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“Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”:
Totemic Nostalgia, Toxic Fandom
and the
Ghostbusters
Platonic
William Proctor1
Recibido: 2017-01-26 Aprobado por pares: 2017-03-14
Enviado a pares: 2017-02-14 Aceptado: 2017-05-05
DOI: 10.5294/pacla.2017.20.4.10
Para citar este artículo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo
Proctor, W. (2017). “Bitches ain’t gonna hunt no ghosts”: totemic nostalgia, toxic
fandom and the
Ghostbusters
platonic.
Palabra Clave 20
(4), 1105-1141. DOI: 10.5294/
pacla.2017.20.4.10
Abstract
In March 2016, the trailer for Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot debuted onli-
ne and suered the unfortunate accolade of being the most disliked trailer
in YouTube history. Popular news media, including professional, pro-am,
and amateur commentators, picked up on the resulting online kerfue as
clear indication that there is something roen in the state of fandom. Feig
himself frequently turned to the echo chamber of social media to denoun-
ce fans as “some of the biggest arseholes I’ve ever met in my life”. Addres-
sing fans that singled out the reboot as “ruining my childhood,” Feig poured
fuel on the re by criticising such a perspective as merely the product of
“some whacked-out teenager,” overdramatic, pathological and, perhaps
more pointedly, “toxic”. In so doing, Feig—and, by extension, the cast of
the Ghostbusters reboot—replicated and re-activated traditional stereoty-
pes of the fanboy—living in his mother’s basement and obsessing over tri-
vial entertainment.
1 Bournemouth University, England. bproctor@bournemouth.ac.uk
1106 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
is article takes the claims of “childhood ruination” seriously to examine
what is at stake for fans of the original Ghostbusters lm. Despite the or-
gans of online media heavily criticising fanboys as misogynistic relics and
sexist heathens, oen in aggressive ways, I argue that fans’ aective, nostal-
gic aachment to the rst Ghostbusters lm—the “primary cinematic text”
(Ber
nard, 2014)—forms a crucial component of fans’ “self-narratives”
(Hills, 2012) and “trajectories of the self”. By drawing on empirical work
on “nostalgic narratives” conducted in the psychology eld, I argue that it
is not simply toxicity that drives these fans to defend the fan-object from
being colonised by an invading text, but, rather, what I am terming as to-
temic nostalgia, a form of protectionism centred on an aective relationship
with a text, usually forged in early childhood. reats to the Ghostbusters
totemic object, then, “can thus be felt as threats to these fans’ self-narra-
tives” (Hills, 2012, p. 114).
Keywords
Toxic fan cultures; ghostbusters; totemic nostalgia; gender; reboot (Sour-
ce: Unesco esaurus).
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“Ninguna vieja va a cazar fantasmas”:
nostalgia totémica,
fandom
tóxico
y los Cazafantasmas
Resumen
En marzo de 2016, el avance de la nueva versión de los Cazafantasmas de
Paul Feig debutó en línea y sufrió el desafortunado honor de ser el avan-
ce más detestado en la historia de YouTube. Los medios de comunicación
populares, incluyendo los comentaristas acionados, semiprofesionales y
profesionales, observaron a partir del escándalo en línea resultante que ha-
bía una indicación clara de que existe algo podrido en el estado del fandom.
Feig recurrió frecuentemente a la cámara de eco de las redes sociales para
denunciar a los fans como “de las personas más imbéciles que he conocido
en mi vida”. Dirigiéndose a los fans que calicaron a la nueva versión como
una “arruina infancias”, Feig le echó leña al fuego al criticar esta perspecti-
va como el simple producto de “un adolescente demente”, sobreactuado,
patológico y quizás, más explícitamente, “tóxico”. Al hacerlo, Feig — y, por
extensión, el reparto de la nueva versión de los Cazafantasmas — replicó y
reactivó los estereotipos tradicionales del fan que todavía vive con su mamá
y que se obsesiona con el entretenimiento trivial.
Este artículo toma con seriedad las declaraciones de la “infancia arruinada”
para examinar qué es lo que se encuentra en juego para los fans de la pelícu-
la original de los Cazafantasmas. A pesar de que los órganos de los medios
de comunicación en línea critican a los fans como reliquias misóginas y pa-
ganos sexistas, a menudo de manera agresiva, lo que argumento es el apego
afectivo y nostálgico de los fans a la primera película de los Cazafantasmas
— el “texto cinematográco primario” (Bernard, 2014) — lo que forma un
componente crucial de las “autonarrativas” (Hills, 2012) y “trayectorias del
yo” de los fans. Basándome en trabajos empíricos sobre “narraciones nos-
tálgicas” realizadas al campo de la psicología, argumento que no es simple-
mente toxicidad lo que impulsa a estos fans a defender el objeto del fan de
que sea colonizado por un texto invasor, sino más bien lo que llamo nos-
1108 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
talgia totémica, es una forma de proteccionismo centrado en una relación
afectiva con un texto, usualmente forjado en la primera infancia. Las ame-
nazas al objeto totémico de los Cazafantasmas, entonces, “puede percibir-
se como amenazas a las autonarrativas de estos fans” (Hills, 2012, p.114).
Palabras clave
Culturas de fans tóxicos; Cazafantasmas; nostalgia totémica; género; nue-
va versión (Fuente: Tesauro de la Unesco).
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“Nenhuma mulher vai caçar nenhum
fantasma”: nostalgia totêmica,
fandom
tóxico e os Caça-Fantasmas
Resumo
Em março de 2016, o trailer da nova versão dos Caça-Fantasma de Paul Feig
debutou online e sofreu a infelicidade de tornar-se o trailer mais detestado
na história do YouTube. A mídia popular, incluindo os comentaristas ama-
dores, semiprossionais e prossionais observaram, a partir do escândalo
online resultante, que havia uma indicação clara de que existe algo podre
no estado do fandom. Feig recorreu frequentemente à câmara de eco das
redes sociais para referir-se aos fãs como “alguns dos maiores imbecis que
conheci na minha vida”. Dirigindo-se aos fãs que qualicaram a nova ver-
são como uma “destrutora da infância”, Feig avivou o fogo ao criticar tal
perspectiva como o produto meramente de “um adolescente doido”, sobre
atuado, patológico e talvez, mais explicitamente, “tóxico”. Ao fazê-lo, Feig
— e, por extensão, o elenco da nova versão dos Caça-Fantasmas — repli-
cou e reativou os estereótipos tradicionais do fã que ainda mora com a mãe
e que se obceca com o entretenimento trivial.
Este artigo encara com seriedade as declarações da “infância arruinada” para
examinar o que é que está em jogo para os fãs do lme original dos Caça-
Fantasmas. Apesar de que os órgãos da mídia online criticam os fãs como
relíquias misóginas e pagãos sexistas, com frequência de maneira agressi-
va, o que argumento é o apego afetivo e nostálgico dos fãs ao primeiro l-
me dos Caça-Fantasmas — o “texto cinematográco primário” (Bernard,
2014) — o que forma um componente crucial das “auto narrativas” (Hills,
2012) e “trajetórias do eu” dos fãs. Baseando-me em trabalhos empíricos
sobre “narrações nostálgicas” realizadas no campo da psicologia, argumen-
to que não é simplesmente toxicidade o que impulsiona estes fãs a defen-
der o objeto do fã de ser colonizado por um texto invasor, mas sim o que
eu chamo de nostalgia totémica, é uma maneira de protecionismo focado
em uma relação afetiva com um texto, usualmente forjado na primeira in-
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fância. As ameaças ao objeto totêmico dos Caça-Fantasmas, então, “podem
sentir-se como ameaças às auto narrativas destes fãs” (Hills, 2012, p. 114).
Palavras-chave
Culturas de fãs tóxicos; Caça-Fantasmas; nostalgia totémica; gênero; nova
versão (Fonte: Tesauro da Unesco).
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Ghostbusters in (Development) Hell
Released on June 8, 1984, the original Ghostbusters lm swily aained the
status of cult blockbuster (Hills, 2003) and became a cultural cornerstone, es-
pecially for rst-generation fans. e success of the lm, both in critical and
commercial spheres, spawned a transmedia franchise comprised of multiple
incarnations, such as: animated TV spin os, e Real Ghostbusters (1986–
1991) and Extreme Ghostbusters (1997); a bevy of video games, the most
popular among fans being Ghostbusters: e Videogame (2009), which fea-
tured the canonical quartet, Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis, and
Ernie Hudson, lending their voices and likenesses for the in-game avatars,
and which Akroyd described as “essentially the third lm” (Tibbes, 2014);
several comic book series procured by dierent license holders (Marvel,
IDW); various Lego “adaptations” (Wolf, 2014), such as the iconic Ecto-1
mobile and the equally iconic Hook and Ladder rehouse; several themed
Universal Studio aractions, including Streetbusters (1991), a seasonal “trans-
branded” (Hills, 2015) mash-up, whereby the Ghostbusters team tackle the
menace of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice; and, of course, a cluer of “non-narrati-
ve” elements (Harvey, 2015) and paratextual frames (board games, toy ran-
ges, associated paraphernalia). Yet, despite the panoply of adaptations and
recongurations within what we could term, in deference to Will Brooker
(2012), the Ghostbusters matrix, the original lm remains rmly ensconced
as the primary text—the source—from which secondary transmedia vehi-
cles are launched. Within the hierarchy of texts, then, the original Ghost-
busters lm stands at the summit.
A sequel, Ghostbusters II, was released in 1989 but, for many fans, failed
to re-capture the spirit of the 1984 zeitgeist. During the 1990s, reports be-
gan circulating about a third feature lm. Wrien by Akroyd and Coneheads
collaborator, Tom Davis, and allegedly titled Ghostbusters 3: Hellbent, the
script featured the original team being transported to an alternative New
York. Bill Murray, however, refused to sign on and the plans entered, rather
appositely, that liminal non-space known in the industry as “development
hell.” Fast-forward to 2011, and Akroyd, again championing the potential
for further franchise development, appeared on e Dennis Miller Show and
1112 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
promoted another script, Ghostbusters: New Blood, which would pass along
the torch to a new generation (the “new blood” of the title):
For a while, the concept for the third movie was that we’d cleaned up
all the ghosts in New York and the Ghostbusters were out of busi-
ness. But that’s not where we should be going. We should have new
Ghostbusters doing their thing, being handed the torch by the old.
Once people start thinking along those lines, we’re going to be able
to keep it alive. (Akroyd, as cited in Wallace, 2015, p. 222).
Aer over a decade of false starts and promises, the passing of Harold
Ramis (who played spores, moulds and fungus hobbyist, Egon Spengler,
in both Ghostbusters lms) led to the demise of a third live-action lm as a
viable option. Coupled with Murray’s continuing refusal to don the proton
pack once more, the Ghostbusters lm franchise seemed to be nothing but
a spectre, haunting the fringes of popular culture but, eectively, trapped
in limbo. Understanding that replacing both Murray and Ramis with new
actors would be unacceptable for many Ghostbusters fans—called “ghost-
heads,” in fan vernacular—Bridesmaids director, Paul Feig, suggested a new
strategy as a way out of the liminal dungeon: to reboot the Ghostbusters lm
series with a new team, all of them female, and narratively disconnected from
the canonical original. Choosing to wipe the slate clean in order to “begin
again” (Proctor, 2018), however, raised the hackles of many a ghosthead,
who then turned to web 2.0 to vent their chagrin at what was perceived to
be a disgraceful violation of what I term the totemic object, that is, a prima-
ry text that opens up a mnemonic conduit to an idealized history of “nos-
talgic narratives” (Vess et al., 2012) comprised by “intimations of selood”
(Jenkins, 2004) and “trajectories of the self” (Giddens, 1991).
In March 2016, fan outrage reached an apex in the days following
the online debut of the Ghostbusters 2016 trailer (hereaer GB ’16), which
swily became the most disliked lm trailer in YouTube’s short but impact-
ful history. Online news media picked up on the story and orchestrated
a cultural restorm, primarily hinged on a minority cluster of misogynist
comments, oen given oxygen by Feig’s discursive interventions on social
media. Fandom is “home to some of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met in
my life,” said Feig, and publicly accused avid fans on social media for ped-
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dling “vile misogynist shit” (as cited in Child, 2015, n.p.). In the process,
Feig singled out those fans that vilied the reboot as ruining one’s child-
hood, a common (fan) complaint when a totemic object is threatened by
external incursion:
The biggest thing I’ve heard for the past four months is, “thanks for
ruining my childhood.” It’s going to be on my tombstone when I die.
It’s so dramatic. Honestly, the only way I could ruin your childhood is
if I got into a time machine and went back and made you an orphan. I
figured it’s some wacked out teenager. (Feig, as cited in Riley, 2016)
is article takes the claims of childhood ruination seriously as a way
into theorizing what I mean by “totemic nostalgia,” which is non-toxic, and
the way in which this might extend into malicious “toxic fan practice.” I
show that fans’ nostalgic narratives, formed by an intense and aective rela-
tionship with the totemic object are valuable “texts” in their own right and
help shine a light on resources of “meaning-making” drawn upon and pro-
duced by fans (Routledge, et al. 2012). GB ’16 provides an apposite case
study to critically examine the formation of nostalgic narratives centred on
a totemic object.
is article does not intend to cheerlead or chastise these behaviours
as this would undoubtedly lead to unhelpful binaries between “good” and
“bad” ways of being a fan. Following Hills’ suggestion in the opening pag-
es of the seminal Fan Cultures, I refuse to construct “decisionist” narratives
“which aack or defend sections of fandom” and usually “hinge on making
political decisions as to the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of fan cultures” (Hills,
2002, p. xii). Instead, I adopt a suspensionist position,
which refuses to split fandom into the “good” and “bad” and which
embraces inescapable contradiction (the ugly?). This means ap-
proaching the contradictions of fan cultures […] as essential cultural
negotiations that can only be closed down at the cost of ignoring
fandom’s cultural dynamics. (Hills, 2002, pp. xii–xiii)
e article is split into two sections, the rst of which addresses and
theorises totemic nostalgia as a form of “risk management” and a source of
self-narrative, self-continuity and ontological security (Hills, 2002, 2012).
1114 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
e subsequent section considers the way in which totemic nostalgia may
negatively blossom into bullying, harassment and abuse in online spaces
which, in turn, provides grounds for theorising toxic fan practices. In the
conclusion, I raise important questions regarding research practices and
consider a future for fan studies that grapples with the barbed wire of on-
line fan cultures.
Totemic Objects, Nostalgic Narratives,
and Ontological Security
According to Svetlana Boym (2001), nostalgia
is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.
Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a ro-
mance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a
long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double
exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad,
past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to
force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface
[…] the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal
irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition. (p. xiv)
Historically, nostalgia has been viewed, as with fandom, as a patho-
logical condition, a “disease of an aicted imagination” (Boym, 2001, p.
4) that produced a smorgasbord of symptoms and ailments: “nausea, loss
of appetite, pathological changes in the lungs, brain inammation, cardi-
ac arrest, high fever […] marasmus and a propensity for suicide” (p. 4) as
well as “a lack of manliness and unprogressive aitudes” (p. 6). Coined by
Swiss doctor Johanne Hofer in 1688, nostalgia was a “curable disease” and
required medical intervention using leeches, opium, “warm hypnotic emul-
sions” and, more radically, “by inciting pain and terror” (pp. 3–5). Begin-
ning in the seventeenth century, Europeans frequently reported “epidemics
of nostalgia” (p. 6), which eventually spread across the Atlantic and into
North America during the Civil War. In this way, nostalgia was thought of
as an enormously negative inuence, a debilitating psychological and phys-
iological malaise to be purged from the self.
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e contemporary view on nostalgia is, thankfully, less dramatic, vir-
ulent, and pathological. Recently, a programme of research in the psycho-
logical sciences “advances the notion that nostalgia, a sentimental longing
for the past, is one resource that enables people to aain and maintain the
perception that their lives are meaningful” (Routledge, et al. 2012, p. 451).
Rather than a “curable disease,” then, nostalgia is an armative psychical
bulwark, a “meaning-making resource” and a “resource for the self” (Vess et
al., 2012 p. 281) both of which counteract “self-discontinuity and restores
self-continuity” (Sedikides, et al. 2015, p. 52). is emergent research pro-
vides a valuable framework for theorising (fan) nostalgic narratives as aug-
mentations and aggregations of the individual self, of “the potent connection
between reecting nostalgically on the past and maintaining a meaningful
conception of one’s current life” (Routledge, et al. 2012, p. 454). However,
rather than a neat binary fragmenting past and present selves of childhood
and adulthood cracked in half, nostalgia represents a dialectical conuence
of temporal identities. Put simply, it is “a mode of temporal thought” that
collapses distinctions between past and present. Generally speaking, nostal-
gic narratives “feature the self as an active and central player” and “carries a
predominantly positive aective signature” (Vess et al., 2012, p. 274). Em-
pirical evidence demonstrates that nostalgia is associated with “aective-
ly warm concepts” (Vess et al., 2012, p. 274), such as childhood (whether
romanticized, imagined or not), and provides a route to understanding the
way in which fans’ aective relationship with a totemic object can function
as an ontological buer against perceived threats and external incursions.
is requires some explaining.
In what is perhaps the most positive, and indeed highly romanticized,
representation of fans in media culture, the documentary lm, Ghostheads
(Mertens, 2016), is a sincere and earnest look at a select group of Ghostbusters
fans for which the franchise property is a fundamental aspect of their every-
day lives. One fan, Tom Gerdhardt, recounts a mundane existence working
in a local pizzeria that he remains commied to in order to provide food and
essentially produce for his family:
Everyday I’m here, at my job, I’m nobody, I’m an average Joe. On
weekends when there’s events we want to partake in and I’m in my
1116 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
gear? I forget about work and I don’t feel like I’m a nobody that I feel
all week long. When I throw on my flight suit, then I’m truly me. (as
cited in Mertens, 2016)
Here, Tom manoeuvres between dierent binary selves: between the
“false” identity of the blue collar, pizza dude, and his “true” identity as a pas-
sionate and dedicated ghosthead. Like a superhero, Tom’s working-class
self is transformed into his secret identity as a ghostbuster! Of course, we
shouldn’t take this as literal, but as one of the ways that fandom might pro-
vide “repertoires of identication” (Jenkins, 2004, p. 7) and demonstra-
tive of “the aective power of primary identication” (p. 30) anchored to
the totemic object. Indeed, Gerdhardt’s “self-narrative” (Hills, 2012) is not
simply enmeshed with the fan-object alone, but intrinsically connected to
childhood memories of viewing the original lm with his grandfather, who
has since passed away from lymphoma cancer. In one particularly charged
scene, Gerdhardt visibly struggles to contain a cascade of emotion and af-
fect hinged on nostalgic memories, which is worth quoting at length:
Not having my parents and that it was something I shared with my
grandfather and I held him very dear…it was something that we shared
together, it wasn’t something that I watched with my mom, she was
always so busy and I was getting weekend Dad… it was the first
thing we did together and we bonded, shared a laugh… birthdays
and holidays I always got something Ghostbusters… the cartoon
[The Real Ghostbusters] was a huge hit… that was my thing and he
was sitting there with me, eating his oatmeal cookies, dunking ‘em
in tea… it was something that I bonded with him and that, because I
shared it with him and it was so big to me as a kid, it stuck with me
[…] it wasn’t so much the film itself, but who I shared it with which
made me love it even more because that person enjoyed it with me.
(as cited in Mertens, 2016)
A recovering alcoholic, Abigail Gardner, explains that Ghostbusters
helped maintain her sobriety: “In order to not drink, I started watching Ghost-
busters and I found something in that movie that gave me hope and gave
me purpose and meaning and a reason to live” (as cited in Mertens, 2016).
For Abigail, the traditional route provided by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
didn’t work at all, but “the aective power of primary identication” cen-
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tred on the Ghostbusters franchise became a therapeutically valuable tool
for wellbeing and self-improvement even, to some extent, transcendence.
Performing fandom, at least in these (mediatized) cases, is not sim-
ply a routinized fun-lled extravaganza, but intrinsically bound to personal
contexts, to everyday realities and “trajectories of the self.” For these (admit-
tedly few) fans, all of which are “ooded with aect” (Hills, 2015, p. 100),
Ghostbusters is so much more than frivolous, disposable entertainment; it
is, quite simply, one of the most important cultural text of their lives and a
discursive foundation in the architecture of self-narrative. As Hills (2012)
explains, “fans’ sense of self-identity is so rmly enmeshed” with the fan-ob-
ject of choice, that they may lionize the primary text to such an extent that
“potential threats to textual authenticity” can become sites of intense ne-
gotiation and defensive bulwarking (p. 115). ese threats, then, may
constitute grounds for issues of ontological security, and, from this per-
spective, defensive manoeuvres seek to process existential anxieties “back
into a sense of security” (Hills, 2012, p. 115). Drawing on Anthony Gid-
dens’ sociological work, Hills (2012) borrows the concept of ontological
security to explain this element of fan identities as “the psychical aain-
ment of basic trust in self-continuity and environmental continuity” (p.
113). us, threats to totemic objects “can thus be felt as threats to these
fans’ self-narratives” (Hills, 2012, p. 114).
Taking the importance of fan aection seriously, and the way in which
the totemic object forms a crucial aspect of identity formation and self-nar-
rative, it surely makes sense to move towards a nuanced understanding of
fan complaints that a new text, such as Ghostbusters 2016, is perceived as
a colonizing threat to trajectories of the self, not because this is somehow
atypical, but precisely because these kinds of criticisms and complaints are
par-for-the-course in various fandoms where “there is a high degree of pro-
tectiveness, with fans policing the boundaries diligently” (Lubernis & Lars-
en, 2012, p. 9). One such mode of protectionism, as we have seen, centres
on the totemic object as a deied (and reied) icon of childhood, a nostal-
gic conduit with which to view the formation of social identity, formative
memory and personal history. One of the ways that fans communicate this
1118 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
is by painting a portrait of a childhood that has been soiled and ruined by
an interloper text and that this produces grounds for “self-discontinuity,”
that is, “a sense of disjointedness between one’s past and present self” (Se-
dikides et al., 2014, p. 52).
Of course, fans that communicate their vexation in such a manner
are well aware that their childhood is safe and secure in real terms. Sym-
bolically, however, the release of a new Ghostbusters lm, and one which
wipes
the slate clean through the process of rebooting, threatens the sanc-
tity of the
totemic object and, by extension, the memories associated with
such an important and fundamental aspect of growing up. Yet this kind of
performative protectionism was singled out for opprobrium and mocking
by news media and industry stakeholders, including director Paul Feig,
who laid the foundations for growing fan-tagonism (Johnson, 2007) be-
tween rst generation Ghostheads and producers. Rather than breaking
down the boundaries between fan and producer, then, industry stakehold-
ers set out to reinforce such boundaries, which can be viewed as a form of
outer fandom othering—that is, a discursive admonishment that performs
the same kind of work as inter- and intra-fandom othering, but, instead,
emanating from industry. One commenter on Reddit addresses these is-
sues in a post explaining—and defending—the totemic object through
the lens of nostalgic ruminations on childhood when the infant self was
rst spellbound by aect.
To begin with, the commenter (tagged as crazylegsmurphy) accuses
Paul Feig of deliberating provoking fans with bile and vinegar:
One of the phrases you’ll often hear when referring to some unwanted,
or mistreated reboot, is “childhood ruined!” Recently, the cast and
crew of
this film have decided to insult people who utter these words.
They argue that it is technically impossible to retroactively ruin a chil-
dhood and that anyone who says that are sad, basement dwelling as-
sholes who need to get friends… [As Feig said] All those comments—
“
You’re ruining my childhood!” I mean, really. Four women doing any
movie on earth will destroy your childhood? I have a visual of those
people not having a Ben [Falcone], not having friends, so they’re just
sitting there and spewing hate into this fake world of the internet. I just
hope they find a friend. (crazylegsmurphy, 2016, para. 2–3)
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Feig’s comments are certainly caustic and rely on traditional stereo-
types of the fanboy, famously captured in William Shatner’s o-cited “get a
life” Saturday Night Live sketch ( Jenkins, 1992).2 Fans who claim that child-
hood have been “retroactively” ruined are “sad, basement dwelling assholes
who need to get friends” and stop “spewing hate into this fake world of the
internet.” What this arguably demonstrates is that fans that summon visions
of childhood purity and innocence as intrinsic components of self-hood are
lampooned and taken literally rather than gurative. is, I argue, is indic-
ative of a wider cultural perspective that fundamentally misinterprets and
misunderstands the aective mechanics that fuel the engine of fandom.
Crazylegsmurphy then moves to share his own experiences by sharing
his self-narrative and aective experience with the canonical Ghostbusters:
As a kid, I remember seeing Ghostbusters in the theatre with my
brother. I sat there on the edge of my seat, eyes wide as the hubcaps
of Ecto 1, while my brother covered his eyes in fear. From that day on
Ghostbusters was one of the coolest things I had ever experienced
in my life…For months after, my brother and I would outfit our back-
packs with everything from tent pegs, to various gadgets around the
house. We would spend hours busting ghosts in the dark and scary
places of our house, our neighbourhoods and our minds. The rigged
together proton packs we had gave us the confidence to be able to
explore and deal with the fears and reservations we had in our lives.
(crazylegsmurphy, 2016, para. 5–6)
Here, crazylegsmurphy briey illustrates how much the original
Ghostbusters was, and remains, tethered to self-continuity and self-narra-
tive; of hanging out with his brother, and constructing a story-world envi-
ronment within which to imaginatively play with home-built proton packs
and backpacks lled with tent pegs as props for identity formation and
self-narrative anchored to the totemic object. is psychical, retroactive
and nostalgic image is so beloved and so “ooded with aect” that any in-
cursion from external forces becomes a veritable aack on such a memo-
ry despite its instrumental power being symbolic. Crazylegsmurphy is well
aware that his childhood has not, of course, been ruined “retroactively”
2 Other cast members joined in vilifying fans as basement dwellers and asexual “man-babies,” including Melissa Mc-
Carthy and Dan Akroyd.
1120 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
and that the new Ghostbusters has not “literally travelled back in time and
messed with my family… so I am now slowly fading from existence in fam-
ily photos” (crazylegsmurphy, 2016, para. 13). By playfully, whimsically—
and denitely sarcastically— conjuring the image of another 1980s totemic
object, Back to the Future (“slowly fading from existence in family photos”),
crazylegsmurphy demonstrates the way in which his self-narrative is per-
haps enmeshed with franchise lms of the 1980s as emblematic of the pri-
mary locus of childhood. e point, however, is that nostalgic narratives,
such as crazylegsmurphy’s, function as defensive mechanisms built against
a symbolic force that threatens the fan’s structure of meaning and the “pre-
dominantly aective signature” of the fan totem: “a well-structured, order-
ly, and predictable world helps provide existential meaning, and that a lack
of structure erodes meaning” (Routledge et al., 2012, p. 454, my italics). It is
not dicult to view fans’ recruitment of nostalgic narratives as a mode of
meaning preservation and to oset self-discontinuity and ontological anx-
ieties anchored to the totemic object.
Proclamations of this type, then, of childhood ruination, are meta-
phorically mapped onto aective and cognitive memories as vital and in-
strumental aspects of the totemic object. Following Richard Jenkins (2004),
“self-identity is a distinctively modern project within which individuals
can reexively construct a personal narrative for themselves which allows
them to understand themselves as in control of their lives and futures” (p. 35,
my italics). reats to the totemic object, then, can thus be felt as threats
to self-identity, self-continuity, and self-narrative. is presents grounds
for addressing and redressing ontological insecurities with totemic nos-
talgia, discursively marshaled as a bulwark to protect the endangered ob-
ject, as an elemental site of memory and identity formation, from external
incursion. As Vess et al. (2012) emphasize, nostalgia operates as “a poten-
tial mechanism through which individuals buress the self against a vari-
ety of threats” (p. 275).
To return to the beginning of crazylegsmurphy’s self-narrative, the
fact that Ghostbusters 2016 is a reboot of the franchise, as opposed to a
continuation, also opens up the potential for backlash induced by totemic
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nostalgia. Although reboots have existed in comic books for decades, Chris-
topher Nolan’s Batman Begins “successfully resurrected the Batman brand
from the cinematic graveyard” (Proctor, 2012, p. 1) by wiping the slate clean
and beginning again. Other franchise properties successfully followed suit,
such as the Bond reboot Casino Royale (2006) or the Abrams’ helmed Star
Trek (2009), but the frequency with which this “strategy of regeneration”
(Proctor, 2017) has been evoked since is oen criticized as evidence of
Hollywood’s creative inertia. And while Batman and Bond were primarily
viewed as “necessary” incursions to update and refresh these ailing—and,
indeed, failed—franchise properties, the economic triumph of Abrams’ Star
Trek was met by a subsection of outraged fans who decried that this paral-
lel spin on a beloved (totemic) classic was “Trek in name only” (Proctor,
2018, forthcoming), thus leading nostalgic fans to resist and repeal the re-
boot as inauthentic, illegitimate and explicitly non-totemic.
Regarding Ghostbusters 2016, this is addressed by e Guardian’s geek
critic, Ben Child (2016), who asks if the lm might well be “an unfortunate
victim of Hollywood hiing peak reboot?”
For while not all remakes and reworkings of classic fare attract brick-
bats from hardcore geek culture vultures, the very term “reboot” itself
has come to denote Hollywood staleness, the inability of studios to see
much-loved properties as anything more than “franchises” designed
to be dusted off every 20 years and regurgitated for a new generation
of filmgoers too young to remember the last time out. And it is this
reading of the term that might just, very unfortunately and unfairly,
have done for the new
Ghostbusters
movie. (Child, 2016, para. 3)
Considering this, then, I argue that, for the nostalgic fan, usually a
rst-generation ghosthead, rebooting is nothing less than a wen on the face
of the totemic object, and wiping the slate clean in order to begin again
threatens the integrity of the primary and primal textual experience, thus
seing the stage for backlash and defensive posturing. Given that so-called
“reboot culture” is oen heavily castigated by dierent kinds
of fans belong-
ing to dierent fan cultures opens up a further point of analysis. For if fans
lambasted Sony Pictures for rebooting Spider-Man so soon aer Sam Raimi’s
trilogy—and, of course, being rebooted again by Marvel Studios in
Captain
1122 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
America: Civil War (2016) and Spider-Man: Homebound (2017)—then we
can see that one of the ways that fans criticized the Ghostbusters reboot
is not “simply” or “only” about gender. is is not to suggest that
totemic
nostalgia cannot mushroom into full-blown toxicity, as we shall see below,
or that misogynist fans do not exist: for if “everyone is a fan of something,”
then it stands to reason that the ideological co-ordinates of fandom—which
are messy and plural rather than a singular body politic—
must indeed in-
clude reactionary actants. To conclude this section, I will now dene to-
temic nostalgia.
Taking all this into account, totemic nostalgia refers to a type of fan
protectionism, which is not toxic, centred on an aective relationship with a
fan-object, usually forged in childhood. As a result, a totemic text becomes
profoundly enmeshed as a resource of meaning-making, of self-identity,
self-narrative and self-continuity. Symbolic threats may emerge that threat-
en the sanctity of the totemic relationship between self and object, and can
induce nostalgic narratives as a method of meaning preservation as a reg-
ulatory and restorative balm (Sedikides et al., 2015). ese threats may
take multiple forms, as we have seen, including the strategy of rebooting,
whereby a new text “writes over” an extant narrative totem to begin again
in a distinct spatiotemporal location. Such “overwriting,” which is meta-
phorical, runs the risk of contaminating the totemic object and pushing it
into liminal space wherein the status of the text-identity becomes imper-
iled by a “structure of undecidability” (Lucy, 2004, pp. 147–151) between
totemic object and non-totemic reboot, both of which bear the same title,
which thus requires shiing the pronoun to dierentiate between the two
(GB ’84 and GB ’16). Totemic nostalgia is thus “a mourning of displace-
ment and temporal irreversibility” (Boym, 2001, p. xvi).
Rebooting also threatens to cast the totemic text into “non-memo-
ry” (Harvey, 2015), especially if it forges a new continuity. Fans intimate-
ly understand that this is gurative, rather than literal, but this provides a
valuable insight into the ways in which semiotic conicts can be felt as real
threats to self-hood that must be defended at all costs:
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Not because [fans] are somehow neurotic or pathological, but rather
because these fans’ sense of self-identity… is so firmly enmeshed
with the narratives of their beloved [fan-object]. Threats to [totemic]
narrative can thus be felt as threats to these fans’ self-narratives.
(Hills, 2012, p. 114)
A totemic object, which may shi in accordance with one’s aective
drive and fannish object of choice, can be understood as “a paern of reli-
gious veneration—nominating and worshipping some sort of religious icon
or set of religious tenets which is then held up as beyond critique” (Lubernis
& Larsen, 2012, p. 121, my italics). Yet, while the undergirding of religion
here is problematic, the sentiment is apposite.
e next section moves to consider the ramications of totemic nos-
talgia when it mushrooms into harassment, bullying and other types of tox-
ic fan practices.
The Anti-Social Network and Toxic Fan Practices
Over the past two decades or so, the rapid ascendancy and acceleration
of domestic computer technologies, especially Internet capacities, has
opened up a discursive space within which fans can immediately respond to
the vagaries of popular culture. e proliferation of social media platforms
provides a gurative bullhorn for fans to celebrate and commemorate, or
criticise and commiserate, the creative decisions of the entertainment in-
dustrial complex. As Jenkins (2006) emphasizes, the aordances provid-
ed by new media proliferation means that “once silent and invisible” fan
subcultures “are now noisy and public” (p. 19). And while many main-
stream critics view this digital sea change as facilitating and producing a
“new breed of fandom” (Proctor, 2016), it is more than likely that the rise
of computer-mediated technologies (CMC) “has brought these consum-
ers from the margins of the media industry into the spotlight” (Jenkins,
2006, p. 257).
This visibility of fans online—populating news groups, online fora
[and social media], video sharing portals, and fan created websites—
has led to some inside and outside academia to misinterpret contem-
porary fan practices as a consequence of technological change […]
1124 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
[yet] these forms of fan productivity precede the proliferation of the
Internet into a widely available house-hold communications techno-
logy. (Sandvoss, 2011, p. 51)
At the same time, however, fans have become “more visible, more
mainstream and more normal” (Due, 2013, p. 15), and this has opened
up a new series of debates hinged on the performances and behaviours of
fans that have been viewed by mainstream commentators, especially jour-
nalists (whether professional, amateur or pro-am) as confrontational, un-
acceptable and, indeed, toxic.
Fan quarrels and conicts are not a new phenomenon, either, but the
migration from the (analogue) margins and into the (digital) mainstream
has exposed the various operations of fan cultures to the larger online pub-
lic encapsulated by blogs, vids, tweets, comments, and social media, for ex-
ample. Marginal fan practices, then, have since entered the wider discursive
array that has, in turn, produced grounds for “new” stereotypes, such as the
wave of discourses centred on so-called “fan entitlement,” a description that
Hills (2016) claims is an “updated and retooled” (p. 271) version of Wil-
liam Shatner’s o-quoted “get a life” sketch ( Jenkins, 1992).
Writing for Forbes, Sco Mendelson (2013) claimed that online
fans oen suer from a severe case of delusional fan entitlement and that
this is given life by the aordances provided by cyber-space. Fans “take
to the internet to absolutely demand that they get their way as a maer
of moral principle, damn the business logistics or any other logical obsta-
cles in their way” (Mendelson, 2013, n.p.). For geek critic, Devin Fara-
ci, such entitlement convincingly demonstrates that “fandom is broken.”
He writes that,
Fandom has always been a powder keg just waiting for the right mo-
ment to explode, and that moment is the ubiquity of social media.
Twitter is the match that has been touched to the powder keg and
all of a sudden the uglier parts of fandom—the entitlement, the de-
mands, the frankly poor understanding of how storytelling and drama
work—have blown the fuck up. (Faraci, 2016, n.p.)
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Yet, while it is certainly the case that the Internet has opened up spac-
es and opportunities for audiences to speak back to industrial power; this
is
not as new a phenomenon as such critics clearly believe.
Consider the fan outrage centred on the hiring of Michael Keaton for
Tim Burton’s Batman adaptation in the late 1980s. Fearing a return to the
comedic Camp Crusader of the 1960s TV series—the ultimate “bad” bat
object for many during the period—, instead of the “adult ethos” (Brook-
er, 2000) represented by the “grim and griy” wave of comics and graph-
ic novels, such as Frank Miller’s e Dark Knight Returns, fans responded
negatively and orchestrated a campaign of protest against Warner Bros.
Keaton’s previous roles in, respectively, Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice were read
intertextually as clearly evincing that the path the studio were treading led
towards horse-play and hilarity, not deadpan realism. Batman co-creator,
Bob Kane, publicly denounced Keaton, which only poured fuel onto the
ames of fan discontent, and reached a crescendo on September 11, 1988
when the Los Angeles Times ran an article about the controversy thus turn-
ing “under-the-Hollywood-radar fan grumbling into a corporate headache”
(Weldon, 2016, p. 161). “e caped crusader may turn out to be a wimp,”
wrote Kathleen Hughes, adding that “Hundreds of passionate leers have
poured into the oces of publications that cater to comic book fans and col-
lectors” (Hughes, 1988, para. 7). Anxious about the fate of their multi-mil-
lion-dollar production, Warner Bros. “kicked into crisis mode” and “[f ]or
the rst time in Hollywood history, a studio launched a campaign targeted
to the hard-core fan base of an existing property with the express purpose
of mollifying their fears” (Weldon, 2016, p. 160).
What marks this (oine) episode dierentially from the (online)
cacophony of recent years is that the bullhorn was held, not by fans them-
selves, but by agents of journalism. Without the Kathleen Hughes article,
such outrage would arguably be contained with the fan gheo and may
not have spilled over into the mainstream. What this example hopeful-
ly demonstrates is that fans have traditionally criticised the creative deci-
sions of the culture industries using methods available to them during the
period, but this has accelerated and proliferated in the digital age. e next
1126 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
wave of bat-fan criticism centred on Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin
(1997), a lm that “alerted Hollywood to the inuence, baleful or other-
wise, of the chatroom nerd” (Brooker, 2012, p. 56). By aaching one’s fan-
dom to a particular idealized vision of Batman—a “bat-platonic ideal of
how Bat
man should really be” (Medhurst, 1991, p. 161)—oen hinges on
totemic nostalgia, but which can mushroom into full-blown toxicity exem-
plied here by homophobic rants against both Joel Schumacher’s sexuality
and the camp
crusader Batman. Despite the multiple versions and variations
of the character
that populate the shiing spectrum of the Batman matrix,
some fans’ totemic nostalgia pivots on the character as a “one-note, rigid pil-
lar of militarised heterosexuality” (Brooker, 2012, p. 176).
From this perspective, then, the opportunities provided by com-
puter-mediated communication are neither specically new nor old, but a
spectrum of aordances that might well seem, especially to those from the
outside looking in, as if they are entirely new ways of being a fan. Rather
than view fan behaviours, performances and creative, transformative pro-
duction (e.g., fan ction, lk, vidding) as binaries between an “old” oine
world and “new” online territories, it would be beer to view the contem-
porary landscape as a complex marriage between past and present. In the
age of convergence culture, fans are implicated in the collision between
new and old media (Jenkins, 2006) and, by extension, new and old ways
of “doing” fandom.
So, then, while cyberspace has certainly led to a mainstreaming of
fan cultures, such heightened visibility publicises a wide variety of fannish
behaviours for online publics and, perhaps more pointedly, news media to
scrutinise, apperceive and cherry-pick readily available comments for wider
dissemination, some of which forces fandom, warts-and-all, into the media
spotlight. In recent years, news outlets have responded to “the dark side of
geek culture,” where fans are implicated within a noxious tsunami of “tox-
ic technocultures” (Massanari, 2015). As with human existence in gener-
al terms, all fan cultures engage in what I term toxic fan practices (which is
not the same as saying that all fans engage in such practices):
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[b]ullying, conflict and aggression occur in all corners of the world-
wide web, and fandom is no exception […] The types of bullying,
marginalizing, and jockeying for position that occur in fandom are
mirrored in most other groups, online and face to face. (Lubernis &
Larsen, 2012, pp. 117–118).
is, of course, is not to condone such hostilities, especially when
aggression takes a nefarious turn and snowballs into a full-frontal assault
on individuals and groups, but to recognise that fan cultures, like all com-
munities, “are based on the necessity of Othering and distinction” (Sandvoss,
2011, p. 62, my italics). Aggression “serves instrumental functions within
a group by helping to enforce norms, build cohesion, and defend against
outsiders” (Lubernis & Larsen, 2012, p.121), as well as erecting defensive
ramparts against (fan) insiders that hurl cannonballs at one’s fan totem(s).
is can be benign and innocuous, especially during the throes of debate, a
prevalent characteristic across fan cultures generally. But this can also are
up into heated and hostile skirmishes, thus producing grounds for toxic fan
practices to emerge.
According to Adrienne Massanari (2015), online spaces are heavily
gendered “hotbeds of misogynistic activism” (p. 2). Focusing on #Gamer-
Gate, perhaps the most notorious and widely publicised toxic ame war
in recent years, which included rape and death threats, Massanari argues
that social media, especially Reddit, actively encourages paerns of tox-
ic technocultures “to take hold and have an outsized presence on the plat-
form” through programming structures, such as “Reddit’s design, algorithm,
and platform politics”, all of which “implicitly supports these kinds of cul-
tures” (Massanari, 2015, p. 1) and “underscores the gendered nature of
online discourse generally and the ways in which it can serve as a barrier
to entry for women” (Massanari, 2015, p. 5). Leaving aside the problem-
atic binary between “geek masculinity” and femininity for a moment, and
which I shall return to in the conclusion, Massanari sees toxic technocul-
tures as coalescing
around a particular issue or event, but tactics used within these cul-
tures often rely heavily on implicit or explicit harassment of others
[and] demonstrate retrograde ideas of gender, sexual identity, sexua-
1128 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
lity, and race and push against issues of diversity, multiculturalism,
and progressivism. (Massanari, 2015, p. 5)
e problem, however, is that the term toxic technocultures would
surely include these items whether stemming from fandom or from wider
online discourse communities (so-called alt-right supporters of President
Elect, Donald Trump, for example). In this light, the term toxic fan practic-
es can be considered as a sub-category of Massanari’s toxic technocultures,
whereby a spirited debate centred on, for instance, a totemic-object or, as
the case may be, the creative decisions of industrial stakeholders, that then
spirals into cyber-violence commied by fans. Saying that, Massanari’s de-
nition works equally for a theory of toxic fan practices.
For so-called Gamer-Gaters, not all of who engaged in toxicity, the
totemic object is not simply a text, as with GB ’84, but the medium of vid-
eo games. Following the ashpoint of #GamerGate—a malicious blog post
wrien by Eron Gjoni, “the jilted ex-lover” (Massanari, 2015 p. 6) of fem-
inist game designer Zoe Quinn—users turned to the aordances of social
media to roundly criticise Quinn based on the contents of said blog post
wherein she was accused of “cosying up” to games journalists in order to re-
ceive favourable reviews of her game, Depression Quest (DQ). is was lat-
er shown to be fallacious, but by that time, Quinn “became the centrepiece
and token gure in a hateful campaign to delegitimize and harass women
and their allies in the gaming community” (Massanari, 2015, p. 6) and or-
chestrated “a disturbing hub of discussion” (Massanari, 2015, p. 7) in online
spaces. Discursively constructed by both mainstream media and academics
as a binary gender war between, on the one hand, ‘Gamer-Gaters’, usually
viewed as Men’s Right’s Activists (Ms) or acionados of “red pill” philos-
ophy—the laer named aer a scene in e Matrix (1999) when Morpheus
oers Neo a choice between red “truth” and blue “illusion” pills—and, on
the other, feminist activists, or so-called “social justice warriors” (SJWs),
a derogatory term referring to politically correct, le-wing bullies, special
agents of the Orwellian thought police. e former claimed that the debate
was centred not on the harassment and bullying of women, but principally
about ethics in journalism—given life by Gjoni’s initial blog post—while
the feminist contingent argued that it was about challenging a widespread
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resistance to the diversication of (masculine) gaming culture (Todd, 2015,
p. 66). us, Gamer-Gaters’ totemic nostalgia xated on an encroaching
feminisation of gaming culture that, if successful, would colonise and dam-
age the medium of video games itself. As Todd (2015) explains,
[t]he GamerGate controversy represents a small group of gamers who
do not want to see the culture of gaming change; however, their ac-
tions have brought attention to an important cultural shift that is oc-
curring in the gaming community. Not only have these attacks on wo-
men heightened concerns related to how gaming is being portrayed
via the media (which in turn affects public perceptions of gaming) but
they have also effectively demonstrated the extent to which sexism
and misogyny have become culturally embedded over time. (p. 66)
Following Massanari (2015), then, the controversy can be viewed
as an ideological discourse community wherein conict centred on Gam-
er-Gaters totemic nostalgia pied against feminist criticisms of a mascu-
linized gaming culture. By aempting to raise defences against feminist
incursion to protect the medium from politically correct machinations,
(some) users’ online performances mushroomed into toxic fan practice.
Bearing this in mind, then—and with the caveat that this synopsis
lacks comprehensiveness—I argue that Ghostbusters fans, male and female,
who decried the reboot as “ruining their childhood” or criticised the ma-
noeuvre as a way to defend the fan-totem from external assault, are forms of
totemic nostalgia: benign and innocuous rather than explicitly toxic. How-
ever, a panoply of media reports indicate that totemic nostalgia is nothing
but thinly veiled misogyny against the all-female Ghostbusters team, who
represented, as with #GamerGate, franchise feminization and colonisation.
Consider James Rolfe’s (2016) Cinemassacre video, where he sum-
mons forth his own totemic nostalgia to explain why he won’t be viewing
(or reviewing) GB ’16. Over six minutes and thirty seconds, Rolfe pains-
takingly oers his opinion via what he calls a “non-review” and why he be-
lieves GB ’16 is box oce poison and an aront to fans who wanted nothing
less than the return of the proton-pack wielding quartet to pass the torch to
a new generation of Ghostbusters as a continuation, not a reboot:
1130 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
The original—which we now have to call the 1984
Ghostbusters
—is
a timeless classic. It’s one of the greatest comedies ever made. This
one, judging from the trailers—it looks awful… If this is the Ghost-
busters movie that nobody wanted, then the box office should reflect
that… I know I’m biased;
Ghostbusters
is something a lot of us grew
up with. We wanted to see the original cast back together one last time
while they were still alive and maybe introduce a new younger cast,
win us over, and then pass it on for a new generation. (Rolfe, 2016)
Here, Rolfe specically emphasizes that his criticism is not related to
a new Ghostbusters team per se, but pivots on the fact that this would be
designed as a reboot and thus erase the original team from textual mem-
ory. Indeed, Rolfe is ne with passing the torch to a new, younger genera-
tion, a point that aligns with Akroyd’s original plans for a third movie, which
I touched upon in the introduction. Paraphrasing Medhurst, then, Rolfe’s
complaint about a new, rebooted Ghostbusters hinge on an ecto-platonic
ideal of how—and who—the Ghostbusters should really be.
Yet Rolfe’s totemic nostalgia was interpreted by over eighteen on-
line media accounts as clear evidence of fan misogyny. Writing for online
site, Medium, intersectional feminist and pop culture critic, Rachel Banks,
described Rolfe as a “bigot,” and accused him for “spewing his sexist bile
in a video on his Cinemassacre YouTube channel” (Banks, 2016, para. 2).
Maggie Serota of Death and Taxes equated Rolfe with Nazi fascism, writing
that his video is the “pop-culture critical equivalent of when our grandpas
all stormed Normandy and kicked Hitler in the dick” (Serota, 2016, para.
1). Rolfe is “a whiny man-baby”, states Alex Bruce-Smith (2016); a “limp
dick loser,” tweets Devin Faraci (as quoted in Banks, 2016)3; a “hideous
bubleach,” and a “chodeface”, according to Courtney Enlow (2016) of Pa-
jiba. e Atlantic’s David Sims (2016) described the anti-Ghostbusters bri-
gade as a movement, “not unlike the GamerGate nightmare that continues
to plague the world of video-games” (n.p.). I could go on.
e point here is that there is no evidence of misogyny in Rolfe’s vid-
eo, but the way in which he explained his refusal to watch GB ’16 by evok-
ing nostalgic narratives is interpreted axiomatically as misogynist. Other
3 Devin Faraci has since stepped down as editor-in-chief of Birth, Death, Movies due to allegations of sexual assault.
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outlets picked this up, sometimes in unhelpful ways by returning a volley
of mud across the cyber-space peninsula, but what is interesting and wor-
thy of further analysis is a YouTube video produced by Comic Book Girl,
19 (henceforth CBG 19), who expressed similar concerns about the re-
boot, but who did not receive online admonishment. In the video, “Why
Being Honest about Ghostbusters is Important,” CBG 19 (2016) propos-
es that the “cultural restorm” was primarily orchestrated by Sony Pictures,
including Paul Feig, as a marketing strategy to deal with the fallout from
the debut of the trailer. “I’m going to try to be the voice of reason in an in-
sane world,” says CBG 19 (2016). e backlash was so pronounced that
“Sony was freaking out, they were deleting, like, negative comments le and
right, it was like super-nuts”. As with Rolfe, CBG 19 explained that her dis-
appointment stemmed from a dislike of reboots and remakes,
Because I’ve just seen so many bad ones…what Hollywood is doing
is they’re being very, very lazy. They’re taking a movie that worked,
redo it now and take the same beats, paint-by-numbers movies,
there’s no real heart to it, nobody really cares…it just feels like a
bunch of executives need to make money, and that’s why they’re
making this. (CBG 19, 2016)
is chimes with Ben Child’s thoughts (quoted above) regarding a
widespread cultural dislike of properties undergoing reboot surgery. But
one of the reasons why CBG 19 may not have been vilied as with Rolfe is
because she is a woman, and if women disliked the GB ’16 trailer, then the
cultural restorm is shown to be more akin to a small brush-re, rather than
a movement analogous with the #GamerGate controversy.
is is not to imply that some anti-fans of GB ’16 do not engage in
toxic fan practices. Many comments on YouTube and, by extension, oth-
er social media platforms, are certainly hateful, but the clearest example of
toxicity emerged on Twier following GB ’16’s theatrical release when Les-
lie Jones, who plays non-scientist character, Paie Tolan, in the lm, was
victimised by a subsection of the Twierati. Users insidiously (cyber) as-
saulted Jones in multiple ways, including racist and misogynistic tweets,
and by creating a new Twier account in the actor’s name in order to push
homophobic content as if wrien by Jones herself. is eventually led to
1132 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
Jones publicly announcing that she was closing down her social media ac-
count to prevent further toxic assaults and rampant racism.
But even this is too neat and tidy; some Tweeters challenged Jones’
character in GB ’16 because they felt that the representation therein was
nothing less than racial stereotyping, a form of toxicity in itself. So, then, in
relation to fan practices more generally, this leaves researchers with an apo-
ria to puzzle over, which I highlight in the conclusion that follows.
Conclusion
is article only pretends to scratch the surface of the perils and pitfalls of
computer-mediated communication circulated around GB ’16. Although
a ra of online news articles focus on—and sensationalise—fan narratives
contained in discursive assemblages, such as Twier, YouTube comment
sections, blogs and social media more generally, this should not be taken
axiomatically by scholars either inside or outside fan studies, but should be
viewed more as a rallying cry for a testing of methodological instruments
and new ways of examining the online discursive elements of fan practices and
behaviours. And while I wouldn’t necessarily expect journalists, whether
professional or not, to implement as rigorous a methodology as scholars, I
would certainly expect researchers to excavate online data in ways that test
the claims of journalistic discourse, which have either cherry-picked from the
readily available array of online chaer to provide evidence or, worse still,
without providing any evidence whatsoever. As I have shown elsewhere
(Proctor, forthcoming), by scraping data from an entire hashtag on Twit-
ter—in this case the hoopla surrounding #blackstormtrooper, which was
cited as evidence of fan racism across multiple news sites—one may be
presented with a rather dierent narrative than that represented by inter-
net news outlets. In this case, I found lile evidence of overt racism, but,
rather, a litany of hostilities from so-called progressive and le-leaning com-
menters towards an imagined, and imaginary, corpus of racist fans. Again,
I am not suggesting that fan cultures are utopian communities—far from
it—nor am I asking that researchers build a rewall around fans to protect
them from misinterpretation.
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Fans themselves also challenge journalistic discourses either by re-
buking claims of misogyny, racism and other toxic practices, thus aiming
to shield fandom from enemy agents, or to conduct research themselves to
challenge and criticise journalists—and other fans—for cherry-picking data
and eectively manufacturing an online controversy for marketing ends.
For instance, Red Leer Media’s (2016) satirical comedy series, Sci-
entist Man, posted a video on YouTube and included analysis of scraped
data from the comments’ section beneath the debut trailer, the source of
many online reports and recriminations, and used computer soware to
excavate the discursive assemblage. “An environment has been articially
created in order to make you look like a sexist for thinking that the lm is a
big piece of shit,” says Scientist Man (Red Leer Media, 2016). But with-
in this biting satire, Scientist Man moves to “look at some facts”, which is
worth quoting at length:
The original upload by Sony of the first Ghostbusters trailer is cur-
rently [at the time of writing] at 38,045,852 views [not as many of the
famous cat-playing-a-keyboard skit]. Out of all of those views,
a total
of 1256,434 have hit the like or dislike button […] That being said,
96.7 % watched the trailer but did not click like or dislike […] Because
of all the down votes and sporadic nasty comments about women and
feminism in general, a narrative began to form: about
childish, racist
man-babies were hating on the trailer, mainly because
of women and
one minority [Leslie Jones]. It seems to be all anyone was talking
about; new story after news story began to pop up. People thought
that these underpaid actors were being attacked by overweight,
virginal, Ku Klux Klan, basement dwelling toy-unboxers members,
they rushed to their defence to expose the justice that was being
done. 0.73% of the people that watched the trailer commented. Ergo,
99.27% of the people who watched the trailer did not comment…
If every one of those comments were sexist and misogynistic, it
would still be less than 1%. Those comments were mixed in with
many comments… 12% of comments were specifically anti-women
[…] .08 % felt the need to make a nasty anti-women comment […]
99.92% did not make a negative or anti-woman comment. (Red Let-
ter Media, 2016)
Of course, I am not suggesting that this be accepted as gospel either,
but it certainly throws a spanner in the wheel of discourse and challeng-
1134 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
es researchers to drill down deeply into the discursive assemblage rather
than wholeheartedly embrace online chaer both axiomatically and a pri-
ori. What this convincingly demonstrates is that the so-called Ghostbust-
er “controversy” needs to be addressed, redressed and examined rigorously
in order to delve beneath the surface to excavate the discursive array across
multiple sites.
Clearly, conict and combat is a part and parcel of being a fan and this
has proliferated and accelerated courtesy of the aordances of new media
technologies. But how many fans are we talking about? What methodolo-
gies have we at our disposal to determine whether or not individual com-
ment
ers are fans at all, or are they just general “trolls” that take great pleasure
in sparking o a ame war while rubbing their hands with glee from behind
the safety of their screens, protected by anonymous avatars, and pseudony-
mous
personas and identities? For if the mainstreaming of fandom gener-
ally speaking has “transformed and facilitated the whole phenomenon of
fandom” (Due, 2013, p. 236), then the issues of respondent selection
“is compounded if the research is pursued online” (p. 257). Rather than
the “embarrassment of riches” that Jenkins prophesized (1992), research-
ers need to ask themselves: “Am I gathering data from actual fans?” (Duf-
fe, 2013. p. 256).
Research conducted over the Internet is convenient, but respondents
can easily disappear, it allows for various kinds of deception, and it can
hide the variable contexts of everyday fandom… Forum membership
and comment-posting does not necessarily signify fannish dedication
although it can act as a sign of it. (Duffett, 2013, p. 256)
e internet has assuredly opened up a series of issues that need to
be addressed by scholars, and “researchers are laerly grappling with a po-
tentially indenite range of communicative behaviours… inuenced by any
number of contextual variables” (Hardaker, 2010, p. 217). What we also
are seeing quite frequently is a discursive demonization of fanboys and a
continuing, and reductive, binary war between masculinity and femininity.
In an interview, Dan Akroyd perpetuated negative stereotypes of fans and
claimed that there are “millions” of “obese, white men between 50 and 60
who are active [Ku Klux Klan] members, or members of the Aryan nation”
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(as quoted in Daly, 2016, para. 4). is is patently absurd, but the way in
which the statement represents critics of GB ’16 as right-wing men is not
only problematic, but, I would argue, clearly fallacious.
In general terms, the binary between men—fanboys—and women—
fangirls—is too neat and tidy, as demonstrated by Lubernis and Larsen
(2012) who bravely illustrate that it is not only fanboys that are aggressive
agents, but fangirls, too, thus deconstructing the reductive and simplistic bi-
nary between genders. To be sure, geek hierarchies exist (Busse, 2013)—and
indeed persist—but this fails signicantly in providing nuanced and com-
plex understandings of “fandom’s cultural dynamics” (Hills, 2002, p. xiii).
Fanboys have engaged in Othering practices, such as the discourse around
fans of, say, Twilight and One Direction (Jones, 2016; Proctor, 2016), for
instance, whereby subsections of fangirls have been discursively constructed
as “bad” fans, hysterical, unruly and “negatively feminized” (Busse, 2013).
is, however, is the beginning of a larger conversation, rather than a nal
exclamation point. Given that sub-sections of fanboys have also been dis-
cursively constructed as “bad” fans, aggressive, inappropriate and nega-
tively masculinized, needs to be addressed more rigorously by fan studies
scholars and that fan conicts may unfold across intersectional lines rath-
er than (gendered) binaries.
A recent study by think tank, Deimos (“New Demos study,” 2016),
for instance, demonstrated empirically that hostile and aggressive online
behaviours are almost egalitarian, by which I mean that both women and
men engage in toxic online practices whether emerging from fandom or not.
Whether the methodology employed in such case studies is suitably metic-
ulous, especially from a scholarly standpoint, is another thing entirely, but
extant academic literature from outside the fan studies discipline (for ex-
ample Chisholm, 2006) has examined online “ame wars”—“vitriolic on-
line exchanges” (Dery, 1994, p. 1)—which show that the neat separation
of users into gendered compartments between angelic girls and demon-
ic boys, both of which are infantilized, is simply parochial and simplistic. I
understand that this might come across as provocative, and in some ways,
1136 “Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”... - William Proctor
it is meant to be, but it will hopefully be viewed as it is intended—that is,
as a rallying call for further critical evaluation, no maer how uncomfort-
able the terrain.
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