I'll be back!

So said Vigo the Carpathian, Terminator fan and supernatural villain, determined to end the world on New Year's Eve 1989.

New Year always gets me thinking about the march of time, particularly how it always seems to be running out or running away from me. Thoughts inevitably return to the year before (what the fuck was that?) and stray towards the year ahead (what the fuck will 2024 have in store?). I panic about all the things I hoped to get done that still remain unchecked across many lists, and I make new (and recycled) lists full of things ‘I MOST DEFINITELY WILL ACHIEVE THIS YEAR’ in a brand new diary.

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And like many autistic people, I avoid New Year’s parties – the crowds, the fireworks, the forced joviality and the obligation to have fun – like the plague. I prefer a quiet night as far a way from other humans as possible: usually either up a mountain or at home with a movie. So in the spirit of seasonal festivities I thought I’d ring in the New Year with a New York style apocalypse alá Ghostbusters 2!

Ghostbusters 2 is a 1989 supernatural, action comedy directed by Ivan Reitman and written by and starring Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis alongside Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Ernie Hudson, Rick Moranis and Annie Potts. Set five years after the events of first film, the Ghostbusters are broke and out of business (except for children’s birthday parties) having been sued by the city for the destruction caused during their battle with the deity Gozer. As paranormal activity in New York is reactivated the Ghostbusters are called into to take care of an increasing number of hauntings. They discover a river of slime beneath the streets of New York which seems to be producing more ghostly activity and other paranormal occurrences including attacks on Dana’s (Sigourney Weaver) eight-month-old baby, Oscar. They trace the source of the slime to a painting of a Carpathian warlord, Vigo, who is determined to come back to life by possessing Oscar’s body on New Year’s Eve.

A favourite from my childhood, Ghostbusters 2 is one of those rare movies that works for either Halloween or New Year’s Eve. You might have guessed that I’m a fan of all things ghostly and ghouly by the fact that I’ve dragged my spooky season out over the last three months, indulging my love of Beetlejuice, Buffy and The Nightmare Before Christmas. What you might not have guessed is that I’m both terrified of and a firm believer in ghosts. As I child I became actively terrified of encountering ghosts after watching a documentary about haunted castles on ITV (remember that???). The special effects were, no doubt, incredibly lame but, it was enough to keep me awake until the wee hours of the morning well into my teens. I would cover myself completely in my duvet hoping that if my head was hidden the ghosts might not notice me.

I spent my teens fuelling this fear by watching every classic horror movie from The Exorcist to The Shining. My nightmares continue to feature me trapped in giant houses with some very scary ghouls thanks to Kubrick and the Overlook Hotel.

And while my childhood home had about as much supernatural activity as a slice of toast, I do believe I have actually lived in a couple of haunted houses. These ghostly encounters may have been products of an overactive imagination, but they felt very real at the time. So real, in fact, that I decided to fictionalise them. You can read my short stories The Hauntings at Cordella Mag and Xibalbá at Pank.

As an adult I haven’t been able to watch anything scarier than Casper. Ghostbusters, however, has always delighted rather than terrified me. My mother was three months pregnant with me when Ghostbusters premiered in 1984 and I was still a toddler when Ghostbusters 2 premiered in 1989. By the time the time The Real Ghostbusters animated series made it to Ireland, however, I was old enough to get caught up in the obsession. I’m sure my brothers and I watched the cartoon long before we were ever allowed to watch the feature films and we liked it enough to have a full set of plastic figurines, complete with proton packs, a mini Slimer and even a plastic replica of the the Ecto-One to go bust our very own ghosts in.

My decades long adoration for the Ghostbuster franchise made perfect sense when I found out that it is the product of another autistic imagination, someone who is far more obsessed with ghosts than I will ever be: writer and actor Dan Ackroyd. The Ghostbusters franchise encapsulates Ackroyd’s twin obsessions with the paranormal and law enforcement (it is essential about a group of friends who go around locking up ghosts) and Ghostbusters 2 is, perhaps, as autistic as big screen blockbusters get: it’s all about the nature of human emotions.

Mood Slime?

Genocidal maniac turned demon, Vigo the Carpathian, is set up to be an evil strong enough to bring about the apocalypse. But he gets his power from what Egon (Harold Ramis) calls a ‘psychomagnatheric slimeflow of immense proportions’ building up under the streets of New York City. This pink ‘mood slime’ as Peter (Bill Murray) calls it, has the potential to both provoke and respond to human emotion. In a city where ‘being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's god-given right,’ the prevailing emotions accumulating on the city’s streets are negative. Ray and Egon spend most of the movie experimenting on and observing the slime’s reaction to diverse emotional stimuli. Their experiments shed light the slime’s potential to animate objects and also how feelings can manifest in a whole population. It is this obsession with observing and understanding emotion that makes Ghostbusters 2 a truly autistic movie.

A common autistic experience is the difficulty in recognising or identifying our emotions and/or what is happening in our bodies at any given time. These phenomena are known as alexithymia and problems with interoception (the ability to recognise the body’s emotional and physiological signals eg. feeling cold, hungry or even anxious). Autistic also people often have trouble reading and/or identifying other people’s emotions from facial expression, body language or even the prevailing mood in a social gathering. As someone who struggles to identify any feelings, good or bad, unless they’re really obvious or reach a crisis point and who often fails to ‘read the room’ until it’s too late, the idea of psychoactive slime as an external projection of the emotions an individual or group feeling is fascinating to me. Ghostbuster 2’s fixation on mood slime, rather than a creepy dude in a sepia painting, is most likely not an accident. Ackroyd sought an autism diagnosis between the first and second movies because he struggled to manage his feelings.

The movie culminates in the manipulation of the Statue of Liberty through positively-charged slime and the mass manipulation of emotions of the people of New York when they see Lady Liberty marching through the streets. The positive energy generated is enough to weaken the recently resurgent Vigo and bring him down. Vigo is expelled from Ray’s body in a shower of positively slime and Ray is left the kind of high you get from a good dose of Molly: he loves everybody, even the recently possessed Janosz.

Is the atomic weight of cobalt 58.9?

The other aspect of Ghostbusters 2 that is intrinsically autistic is it’s celebration of nerds and the joy of research. As a nerd by nature and a researcher by profession, this hits all the right buttons for me.

Ray and Egon reflect each other’s excitement about research and get to nerd out about science in multiple scenes. Even though their excitement may not be fully understood nor shared by Peter or Winston, they are rarely mocked for it. In fact, research into the occult, the paranormal, folklore, mythology, human emotion and the workings of the human mind drive much of the story in both movies. These frequent expressions of excitement are one of the few representations of autistic joy I have seen on screen.

The wonder and excitement they experience from their own work is palpable even if it is not always expressed in the most appropriate way: Ray exclaims ‘great’ when Peter calls to tell them about Dana’s (Sigourney Weaver) bathtub trying to eat her baby. This is subsequently turned into a joke that deserves attention. It shows that even when autistic people put our foot in it or our reactions seem inappropriate, that does not necessarily mean we have bad intentions. Ray was just thrilled to have more evidence that the mood slime is conscious as well as pyschoreative. Ray apologises and the story moves on without making a big deal about Ray’s accidental insensitivity.

They're more interested in my epididymis…

Ghostbusters 2 is also a movie about a group of friends who seem delighted (mostly) to be able to work together and indulge their very niche special interests, while also making some money. This contradicts one of the myths about autism that has been hardest to shake: that we cannot make nor maintain friendships. Each of the Ghostbusters has a role to fill.

Ray and Egon are the brains, and I would argue the heart, of the operation. Both were written as canonically autistic characters, as well as asexual and aromantic. (Unless you subscribe to the You Are Good theory they are slime sexual.) Meanwhile Winston translates all the technical jargon for us mere mortals in the audience and Peter provides charisma and comic relief. The fact that two autistic (Egon and Ray) and two allistic (Peter and Winston) men have managed to sustain friendships and working relationships over at least five year is testament to the possibilities for creating friendships across the neurodivergent-neurotypical divide when difference and diversity are embraced.

Some of them even became sex symbols. As a child I nursed a very secret crush on Egon, the soft spoken, beta-male, brainiac. I can’t think of another movie where an asexual, aromantic scientist also gets to be a superhero. And despite the fact that 90% of straight women were apparently lusting after Peter, he just seemed like an asshole to me. In fact, Peter felt so much like Bill Murray’s alter ego that his character put me off watching his film for years. Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson eventually gave him enough flailing, but lovable, man-child roles to convince that he me he might not be so bad after all. Somewhere between Raleigh St. Claire and Police Chief Cliff Robertson I became a huge fun. Turns out, however, that my ten year old instincts were correct: Bill Murray is a grade-A asshole.

One time, I turned into a dog and they helped me!

I’ll wrap up with a shout out to two of my favourite character actors of all time: arch creep and campy henchman Janosz, played by the ever willing servant, Peter MacNichol and Rick Moranis as Luis the accountant who was once turned into a hell hound.

While MacNichol’s accent is, 35 years later, deeply problematic (Eastern Europeans were apparently very scary in the 1980s), Moranis provides another wonderful and canonically autistic performance. Luis’s singleminded obsession with accountancy, his monotone voice, his awkwardness around other people and his difficulty making friends can all be read as autistic. I appreciate how in Ghostbusters 2 he is less of a joke and even becomes one of the gang. Luis contributes to ghostbusting where he can (accounting, lawyering and starring in their network TV ad) and he is the only one, other than Peter, who has a romantic storyline featuring an adorable encounter with Janine.

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If you’re eager fo more Ghostbuster content, I highly recommend the You Are Good episode on why Ghostbusters 2 is an underrated sequel and the

Autistic Culture

podcast on how the Ghostbusters franchise is canonically autistic.

Join me next time as we dive into the Derek Zoolander’s secret to being really, really, goodlooking.

In the meantime, drop a comment about what non-prescriptive activities you prefer to engage in over the holidays or your own New Year’s Eve big-screen favourite: