No, It Isn’t Surprising That Ghostbusters Mocked the Government

Of all the reactions I’ve seen to Harold Ramis’ death, this

passage in Quartz must be the strangest:

Ghostbusters isn’t about
ghosts. (Well, it kind of is.) But it’s also about the power of the
US private sector and the magic of market discipline to transform
anyone—even effete, over-educated academics—into heroes….

It’s hard to believe Ghostbusters was intended to be a
pro-business, anti-government polemic. Dan Aykroyd co-wrote the
film with Ramis, whose previous flicks—such as Animal House,
Stripes, Caddyshack—are filled with liberal digs at
establishment authority figures.

But the Ivan Reitman masterpiece was made in a certain time and
place. And the movie is worth reconsidering now—almost three
decades after its release—if only because it so perfectly captured
one of the rare moments when the supertanker of American public
opinion clearly changes course.

The problem here isn’t the idea that
Ghostbusters mocks the government—it
obviously does. The problem is the idea that there is some sort
of gap between “anti-government polemic” and “digs at establishment
authority figures.” William Atherton’s EPA agent fills the
space in Ghostbusters that John Vernon’s dean does in
Animal House and Ted Knight’s old-money country-club man
does in Caddyshack. There is no great shift here. We’re
watching a clearly recognizable descendent of that ’70s-style
anti-authoritarianism.

There isn’t even that big a shift in the targets. In the ’70s,
activists on the left as well as the right regularly
took aim at the regulatory state. Carter presided over more
deregulation than Reagan did (though not, admittedly, at the EPA),
and figures well to the president’s left pushed for more. These
liberals and radicals believed, for good reason, that many agencies
had been captured by industry interests and used to squash
competition from upstart operations like…well, like the
Ghostbusters. There was a natural fit between that fear and the
freewheeling disdain for authority in the counterculture’s
pop-culture products.

These observations are old hat, really, whether you’re a
libertarian pointing out those continuities to praise them or a Tom
Frank type pointing them out to attack them. Ghostbusters
is plainly a product of the mindset behind Ramis’ other early
movies. The big difference between it and the others isn’t that it
takes on the government; it’s that it’s much more tightly
plotted.

Bonus link: My colleague Nick Gillespie
writes about Ramis and baby-boom anti-authoritarianism. I agree
with a lot of what Nick has to say—including his
maybe-controversial comment that Animal House hasn’t aged
all that well—but I wonder if the reason Ramis’ output grew less
interesting after Groundhog Day has less to do with
boomers losing their edge and more to do with the fact that he
stopped working with Bill Murray.