'Ghostbusters' And The Post-Truth Politics Of 2016 Blockbuster Culture

I have not yet seen “Ghostbusters” (2016). The reason is prosaic: it will be released in the country where I live next month. But thanks to the way the world works now, this hardly stops me having an opinion on it, any more than it stopped all the pre-release chatterers last week, last month or last year. Indeed, I would have had to have fallen into a coma in early 2014 and to wake up August 4th already ensconced in the multiplex as the lights go down in order to have ensured anything like an “objective” or “disinterested” view on the film.

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Actually, it’s worse than that. “Objectivity” is largely a fallacy, seeing as we’re all formed by our subjective experiences, but this is not about whether I liked the trailer, or if I went for a dodgy Vietnamese meal just prior, or if I’m well disposed toward Kate McKinnon because she has the same chin as my mother, or whatever. This is much more pervasive and prejudicial than idiosyncratic: there is no way I can go to my screening of “Ghostbusters” without already having aligned my politics and united against common enemies —essentially, without my ridiculously in-depth knowledge of a whole raft of factors outside the film itself coloring my experience of it. This has the secondary effect of delegitimizing any thoughts the movie might inspire because anyone, myself included, can quantify my eventual reaction either as confirmation bias (“Well, she would say that, she went in wanting to like it”) or contrarianism (“Well, she would say that, because no one else did”).

C’est la vie, right? Whether I like it or not doesn’t actually matter anyway —and not just because one more dissenting or assenting verdict on Paul Feig‘s “Ghostbusters” isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans at that stage. It doesn’t matter because mine will simply be an opinion on the film, and increasingly a given film matters much less than the kerfuffle it generates. One can be just as germane to the whole “Ghostbusters” debate by throwing peanuts from the sidelines sight unseen (which is after all what everyone was doing for the 2 years after it was announced and before it screened) as one can be having watched it: the movie is an afterthought. As such, “Ghostbusters” represents the apex of a phenomenon last manifested by “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” (which I wrote about previously here), only it’s not even about signal-to-noise ratio anymore: this time, the noise has drowned out the signal. It has become the signal.

One of the noisiest recent elements of the wider “Ghostbusters” narrative resulted in two high-profile departures from Twitter. Leslie Jones‘ was self-imposed, a matter of preservation of sanity, disgust at the nauseating racist and sexist abuse she was receiving and disappointment that Twitter was doing nothing about it. Twitter’s expulsion of notorious troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who was implicated in the targeting of Jones, was very much unwilling, as he clung to the woodwork and bawled about free speech as if hate speech were exactly the same thing, and as if Twitter, as a private company with its own statutes, was somehow required to abide by the most inhumanely libertarian interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Amid all the ugliness the whole debacle revealed, there was something in Jones’ last tweet that struck a different nerve. This is what she wrote: “I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart. All this cause I did a movie. You can hate the movie but the shit I got today… wrong.” It’s that line “you can hate the movie” that is surprising, because it suddenly reminds us what we’re technically all talking about, and yet it seems almost quaint —as if this debate about a movie was ever actually about the movie.