Molehill Mountain Episode 7 – Quietly Into the Night

I had been looking forward to Ghostbusters, until the trailers started coming out. And even though the trailers were cringe-inducingly bad, I know that trailers are not always indicative of the quality of the actual movie, and I still wanted to give it a shot. Because it’s GHOSTBUSTERS. 😀 But the torrent of shit from the people behind the movie, to the effect of “Fuck everybody who doesn’t like the trailers, they’re just a bunch of misogynists,” has really put a foul taste in my mouth, and made me not want to reward them with my money.

They’ve spun this narrative into a core feature of their marketing, that this movie is really sticking it to them durn misogynists. Those few obnoxious crackpots are around, of course, like they always are. But they don’t explain why the Ghostbusters trailer got nearly a million dislikes, while Force Awakens or Rogue One, both of which are also from a beloved franchise that switched to female leads, got around twenty thousand (and the Force Awakens trailer was pissing off the racist scum, too!). Or look at the Hunger Games. No great amount of dislikes on those, either.

I mean, what’s more plausible here? That there is a vast horde of misogynists who have been waiting as female-centric movie after female-centric movie comes by, biding their time, until they finally get the secret signal on their Misogyny Club decoder rings to dogpile on this movie? All the while, making sure to disguise their misogyny by making valid criticisms that have nothing to do with the gender of the cast? Or could it be that the trailers were just pretty bad and a lot of people didn’t like them? I know what the people behind the movie would say, and that’s why I’m probably going to sit this one out.

Pretty reflective of every article and quote I’ve seen on the topic. When the subject of the backlash against the trailer is brought up, the whole conversation is just misogyny this, gamergate that, nerds are a bunch of assholes, etc. Any other reasons for disliking the trailer, if they are even mentioned at all, are handwaved away. Obviously this includes commentators and personalities who are not working on the movie, but that overall framing of the issue is reinforced, whether explicitly or tacitly, by the people who are. If the only thing you ever talk about is misogyny any time you are asked about the criticism of the trailer, you’re sending a pretty clear message.

It just chaps my ass that real opinions, including mine, get swallowed up in this trumped-up culture war skirmish. It wouldn’t be enough to stop me from going if I thought it looked good, but it’s enough to tip me from “Meh, it might not be as bad as it looks” to “No thanks”.

The way they treated Ivan Reitman was pretty shitty, too (from the leaked/hacked e-mails floating around).

I’m not talking about user posts, I’m talking about articles, everywhere. Just google “ghostbusters misogyny” for examples.

As for the Ivan Reitman stuff, here’s a writeup: http://www.gbfans.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=39324 and a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPAklIlov-A .

7 of the first 10 results on Google either bluntly state that the backlash is because of misogyny, or at least suggest it by speaking about the criticism in terms of misogyny and nothing else.

[quote]Feig has said previously that the negative online reaction to the film’s trailer stems from a “very small minority” of “bullies” in the geek community who “write misogyny and hate and threats.”[/quote]
[quote]The seemingly concerted effort to snub the trailer, combined with the internet’s original reaction to news of an all-female lead cast, suggests the hate may be more complicated than people “disliking this movie because it is a shitty remake.” After first announcing the gender switch last year, the Guardian reported that Feig said the backlash was “some of the most vile, misogynistic shit I’ve ever seen in my life.”[/quote]
[quote]At the annual Produced By conference held on June 4, Feig, who also directed the women-led Bridesmaids and Spy, addressed the criticism his movie has faced since the all-female Ghostbusters remake was announced in 2014. “I have been hit with the most misogynistic stuff,” he said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “The onslaught that came in was just so chilling.[/quote]
[quote]Could “Ghostbusters” seriously be that bad? It seems highly unlikely, and as ScreenCrush noted, “ What is actually happening is that a certain subset of people on the Internet have an unhealthy fixation with hating on the ‘Ghostbusters’ remake and are teaming up to downvote it into oblivion.”
Who is that subset of Internet people? Dare we say trolls with a lot of time on their hands? As Forbes theorized, and we agree, these are the same people who threw a hissy fit when, after six consecutive “Star Wars” films focused on male heroes, the following two (with two still to come) featured female leads. The same people who verbally attack a female film critic for panning a beloved comic book film. The same people who send death threats, forcing female writers into retirement, and generally set out to make women’s Internet lives total hell.
It’s not surprising that the same set of sexist Internet trolls, Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs), and misogynists who harass women online would band together to make sure that Feig’s all -female “Ghosbusters” was the most disliked trailer in You Tube history.[/quote]
[quote]Baby-men liked old movie that baby-men saw when baby-men were babies, before internet was place where baby-men could put angry baby-thoughts. New movie no have men, have women. Women confuse baby-men. Women not men. Women not men at all!

Baby-men bang head against keyboard until form mad baby-words. Baby-men put mad baby-words on internet. Baby-men shriek into void.[/quote]
[quote]Right is now horribly wrong. The torch has been passed from the heroes of yesterday (aka your childhood) to new heroes who might just inspire the same kind of love for a new generation of movie lovers. And now a new vocal and irate critic has weighed in with a rallying volley for the misogyny-flecked backlash against the all-female Ghostbusters.
…
Extend that theory to low-key Ghostbusters misogyny and you get what Birth Movies Death’s Devin Faraci perfectly describes in a piece titled “The Soft Sexism of Hating on the New Ghostbusters.”
Every conceivable minor quibble with a movie no one has yet seen has been tallied to add up to the inalienable conclusion that Ghostbusters the remake is an abomination created to devour and erode and co-opt that thing from your childhood that you loved and allowed to partially define you.
Retrograde gender politics and a resistance to a progressive future go hand in hand, in pop culture and elsewhere. And if angry video game nerds can’t see that ugliness in their undue animosity toward a female-fronted movie that doesn’t directly impact their actual real lives, then we all have a lot more to be afraid of than ghosts.
Or, as Feig himself so aptly put it in response to the hateful misogynist fanboys of the Internet: “Geek culture is home to some of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met in my life.”[/quote]
[quote]The undercurrent of misogyny isn’t too hard to see, even if it’s not stated explicitly, and the all-female principal cast has riled up many male YouTubers since the trailer first dropped. The notion that an actor without the proper genitals would dare to star in a previously-established film property has, for some reason or another, gravely offended the denizens of YouTube.[/quote]

So… I guess [quote] tags aren’t a thing? Or is that the wrong formatting?

When the question is why people didn’t like the trailer, and the answers only ever refer to misogyny and ignore/handwave any other reasons, the implication is pretty clear.

Noted. I’m not seeing any way to edit posts, though. Am I missing it, or is it not there?

I tried to track down the songs you were talking about, too. I was (unfortunately… >.> ) successful in finding the Fallout Boy one. And some googling seems to indicate that the other band you were trying to remember is Pentatonix, but I can’t seem to find anywhere to actually hear their version. Do you remember where you came across it?