuff going on.




While it's great to show different kinds and styles of intelligence in a team, ie some are professorly (Erin) and some are working class, self-educated types (Patty), it can become a problem when there is only one black woman in the film and she's the working class one, and all the more academic ones are white.

As in the original, Patty is the last to join the team; the others have previously established relationships. I'd have liked her to be Jillian's friend, someone she knows from engineering school or something. An inventor, or a business woman. I wasn't sure why she wanted to join the GhostBusters, and if she was previously friends with Jillian that would have made more sense.

There is a scene where Patty suggests her cousin as a receptionist, instead of the incredibly incompetent Kevin. This suggestion gets ignored. Why? Why put that line in the film just to have it drop?

A scene at a rock concert: Abby jumps off the stage and crowd surfs. Patty is about to follow suit and I'm prepared to grin as all the Ghostbusters crowd surf. Instead, inexplicably, the crowd moves out of her way and she falls to the floor. "I don't know if this is a race thing or a woman thing," she says. The film is commenting weirdly on its own racism.

In contrast, there is a scene where Kevin (the white receptionist) falls after being de-possessed. Two of the ghostbusters literally throw their bodies underneath him to save him from injury.

In another scene, Abby is briefly possessed by the villian's ghost. Patty saves both Jillian and Abby; but when she slaps Abby to get the ghost out, she says "the power of Patty compels you!" This falls into the trope of the "Magical Black Person".

Comments

[gorgeousnerd]

I also thought men of color in the movie were approached in a racist way. The delivery man was the most obvious example - ha ha, he's incompetent with her order and he isn't white - but they were also wheeling out a MOC from the metal concert, and he literally was only there to be injured instead of a character.

(The moment with "the power of Patty compels you" struck me as less Magical Black Person - she was quoting The Exorcist while trying to exorcise a ghost, and not with magical means - and more "look how powerful and physical this black woman is", so a different kind of racism.)

[sasha_feather]

Interesting!

[gorgeousnerd]

This post outlines it better than I could, probably.

[longwhitecoats]

Yes! Also, a moment that really bothered me: during the big fight scene, Patty fights to save her friend, Holtzmann, and when she succeeds we get a shot of Holtzmann being helped to her feet. But seconds later, when the team has to save Patty by fighting off more ghosts, there is NO shot to show us that she is okay. I kept waiting for it! I was like IS SHE ALL RIGHT??? It upset me that the movie didn't see those moments as equally important.

[sasha_feather]

I didn't notice that! Maybe because I kind of tune out during action scenes. Hmmmm interesting.

[thingswithwings]

Yeah, I was really put off by the "Latino guy muttering about the devil" thing. Like, why don't they interview him? If Patty speaks Spanish, which the scene implied, why doesn't she ask him what he saw and where and how big? It would've legitimized him, put some Spanish into the film (it's set in NYC after all!) and shown Patty's skills as useful. Instead it's a joke about Latino people and superstition (he's saying "El Diablo" over and over.)

[sasha_feather]

I didn't catch what he was saying, thanks for pointing that out. I thought there was one scene where Erin finds the Mercado on a map, and says "Spanish for table" and I was like.... what.... it means market. But I wasn't sure if I heard her right.

[thingswithwings]

yeah, it's supposed to be a running joke about how Erin thinks she speaks Spanish and doesn't (she also offers an incorrect translation of the man on the stretcher). :/

[sasha_feather]

Yikes. That didn't work at all.