Ghostbusters & The Dramatization of Disenchantment
The font from Stranger Things looked familiar to me when I first saw it, and then I realized It’s very similar to the font from The Real Ghostbusters, the animated series developed in the wake of the movie’s massive success. Bold, black capitalized serif typeface, with a style almost seeming to loom or tower in the dark, backlit by a strange glow. One of many signs of a generational creative cycle, an oneiric Saturn Return, especially those of us inspired by the more marginal genres of sci fi and fantasy.
Us kids born in the mid 80s came out into the world among a media ecology fed by the odd confluence of cyberpunk (Tron, Ghost in the Machine), anthrozoomorphic fantasy or sci fi (Ninja Turtles, Animorphs), ancient and itinerant ghosts (ghostbusters) and apocalyptic animism (The Brave Little Toaster). The themes of strange animacy, weird ecology, and mutation or hybridity , which I think now are enjoying a resurgence of attention, were very much planted in our psyches in ways we may not be fully aware of. Ghostbusters and Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles were two of me and my brothers’ favorite shows.
As I revisit it now, Ghostbusters can almost be read as a satire of disenchantment. A somewhat frat-like brotherhood of parapsychologists and professional ghost hunters work to rid their city of specters, monsters, ghouls, and various cryptids of myth and lore…like Men in Black, but the difference is the Ghostbusters’ quarry is not confined to beings of extraterrestrial origin, but ones who may also be indigenous to earth. During the course of their adventures in spirit extermination, we learn various histories and anecdotes from the annals of supernatural literature and myth, a lot of which probably went over our head as kids, but not completely. (This was probably the first time I heard about HP Lovecraft’s work.)
Yet, ironically, as we tag along for the ride with the team and occasionally Slimer, the rascally trickster turned friendly-ghost sidekick, we are enveloped in a world where ghosts and fantastic creatures are not just real, they’re so real that they’re inconvenient—treated like pests or vermin, with Egon, Winston and the others caught in a perpetual game of whack-a-ghost. We are often left wondering if the game, like most “pest management” in general, is futile in light of the West’s frustratingly slow yet deepening understanding of ecology.
These beyond human beings come out of the woodwork of a fictional New York City, disgruntled at these states of modernity in which they are not welcome, attempting to make home in a spiritual and spatial ecology where the habitats for the dead and the supernatural have been almost completely destroyed. Relegated to pest species along industrious and adaptable contemporaries like rats and coyotes, these ghosts take up fugitive status as disrupters of the paradigms and systematics of disenchantment (and colonialism). We humans, or at least the humans in the show, are then stuck in a paradoxical dance where our repression of ghosts reifies—or makes real—their significance and power, and contributes to a continued cognitive/spiritual splitting, as our futures do battle. Among the contestants in Thunderdome are the technocrats and tamers of feral nature with the token ghost friend (who seems oddly like a servant consigned to a vaguely codependent relationship), and the post-collapse animists who make altars from salvaged analog effigies and drag artists for whom horror is salvation. I’m rooting for the latter.
