[COLUMN] In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Bustin' Doesn't Feel Good | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

On the soundtrack to Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr. sang, “Bustin’ makes me feel good.” Watching the latest entry in the franchise, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, it’s tempting to ask if bustin’ makes you feel anything at all.

Frozen Empire is a direct continuation of the previous Ghostbusters sequel, Afterlife. As such, it shared that sequel’s strange reverence for a quirky and irreverent comedy about ghost blowjobs. Picking up where that film ended, Frozen Empire follows a new generation of Ghostbusters. There’s Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon), the daughter of Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), along with her children Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), and her partner Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd).

If there is a central theme tying Frozen Empire together, it is the importance of being a Ghostbuster. Gary longs to be accepted by Trevor and Phoebe as their father, becoming part of the Spengler dynasty. “Nobody wants to be a Grooberson,” he explains early in the film. Trevor wants to prove that he’s an adult, which he does by confronting the ghost Slimer who haunts the family home. Early in the film, Phoebe is told that she’s too young to be a Ghostbuster, and sets out to prove that wrong.

In the world of Frozen Empire, busting ghosts is more than just a profession. It is a vocation. In the original Ghostbusters, Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) joined the team because he needed a salary. Now, Winston is a billionaire who invests his money in paranormal science to scale up the Ghostbusters franchise. In the original Ghostbusters, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) was a cynical conman motivated primarily by his lust and greed. In Frozen Empire, Peter is a true believer.

No characters in Frozen Empire have any agency outside of their connection to the franchise. This is also true of the supporting characters carried over from Afterlife, now fully subsumed into apprentice roles under established veterans. “Podcast” (Logan Kim) studies under (Dan Aykroyd). Lucky Domingo (Celeste O'Connor) dons a proton pack to work in Winston’s laboratory. There’s nobody outside the profession, like Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) in the original film and its sequel.

This carries over to the entire city of New York. The original Ghostbusters is one of the defining movies about New York City. While Frozen Empire did shoot on location, it isn’t interested in New York as a location unto itself. It is fascinated by New York as the setting of Ghostbusters. The film’s geography of Manhattan is primarily preoccupied with visiting locations that featured in the original Ghostbusters, rather than in exploring how the city has changed in the past few decades.

The movie opens at Hook & Ladder Company 8, the iconic firehouse. Later in the movie, Ray takes Phoebe and Podcast to the New York Public Library, the location of the famous opening scene of the original movie. Hubert Wartzki (Patton Oswalt) walks the trio through the bowels of the library, the familiar sets. Ray even catches a glimpse of Eleanor Twitty (Ruth Oliver), the first ghost to appear on screen in the original Ghostbusters.

However, it isn’t just the geography of New York City that is defined by the original Ghostbusters. The city’s politics are apparently still shaped by the events of that movie. Walter Peck (William Atherton), the EPA inspector who shut down the Ghostbusters in the original film, is apparently now the mayor of New York City. It’s interesting to contemplate how that might have happened. What platform would an EPA inspector run on? However, in Frozen Empire, Peck is still defined by the Ghostbusters.

New York seems small, a sentiment reinforced by the recurring sense that characters can magically teleport across the island of Manhattan. When the city is attacked by a frost demon, there’s very little sense of the chaos that such a creature would cause while carving its way across town. In the midst of this attack, both Winston and Peter are able to spontaneously materialize at the firehouse headquarters, looking none-the-worse-for wear as the city freezes around them. It’s a small world, after all.

Frozen Empire allows no room for doubt or cynicism in the world of Ghostbusters. Early on, Phoebe strikes up an unlikely friendship with a ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), which raises all sorts of questions about the morality of busting ghosts. Phoebe comes to care for Melody, welcoming her into her life and home. In some ways, this is framed as a rejection of her family business, a buster who cares for ghosts. Inevitably, Melody betrays Phoebe. Phoebe was wrong to trust a ghost.

This arc is mirrored with Nadeem Razmaadi (Kumail Nanjiani), who is introduced as an opportunistic grifter peddling the relics that he found in his deceased grandmother’s possession to Ray. Nadeem is quite close to the man that Peter used to be, and it’s perhaps revealing that the first of the two sequences to feature Bill Murray pairs him with Nanjiani. Nadeem is irreverent and fast-talking. He’s goofy, and he’ll go along with anything for a quick buck.

Nadeem eventually learns that, like Callie and her family, he is the caretaker of a grand legacy and inheritance. His grandmother’s beliefs weren’t ridiculous superstitions, and he was wrong to try to give away the things that she passed down to him. Like Phoebe and Trevor in Afterlife, Nadeem has no choice but to accept his grandmother’s cause and destiny. Indeed, Frozen Empire goes out of its way to parallel Nadeem and his grandmother with the Ghostbusters.

In the world of Frozen Empire, the Ghostbusters are more than just a pest control company launched by a group of unemployed academics. Instead, they are part of a dynasty and a legacy that reaches back generations, one that must be preserved and maintained. The opening scenes of Frozen Empire follow a group of firemen from the firehouse in 1904, investigating strange events at an upper-crust club – deliberately parallelling the team’s first official job in the original film.

Frozen Empire strains to imbue the Ghostbusters franchise with a mythic weight. There’s a lot of fire and ice symbolism, tied to that firehouse headquarters. Melody burnt to death in a fire. The villain of the film is the ice demon Garraka, who must be fought with fire. The film opens with Robert Frost’s poem Fire and Ice. It’s eventually revealed that Nadeem’s family were “Fire Masters”, the ancient sorcerers who defeated and imprisoned Garraka. “Kinda like Ghostbusters,” Phoebe explains.

There is a whiff of desperation to all this. Frozen Empire makes an interesting companion piece to Sony’s other big Spring release, Madame Web. These movies both exist in the context of the larger “superherofication” of pop culture, the belief that audiences are inherently drawn to the conventions of the superhero story and that those can be grafted onto any other genre. Of course, it’s strange to see Frozen Empire commit to this approach as the superhero genre is in decline.

Nadeem can literally control fire. He has the power to bend flame to his will. Towards the climax, he is able to throw fireballs. Obviously, the Ghostbusters franchise has always unfolded in a world that operates according to very different rules, but Nadeem is presented as a superpowered human being, a bold departure for the series. He even gets to wear a cool costume with a mask. Nadeem is guided by destiny. By implication, so is the rest of the cast.

It's hard not to feel cynical about all this. It doesn’t help that the film is very obviously working around substantial external limitations that are very much at odds with what it is attempting to do. Bill Murray has had a long and complicated relationship with the franchise, and so it’s no surprise that he only agreed to a very limited involvement with Frozen Empire. However, the film still insists that Peter is an active part of the Ghostbusters franchise, because… well, everybody is.

Frozen Empire never really feels like a movie. It is instead a piece of content designed to further the Ghostbusters brand. If the film can be said to be “about” anything, it is about the value of Ghostbusters as a piece of intellectual property. It’s about the value of performing Ghostbusters, of investing in Ghostbusters, of embracing Ghostbusters. This is true inside the narrative, as Phoebe, Trevor, and Gary demonstrate. However, it is also true of the film’s relationship to its audience.

In recent years, Hollywood has made a point of “modeling” fandom for its audience, presenting characters who are intended to embody the ideal fan of a given property. These are characters within these narratives who are defined by their relationship to (and often unquestioning love of) the larger intellectual property: Rey (Daisy Ridley) in The Force Awakens, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) in Ms. Marvel, Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid) on Star Trek: Lower Decks.

This is just good brand management. It encourages fans to see themselves within the object of their fandom and it allows these properties to justify such fandom within the context of their narratives. In this way, these narratives assert their own value and importance not through argument or demonstration, simply by presenting it as a fait accompli. These are objects of worship because even the characters within the world worship the intellectual property.

In this context, sustaining the intellectual property is an end unto itself. When this approach is taken to its extreme, meaning and substance aren’t just unnecessary but are potentially dangerous. Giving these projects a perspective would jeopardize their perfect emptiness. Making these franchises “about” anything other than themselves – suggesting that anything could be more important than the continuation of the property – risks potentially alienating or confusing fans. So is any emotion beyond nostalgia for what came before, validation of love of the franchise.

In other words, Frozen Empire seems to argue, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a ghost busting on a human face — forever.