I don’t have much nostalgia for the Ghostbusters franchise, but even going into the latest film with no expectations, I still found it disappointing. For me, Ghostbusters: Frozen Realm — now streaming on Netflix — wasted his time An Interesting plot point: What Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace) had with the ghost girl Melody (Emily Alyn Lind).
Quick catch-up, in case you’re lucky enough not to have seen the latest Ghostbusters movies: Phoebe is the 15-year-old granddaughter of original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis). And just like her grandfather, she’s a bit of an outsider. She loves ghosts and science. And she’s so, So queer-coded. That hair! That overall! The fact that she feels isolated from her peers and can only make contact with spirits!
In the new film, she befriends a ghost girl, Melody, who tragically died in a fire in a rental house at an unknown time. They form a deep bond, which is made stronger by the fact that Phoebe is temporarily banned from ghostbusting, thanks to, like, child labor laws or something. She feels particularly isolated from her family and ghostbuster friends, so she really clings to Melody as someone who offers her friendship during this difficult time.
(Editorial note: Big spoiler for Ghostbusters: Frozen Realm.)
Image: Columbia Pictures
The friendship quickly becomes intense, in a way that makes much more sense if you read it as a romantic crush. Phoebe literally decides to put her body in a near-death state so she can enter the ghost plane and to touch Melody. And yet the movie still portrays this as a “just girls being buddies” moment, a completely platonic, desperate need for physical contact with a buddy. Who goes through all that to hold hands with a friend?
Throughout the movie I kept waiting for some sort of confession, or a big kiss in their last scene or something. Of course I was disappointed. (But don’t be surprised!) The two share a tearful but not-at-all-romantic goodbye, and Melody heads off to the Great Beyond, or something. And that’s because she realizes that the whole reason she couldn’t move on was because she was ultimately destined to save Phoebe’s life at the film’s climax, using the matchbox that’s been haunting her her entire unlife. Platonic.
Not every queer romance needs to be told clearly on screen, but come on. Evidently director Gil Kenan even told Lynd to watch Sylvie and the ghost for research. That’s a 1946 movie about a ghost who falls in love with a woman who reminds him of his former lover. At this point, it really feels like the filmmakers, the studio, or some executive went out of their way to make sure the storyline wasn’t explicitly romantic, just in case some hardcore Ghostbusters fans got upset that Egon Spengler’s granddaughter is gay. (Considering the track record of the self-proclaimed fandom of the Ghostbusters(That is indeed a very likely scenario.)
But that leaves Frozen Kingdom in a cowardly, half-realized state, in which Phoebe and Melody are not gay ghost friends, even if that would explain the remarkable intensity of their relationship and add a sense of emotional stakes to some of the big moments. Would a yearning teenage kiss or a tearful farewell confession have saved them? Frozen Kingdom of a downright bad movie? Probably not. But it would at least be a something to emotionally ground it and actually make this struggling franchise do something new and interesting.