THEORY: 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' Doesn't Take Place In NYC, But The Pink Slime Might Still Be Involved
Ghostbusters 2 was a fascinating movie. It was a rare sequel that at least sort of lived up to its predecessor, which, back before the days of media dynasties like Disney, Pixar and Marvel, was very hard to pull off. Setting aside the weird recharacterization of Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) from mildly apathetic eccentric to all-out manic pixie dreamgirl - and the ensuing end of her implied relationship with Egon (Harold Ramis), something Ghostbusters: Afterlife thankfully appears to correct - it was a solid film, and the way it built on the world they created was fascinating.
Needless to say, there wasn't the same obsession with Lore in the 80s that there is today. Nobody was watching Ghostbusters and trying to figure out the rules and laws of physics that bound that universe together - in spite of the fact that physics is directly mentioned many times in the film, and we know they technically exist, because the Ghostbusters ARE scientists.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife looks like it may work to build that out some more, especially with all the references to past films we see in the trailers, and talk of "picking through the rubble" of Egon Spengler's life. And seeing as the film appears to be set outside of the city, New York probably won't be as much of a key player as it was in the first two...but even so, one has to wonder - how is that psychotropic slime under New York City doing today?
The presence of this weird pink slime under NYC, absorbing negativity and creating a feedback loop of feeling, makes for some extremely interesting implications about what exactly the ghosts haunting New York are haunting it for.
To refresh your memory: In Ghostbusters 2, the Ghostbusters find out that there's a river of pink slime flowing through the tunnels of the old pneumatic transit system - the precursor to the subway system we still use today.
The slime is later found to be extremely emotionally receptive; if you give it happy, say by playing an uplifting song (or whatever Spengler and Ray (Dan Akroyd) tried in the lab...), it becomes positively charged, which has an uplifting effect on everything it touches, from a toaster to the Statue of Liberty. Similarly, if you yell at or berate the slime, it gives anger and negativity back - it makes everyone tense, and can turn a dancing toaster into a man-eating one in the blink of an eye.
The slime is both the problem and the solution in the movie: It shows that the issue with NYC is that everyone in it is unhappily floating around in their own stressed-out, overworked bubble, which definitely tracks with what it was like there in the 80s. In the end, when they positively charge enough slime to get the Statue of Liberty to go for a walk, it has a definitive effect on the city: People gather together to sing, point, smile, and take pictures, and this positive effect helps the Ghostbusters defeat Vigo.
The message of Ghostbusters 2 actually reads a whole lot like a Disney Princess movie: It tells us that if you give love, you get love back, and that if enough people decide to live like that, everything gets better.
New York City has vastly improved in recent years, and if you had to guess what's been happening vis-a-vis the pink slime in the last few decades, "less angry" would be a good starting try. The place that was once a punchline about crappy urban life is now once again seated in reputation as one of the greatest cities in America. Actually, it seems that all the anger these days is not centered around major urban areas as much as it is in small, rural towns, particularly those that seem somewhat forgotten - like the one Egan ended up moving to, the one in which Ghostbusters: Afterlife is set.
The original trailer shows Finn Wolfhard's character staring on as ghosts emerge from a hole in the ground, intercut with scenes of the ground shaking for seemingly no reason. That makes it seem a lot like the source of the ghosts, whatever it is, is somewhere underneath the town, and the way the shot of them in front of the mining shaft in the clip resembles the manhole the guys went down into the tunnels seems like it may not be a coincidence. Paul Rudd's character is quoted as saying that nobody's seen a ghost in around 30 years - and perhaps the reason is that nobody's been angry enough to make them appear.
So that's my theory of the day: Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to see the return of the pink slime as a character (and perhaps a culprit) for these kids and their new town.
There's no direct indication of this in the trailer, so I could very well be dead wrong - but even if I am, it sure is interesting that ghost movies like these always seem to be set, not necessarily in the saddest places, or the scariest, but rather the angriest - if you watch closely Ghostbusters, over and over again, has warned us that when we live with unresolved anger or hatred, ghosts will eventually come for us.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife hits theaters tomorrow.
