chroniclesofrettek:

kontextmaschine:

You know what my favorite piece of reactionary media is?

Ghostbusters.

Hear me out, I’ve mentioned this before, but forever ago. It’s a movie about a bunch of guys who, in the go-go ’80s, give up on academia to found a startup based on cutting edge technology. They settle in gritty New York City, specifically rehabilitating decaying public safety infrastructure, and their job description is literally “drive around town with the siren on, rehabilitating once-glorious locations by imprisoning vandalous spooks”.

They clean the city up, create jobs for the black and white ethnic working class, but face resistance from pointy-headed bureaucrats. (The dickless EPA guy manages to represent both “overregulation” and “safety-threatening prisoner releases” with admirable efficiency.) Ultimately though, the meddlers have to relent in the face of their success at making the city safe for innocents, as represented by yuppie singles in their 30s.

(Ghostbusters II is about the guys making the city a safe place for those yuppies to raise kids by cleansing cultural institutions of evil influence using the power of American patriotism, while the judiciary and mayor come to accept that whatever the law or political elites might say, busting is both necessary and popular.)

Meanwhile, it’s fucking Ghostbusters.

What I love about Ghostbusters is you can write something similarly convincing about how progressive Ghostbusters is. Try watching this video (here’s an excerpt): 

When Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddemore stand before Gozer the Gozarian; they are scientists of no discernibly notable religious disposition (except for Winston, sort of) standing against a god - and they’ve come to defeat that god *with science.*GHOSTBUSTERS, fundamentally, stripped to its core, is a movie about science versus superstition - the ascendant technological ingenuity of man (and, as mentioned, not even “special” ingenuity that only certain benighted scientists can use, since the Ghostbusters have already refined their tech into a democratized user-friendly form that a newbie like Winston can evidently learn to wield in the course of a day or two) versus (literally!) the ancient powers of the gods. And since nearly all modern stories about humanity’s relation to ancient or fictional gods are subtextually “about” the relation of said story’s society of origin to its own currently-dominant spiritual belief systems… yeah, you see where this going: GHOSTBUSTERS is a science vs religion story where religion gets its ass handed to it.

Yeah that vision of intellectual progress and that vision of reactionary restoration ARE perfectly compatible, aren’t they?