I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the Ghostbusters franchise, but even going into the latest movie without any expectations, I still thought it was disappointing. For me, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire — now streaming on Netflix — wasted its one compelling plot point: Whatever Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace) had going on with ghost girl Melody (Emily Alyn Lind).
Quick catch-up, in case you’re lucky enough to have not watched the newest new Ghostbusters movies: Phoebe is the 15-year-old granddaughter of original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis). And like her grandfather, she’s a bit of a misfit. She loves ghosts and science. And she’s so, so queer-coded. That hair! Those overalls! The fact that she feels isolated from her peers and can only connect with ghosts!
In the new movie, she strikes up a friendship with a ghost girl, Melody, who died tragically in a tenement fire in some unspecified time period. They form a deep bond, heightened by the fact that Phoebe has been temporarily banned from ghostbusting, thanks to, like, child labor laws or something. She’s feeling particularly isolated from her family and ghostbuster friends, so she really latches onto Melody as someone offering her friendship in this trying time.
[Ed. note: Major spoiler ahead for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.]
Image: Columbia Pictures
The friendship gets intense mighty quickly, in a way that makes way more sense if you read it as a romantic infatuation. Phoebe literally decides to put her body into an unconscious near-death state just so she can enter the ghost plane and touch Melody. And yet the movie still portrays this as a “just gals being pals” moment, a completely platonic urgent need for physical contact with a buddy. Who’s going through all that just to hold hands with a friend?
Throughout the whole movie, I kept waiting for some sort of confession, or for their final scene to have a big ol’ smooch or something. Of course, I was disappointed. (But not surprised!) The two of them share a teary but totally non-romantic goodbye, and Melody goes off to the Great Beyond, or whatever. And that’s because she realizes the whole reason she hadn’t been able to move on was because she was ultimately destined to save Phoebe’s life in the movie’s climax, by using the matchbox that’s haunted her throughout her unlife. Platonically.
Not every queer romance needs to be clearly spelled out on screen, but, like, c’mon. Apparently director Gil Kenan even told Lynd to watch Sylvie and the Ghost for research. That’s a 1946 movie about a ghost falling in love with a woman who reminds him of his former lover. At this point, it deeply feels like the filmmakers, the studio, or some executive went out of their way to ensure that storyline wasn’t explicitly romantic, just in case some hardcore Ghostbusters fans got angry about Egon Spengler’s granddaughter being queer. (Given the track record of the Ghostbusters’ self-proclaimed fandom, that’s a fairly likely scenario, really.)
But that leaves Frozen Empire in a cowardly half-realized state, where Phoebe and Melody aren’t gay ghost girlfriends, even if that would explain their relationship’s notable intensity and add a sense of emotional stakes to some of the big moments. Would a yearning teenage kiss or a tearful goodbye confession have saved Frozen Empire from being a frankly bad movie? Probably not. But it would’ve at least given it something emotional to ground it, and actually let this floundering franchise do something new and interesting.