The Real (Symbolic, and Imaginary) Ghostbusters

Postscript

The Lacanian reading also offers another explanation for the crossing of the streams.  One thing that Belinkie didn’t mention in his otherwise excellent post is that, for all that it’s a horrific risk of human life, crossing the streams works as a narrative device.  It satisfies in a way that few horror movie final showdowns can… certainly more than the “oh, let’s just squirt him with goo” finale of Ghostbusters II does, and certainly more than if they had simply disposed of Gozer using the same old zap n’ trap method that they had used on more prosaic ghouls.  Of course, part of this might just be because the device of crossing the streams is a well-aimed Chekhov Cannon.  But remember that throughout the movie, ghosts have been captured using various metonymies of science.  Science is an important part of Lacan’s Symbolic Order (along with conscious thought, language, legal codes, and the patriarchy in general).  But just as the Real has no existence apart from the crumbling absence we feel at the fringes of rational thought, the Symbolic Order (i.e. rational thought itself) is only an arbitrary structure imposed on the undifferentiated chaos of existence.  Or to put it another way, every rational system is based on irrational axioms.  (That whooshing noise you hear is our scientist-in-residence drawing in breath to scream profanities in my ear.  Pay it no mind.)  If you’ve ever had a conversation with a child about science, you’ll know what I mean:  if they ask “Why?” enough times, you’ll eventually have to fall back on “because I said so,” or some variation of the same.  Thus, the final scene of Ghostbusters.  The crucial point to remember is that we have no reason to believe that crossing the streams will work.  This should be a weakness, but because our science-heroes are struggling against the limits of rationality itself, an arbitrary tactic is the only tactic that we will accept.  It will work, in the film and as storytelling, because Egon Spengler, Man of Science, has told us that it will work (because he said so), and this too, is what we have somehow always known.