Stage 5 in Ghostbusters: Chapter 1 Part 7 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Stage Five in GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)

Ghostbusters, once “the most successful motion picture comedy of all time”(Shay 13), is according to its director Ivan Reitmanm, a film about the process of going into business, a saga of stage five set against the stage-four suspicion that materialistic enterprises have diabolical associations. Indeed, the firehouse-corporate headquarters of spectral extermination has above it the remains of a previous sign, showing an S with two short lines crowning it—suggesting both a dollar sign and horns. All of this, however, came from the intensive rewriting about two months before the thirty-one-million-dollar filming began. In contrast, Dan Aykroyd’s first draft, “written in a way that your basic acceleration physicist might have enjoyed more than the mass audience” (Shay 7), instead of having the characters develop, places them immediately at the end of stage five. In both draft and finished film, however, they encounter a universe larger than traditional science (though, as we shall later see, it somewhat foreshadows chaos theory, i.e., a distant glimpse of stage seven, precisely because the nature of stage five is to realize that life is much less orderly than stage four decrees).

A member of the American Society for Psychical Research, Aykroyd had personal interests in phenomena outside traditional science. Once he saw on the stairs of his childhood home “ectoplasmic tubes of light” (Shay 6). His religious background included a spiritualist component: “My grandparents, apparently, were holding seances, and my father would tell of being invited to participate as a medium and being put into trances” (Shay 6). In writing about the spirits, Aykroyd extrapolated from his own parapsychological beliefs. The original draft had an alien creature capture a “Terror Dog” pet of Gozer, ruler of another dimension. Aykroyd derived the name “Gozer” from “a documented haunting in England” where the word appeared on the wall (Shay 7). Spiritualism (which had cultic trappings) and parapsychology (which lacked them) were both attempts to prove the existence of religious phenomena physically and thus were controversial products of the materialistic desire for scientific corroboration associated with stage five. Aykroyds multi-dimensional universe is about as large a mega-verse as stage five can envision. At this postmodern stratum of that stage, the willingness to defy the conventional has reached such a height that it accepts the paranormal, so long as spiritual events receive a material explanation.

Fearing that Aykroyd intended this all “rather seriously,” the director, Ivan Reitman rushed in Harold Ramis for a rewrite (Shay 78). Unlike Aykroyd, Ramis did not accept the apparitions literally but searched for a psychological interpretation: “I found some symbolism in the fact that the whole world of the paranormal seems to represent people’s abstract fears—people . . . put all that nameless dread . . . into ghosts and things unseen. But the real source . . . is very real things like violence and death and economic uncertainty” (Shay190). Thus, for Ramis, the world is also wholly material but somewhat smaller and more petty than for Aykroyd—a middle ground of stage five, interested in phenomena as complex as the emotional impact of “economic uncertainty” but not in a multi-dimensional megaverse.

The expert on the beginning phase of stage five was Reitman. He made a career primarily from films addressed to adolescents’ ridicule of stage four, just as they were rising to stage five. Consequently, his approach seems to have been less philosophical and more ad hoc—a knack for how much irreverence the market would bear and when to support tradition. The associate producer Joe Medjuck recalled an instance of this. It concerns a scene where Winston, the African-American Ghostbuster, tries to explain the spectral plague as evidence for the Biblical Judgment Day. Aykroyd (playing the character Stantz) counters, “Every ancient religion had its own myth about the end of the world.” In other words, the Christian narrative arose among many sacred stories, none more authoritative than the others. Medjuck, however, comments, “we [including Reitman] always liked it [the scene] because it offered a possible explanation as to why the city was suddenly being plagued by ghosts” (Shay 129). Which “explanation” does Medjuck mean? The remark of Aykroyd/Stantz echoes a theme running throughout the film: the Second Coming (raising the ghosts) is not that of Christ but of Gozer, a deity from ancient Sumeria. No reason exists for Medjuck and Reitman to single out one of many prefigurements of Gozer’s Coming. What occurs uniquely in the scene is Winston’s reference to Revelations (a text travestied by Aykroyd and Ramis). Reitman and his colleagues seem to have saved the scene because they sensed that a Christian audience would turn to this Biblical allusion for meaning and ignore Aykroyd’s parody of it.

As in many films, the actors also contributed significantly to Ghostbusters. Frequent improvisations and ad libs included Bill Murray’s line “Nobody steps on a church in my town”(Shay 190). With this addition, he turned the Ghostbusters into defenders of Christianity, but, given the rest of the film, it cannot be a very literal or fundamentalist Christianity. Rather, since Murray’s character Venkman is the only one to have begun at stage five, he, by the end of the picture, has grown to have some inkling of stage-six respect for others by way of his love interest. His link to the paranormal, she is at one point even possessed by an elder god, i.e., by some Animus figure with a deep voice. Precisely because it had to reflect what the disagreeing writers had in common, the amusing ghosts and other extra-dimensional beings function as what the character Spengler calls them: part of the “collective unconscious.”

The Labyrinth

An inflexible guardian of state property, a stone lion stands by steps, leading the eye into New York’s Public Library. Behind a frightened librarian, volumes float from one shelf to another, probably never to be found again in an indefinitely vast maze of shelves. This supernatural sabotage of the library’s organization is but the first of the film’s assaults on stage four’s rule-obsessed order.

An unseen force opens catalogue drawers. Sprayed outward, their contents resemble the iterative patterns studied by chaologists. It consists of a series of individually simple repetitions (e.g., cards springing one by one from a drawer), which form complex symmetries. Since no human hand or natural agency vandalizes the stacks, the “chaos” suggests that the universe transcends stage four (here represented by a terrified librarian).

“Venkman Burn In Hell!”

These words, seemingly scrawled in blood, next appear,
defacing the door of the “Paranormal Studies Laboratory.” The bloody graffiti might be demonic—or (like the judgment on the wall of Babylon in Daniel 6:24) heavenly. Or “Burn In Hell” might be one of Venkman’s less complimentary student evaluations. Stage five confronts the inherent messiness of existence with more ambiguity and far less demand for tidy certainty. Calling the viewers attention to the room’s clutter, a sign hangs from the doorknob: “Maid—Please Make Up This Room.”

Behind the door, he fingers parapsychology cards with stars, circles, and wavy lines. “Clairvoyants” guessing them normally produce a melange of accuracy and inaccuracy. Deviating from randomness, the results allegedly illustrate another mysterious order: a situation where an outcome is weakly directed (e.g., by the supposed telepaths’ unpredictable talents). Serious parapsychologists devote their lives investigating this chaosmos beyond human control. Venkman, however, falsifies experiments to seduce a beautiful woman. Interrupting the con game, Stantz (who—ignoring the complexity—still thinks he can do parapsychology according to a stage-four establishment’s rules) drags Venkman to the library to help document a new case study.

The Labyrinth (Again)

At Reitman’s suggestion, the Ghostbusters see evidence that something odd is actually happening: a “symmetrical,” wavy stack of books from floor to ceiling. In dialogue improvised during shooting, Stantz recalls an identical occurrence in the “Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947.” (Finding symmetrical patterns in turbulence has been a major victory of chaos theory.) Venkman quips “no human being would stack books” that way. His sarcasm reminds the audience that proof of the paranormal is still uncertain (for the librarian admitted religious insanity in her family and the first scene might have been her hallucination). Shortly after escaping a falling shelf, however, the Ghostbusters sight the floating torso of an elderly librarian. They approach until the apparition metamorphoses into a “screaming demon” (Shay 3).

Two aspects of the scene deserve note. First, at least in Christian reckoning, ghosts (human souls) and demons (fallen angels) differ significantly. Here, the movie transforms one to the other as elsewhere a whole gamut of religious and science-fiction ideas fuse together—thereby undercutting stage-four order. Slimer (a grotesque being haunting the hotel), for instance, is, according to Aykroyd, not a single ghost but “a kind of confluence of stored up psychic energy . . . an accumulation of spirits”(Shay 64). According to Gross, the filmmakers decided that the specters were “souls of the entire universe” (Shay 145). These intentions manifest in the varied appearance of the ghosts, ranging from the librarian’s initially human features to the cartoonish blob that is Slimer.

Second, the Ghostbusters run from the spook, making them childish (i.e., ripe for development). In world mythology, “chaos” often connotes individual infancy or that of the world. Not surprisingly, religions have frequently prized the innocent, unshaped qualities of the youthful or primal. Jesus recommends being childlike (e.g., Mark 10:14). Taoists honor hun-tun, original “chaos” personified (Girardot 16). Throughout Ghostbusters, the parapsychologists appear partly childlike: Stantz, a naive enthusiast; Venkman, a selfish adolescent; and Spengler, an intellect whose emotions remain undeveloped. They are also, of course, adult entrepreneurs and scientists, who save the city. Indeed, the movie Ghostbusters itself constitutes a cusp. On the one hand, the action supports Aykroyd’s premise that the paranormal is objectively real, not just some character’s delusion. On the other hand, jokes by Venkman and others make the action seem psychological, Ramis’s premise.

Ghostbusting

Immediately after their escape, Stantz plans to “bust some heads—in the spiritual sense” with “unlicensed nuclear accelerator[s]” that might explode at any moment. Fired from the university for flagrant disregard of research protocols, they are forced upward from the stage four-shelter of academic bureaucracy to a capitalist stage five that demands “results.” This is a struggle for them as they found a paranormal eliminations business and ineptly destroy the buildings they exorcise.

Their first client is Dana. In her supernaturally soiled kitchen, growling comes from the refrigerator. Opened, it reveals a fiery road to a shrine with “TERROR DOGS.” These combine aspects of “fu” (Buddha) dog statues from Chinese temples and gargoyles from Christian cathedrals. Later investigations reveal that her apartment building concentrates “spiritual turbulence” afflicting the city. Believing society “too sick to survive,” a thousand Gozer-worshipping cultists used to gather there “praying for annihilation.”

Whereas at stage four, there is only one religion worth considering—the True One (whichever that may be), Ghostbusters has a stage-five recognition that there are many faiths. Stage-six deems them all equally correct. Ghostbusters, however, prioritizes a science (or pseudo-science): parapsychology, which studies them all. Indeed, the film itself reflects research into religion and occultism. The spirit “Xul, ” for instance, comes from The Necronomicon. It is a work like Ghostbusters about rituals to evoke ancient gods. Allegedly an eighth century Arab treatise, The Necronomicon is more likely a twentieth–century amalgam of the mythologies of H. P. Lovecraft, Aleister Crowley, and Ancient Sumeria. Indeed, having a modern revival of Sumerian religion may allude to Crowley’s “magick,” which he described as “the rediscovery of the Sumerian Tradition” (quoted in Simon xi). The movie’s end-of-the-world theme suits his self description of himself as the Great Beast of the Apocalypse.

Marshmallow Armageddon

In a wild parody of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and comparable horror films, the TERROR DOGS “Gatekeeper” and “Keymaster” possess the bodies of two representatives of stage five, the professional musician Dana and an accountant. With the usual stage-five emphasis on sexual variety, they engage in erotic magic, as libido functions for metaphysical purposes in Wicca, Tantrism, and various other religions. Such sexual doubles entendres as the names “Gatekeeper” and “Keymaster” (and other imagery of penetrating an entryway) do fit their supposed Sumerian origin. An opening-the-door ritual was “the central ceremony in a Sumerian wedding, which concluded the marriage and immediately preceded its consummation” (Jacobsen 1976, 55-72). At the sacred nuptials of the Sumerian demigod Dumuzi, he puns erotically, “Make haste to open ....” (Jacobsen 1987, 1-23). Taken into the film’s context, however, these allusions are not a return to some primitive faith but titillating play with the idea of an erotic cult, since stage five often includes a reaction against the sexual and other repression common to stage-four religion.

Being ridiculed as the latter, a Roman Catholic cardinal inaccurately labels the above “a sign from God.” According to the final script, “The Ghostbusters stand there [before Gozer] facing their new God like Moses on Mount Sinai” (Shay 183). Early in production, Gozer resembled the traditional version of God the Father, a kindly old man. Later, inspired by feminist revisionism in Judaism and Christianity, Reitman decided to cast as Gozer an unknown female with makeup suggesting an androgynous rock singer.

S/he lets them decide in what form s/he will destroy the world. Stantz chooses a marshmallow person. With nuclear packs flashing, they shatter her/him, splattering dessert over everything. From this cataclysm, they emerge to the disorderly cheers of the masses including orthodox Jews, a row of priests, and people who have tossed away their “end of the world” placards. Diverse faiths unite momentarily in celebrating the disorderly entrepreneurs. According to James Thurber, “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility” (Eastman 136). This is a perfect definition of humor at stage five, as contrasted, for instance with stage four, which finds chaos too threatening to be amusing.

As the Ghostbusters eliminate specters of the past, so the film subdues them with laughter—part of stage-five’s project of clearing a secular space, by ridiculing superstitions and taboos. Since (among other things), the ghosts represent unconscious fears, as Ramis intended, the movie shows that repressing them (in the confinement chamber) leads to their release, but that they can be overcome by exploding Gozer, who controls them. This is very like one hypnotic technique, where an image representing an unproductive mental state is imagined expanding until it explodes. (I have seen that technique used successfully against phobias, and the movie version is particularly well designed for clearing fears because it first represents the dominant version of danger with a relatively unthreatening image (the marshmallow person); then, this is obliterated.) The cartoon series continues the Ghostbusters’s project of dealing with these fears, sometimes quite explicitly, as when the team confront and overcome bogeys from their own pasts.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 1 Part 8

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