Safety lights are for dudes
Jul. 21st, 2016 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI saw Ghostbusters Sunday. The topline verdict is that it was both fun and funny, and that it had glorious, top-notch technobabble.
No seriously, I aspire to write technobabble that good. It wasn't just euphonious and sciencey, it was self-consistent and it was consistent with the technobabble of the original movie. But it was also euphonious. There were repeated references to ionizing energy that had very little connection to how ionizing energy works in the real world, but which were consistent with each other, and built up a mental image in the viewer's head of how the science of ghostbusting worked. It sounded like real science. And it was paired with scientists thinking like real scientists. I loved how Dr. Gilbert confronted the Bill Murray character by saying "You're right, if I were you I wouldn't believe us, because science is built on experimentation and repeatability and evidence, and you have not seen any compelling evidence yet, so... I am going to show you our evidence." All the scientific method feels.
Holtzmann was the best. "Safety lights are for dudes," indeed. I love her reckless abandon and commitment to engineering improvement. I love how even she can't keep track of all of her own modifications, and how casually she handles nuclear weapons. I love how she iterates, how every failure just brings out her "Okay, now I know how to make the next generation better." I loved her sarcastic guessing about how many safety regulations she's violated. Holtzmann is my engineering anti-hero- though a basic guide to how to do engineering would be: Look at whatever Holtzmann does and do the opposite, it is awesome to imagine a world in which Holtzmann could be successful. (Holtzmann reminds me of the way I wrote Eugenie Rillieux, actually)
I have mixed feelings, though, about the put-it-back-in-the-box ending. I suppose the intention is to suggest explicitly that women can be as successful as men, but they won't get the same credit, and I think there is also commentary about how the discourse between scientists and the public is broken, how the things the public believes about the scientific world are not the same as the things that scientists believe, but... the triumphant ending is part of what I love about the original movie. I like that ultimately the outsider scientists save the world and are recognized for it, that the world readjusts to the reality of ghosts rather than trying to deny they ever existed. The cover-up is not supposed to be part of my Ghostbusters fantasy, damnit.
No seriously, I aspire to write technobabble that good. It wasn't just euphonious and sciencey, it was self-consistent and it was consistent with the technobabble of the original movie. But it was also euphonious. There were repeated references to ionizing energy that had very little connection to how ionizing energy works in the real world, but which were consistent with each other, and built up a mental image in the viewer's head of how the science of ghostbusting worked. It sounded like real science. And it was paired with scientists thinking like real scientists. I loved how Dr. Gilbert confronted the Bill Murray character by saying "You're right, if I were you I wouldn't believe us, because science is built on experimentation and repeatability and evidence, and you have not seen any compelling evidence yet, so... I am going to show you our evidence." All the scientific method feels.
Holtzmann was the best. "Safety lights are for dudes," indeed. I love her reckless abandon and commitment to engineering improvement. I love how even she can't keep track of all of her own modifications, and how casually she handles nuclear weapons. I love how she iterates, how every failure just brings out her "Okay, now I know how to make the next generation better." I loved her sarcastic guessing about how many safety regulations she's violated. Holtzmann is my engineering anti-hero- though a basic guide to how to do engineering would be: Look at whatever Holtzmann does and do the opposite, it is awesome to imagine a world in which Holtzmann could be successful. (Holtzmann reminds me of the way I wrote Eugenie Rillieux, actually)
I have mixed feelings, though, about the put-it-back-in-the-box ending. I suppose the intention is to suggest explicitly that women can be as successful as men, but they won't get the same credit, and I think there is also commentary about how the discourse between scientists and the public is broken, how the things the public believes about the scientific world are not the same as the things that scientists believe, but... the triumphant ending is part of what I love about the original movie. I like that ultimately the outsider scientists save the world and are recognized for it, that the world readjusts to the reality of ghosts rather than trying to deny they ever existed. The cover-up is not supposed to be part of my Ghostbusters fantasy, damnit.