Why the Ghostbusters Are Conservative Icons
It is ironic that some of the countercultural pranksters of 1970’s-era Saturday Night Live would find their greatest box-office success with a movie that is actually a subversive piece of conservative propaganda. None of the anarchic spirit of Aykroyd’s road trip classic Blues Brothers or Murray and Ramis’ military-skewering Stripes exists in their hit 1984 collaboration Ghostbusters.
The story of a group of supernatural exterminators in New York City was also a movie that was pro-deregulation, business, and apocalypse. The ethics of Reagan conservatism, which is still alive and tea partying to this day, inform Ghostbusters. Instead of a team of post-hippie miscreants, the Ghostbusters are entrepreneurs who just want to get rich without big government getting in the way. That Ghostbusters, either consciously or subconsciously, has a conservative subtext makes total sense in a way: by the mid-eighties, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis and director Ivan Reitman were comedy superstars worth millions. There is an old political joke that says a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged. But the truth is a conservative is a liberal who just got rich. Ghostbusters uses the comedic vocabulary of the left in order to tell a story that has traditional right-wing values.
