June 21, 2007
Throwing Pale Shade On Ghost Hunters
Come Out Tonight. Paranormal photograph © 2004 JdB.
by Jerome du Bois
Yesterday, Virginia Heffernan of the NYT reviewed one of the few TV programs we watch whenever it's on: "Ghost Hunters," on the SciFi Channel. Maybe she just watched a couple of shows for her piece --a press package, probably-- but the cultural critic sure missed a lot, and didn't give the show a righteous profile. (DVDs of previous seasons are available.) I myself detected the snide, dismissive odor of New York tony irony --a sure sign of laziness and ignorance.
Jason Hawes, a jovial, bald hulk who resembles Vic Mackey of “The Shield,” runs his own vigilante team on “Ghost Hunters.” But unlike Mackey’s fictional rogue cops, the TAPS gang on this Sci Fi reality show doesn’t whack anyone: the quarry is already dead.
It’s funny when you think about it: make-believe cops are maniacs, while real-life ghost hunters — who could be forgiven for being delusional — turn out to be neato team players in oxford cloth and fleece. In the season’s opening episode earlier this month, they looked like nothing more than a men’s a cappella group on a tour of Britain.
No, it's not funny; it's stupid. Instead of comparing Jason to the fictional TV corrupt cop, Heffernan could have more fruitfully compared the whole crew to their British counterparts, the "Most Haunted" group --especially since the season premiere took place in Britain. Basically, the Americans go with the high-tech equipment --their default position is to debunk-- while the British go with mediums, feelings, historical verifications, and traditional spiritualists methods such as table-tipping.
That comparison would have made a better opening; after all, who Jason Hawes resembles is completely irrelevant to "Ghost Hunters," but how his team's methods differ from their British counterparts's methods is relevant. Is this Heffernan's pathetic attempt at some kind of street cred, to link a fringe show with a hit show? Everybody knows what Vic Mackey looks like; everybody made that connection automatically, then dismissed it and moved on; Heffernan (and her editor) should have known that.
There's plenty more.
The ghostbusters are all men but one, and all white, which does nothing to correct the staple joke of black comics that white people are too quick to pursue things that go bump in the night. A typical scene shows one of the TAPS guys racing toward a disembodied face as if it were a birthday cake. (TAPS stands for the Atlantic Paranormal Society.)
Again an irrelevant cultural reference after irrelevant (and racist?) ethnic and gender references. Look at those dumb white folks stumbling around in the dark after some haint, hee hee hee. If Heffernan had paid attention to even one show, she would realize that the machines don't care who's pushing their buttons or plugging them in or aiming their lenses. This is just more thin filler, a mental Post-It Note she had tagged to her cultural mirror.
They also just hang out in the world’s scary spots, sitting and waiting with their gadgets for the dead. Their patience is one of their most unnerving qualities. And when they really freak out, that’s also when they steadfastly stay.
“I started to get real uncomfortable sitting in that ‘wrath,’ ” Grant Wilson, another TAPS member, said in the season premiere, using a term for a fairy domain, in this case essentially a current of bad vibes in an Irish field, with a monstrous-looking ruin on it. “I started hearing various types of humming behind me. And footsteps, and voices. That was something I’d never heard before. After a little while I could start to see little figures moving around.”
Right here, Eddie Murphy needed to appear —dragging chains, if necessary— to remind everyone to get out.
Hey, remind me what fuggin Eddie Murphy has to do with anything! Online, the name is hyperlinked, but it doesn't send the reader to, presumably, a role with Eddie Murphy, chains, and ghosts --you know, to support the sentence. Is there such a role? Don't ask me, because I don't care. But the link only goes to his general filmography, as if we needed to be reminded who Eddie Murphy is. The NYT, Heffernan, and her editors show less internet savvy than a first-day blogger Unless it's the usual advertorial sleeve-tugging. Crass as hell, but, alas, we're used to it. Meanwhile, the reference derails thinking about what Grant testified to, and how calmly he did so. (Again, in contrast to, say, Stuart on "Most Haunted": "Oi've got to [bleep]ing tell yew, Oi've never bean soo froitened in moy loif!")
The Ghost Hunters don't usually visit "the world's" scary spots --mainly sites in the US, and mostly humble homes, with a scattering of derelict prisons and asylums, famous hotels, Tombstone, and lighthouses. Now, we're not devoted fans, but we have seen enough shows to know that Grant Wilson doesn't usually give this kind of testimony, and hardly ever without backup from one of his "gadgets for the dead." ("Gadgets," she said, in that impossible tone, as if a FLIR thermal-imaging camera was a toy from a cartoon show.)
The Ghost Hunter investigation design guarantees multiple simultaneous human perspectives confirmed by live timelines from equipment recording in several modalities. Because of this rigor, only the completely unexplainable, the totally uncanny, gets filtered through, and that's what makes it impressive. I'm thinking of a hunchbacked figure who passes behind a table at the far end of a room, a cloaked thing outside a prison cell that caused the famous "Dude, Run!" clip, a vividly-colored outline of a shadow man in a doorway that isn't there, an imp-like thing cavorting at the top of a spiral staircase in a lighthouse, a FLIR rainbow aura throbbing around Jason like a psychedelic poster come to life . . .
Heffernan wrote more, but I won't fisk it all, since she already left out all the interesting parts, leaving only a pale outline of the principals and their purposes. Just one more paragraph:
While the Sci Fi Channel flashed fake lightning and simulated vertigo and double vision with its camera, “Ghost Hunters” did what it does best: supplied the social history of infamous places. In the case of the prison, the cells —hard mats with bars, really— looked as if they would atrophy an average-size prisoner within a year. “I couldn’t imagine why, if you were dead, why you would continue to hang around in an area like that,” Mr. Wilson said.
That's an excellent question --one of the top ten in paranormal circles-- but Heffernan can't be bothered to pursue it. And it's "Most Haunted," not "Ghost Hunters," which more often supplies "the social history of infamous places." (One of their hooks is that the mediums "know nothing of the bloody and sinister history of this castle.") The Ghost Hunters are usually at Darrell and Carol's dilapidated duplex somewhere in New Jersey.
And Heffernan completely ignores the personalities, social dynamics, and motivations of the team, which are what keep me watching. (I don't need to be convinced of the existence of ghosts.) These are real people who apply themselves to their work seriously, without irony, following their curiosity with self-critical professionalism.
Reading her article you would never know that Jason and Grant, the team leaders, are Roto-Rooter plumbers, and the shows often have footage of the two in some rough basement speculating on a paranormal hypothesis while handing each other plastic pipes and wrenches. Sometime in the past, each had had, separately, a powerful paranormal experience. Unlike nearly everyone else in the same situation, especially with a camera around, neither Jason nor Grant will tell anyone what happened to them. To me, that makes them interesting. And both are almost painfully sincere and sensitive. Thus Grant's invariable introductory line: "We're from TAPS. We're here to help."
Then there's Brian Harnois, who was probably called "doofus" and worse as a kid. Earnest and headstrong, he has had the most volatile history with the crew: chafing against authority --"I've forgotten more about the paranormal than he'll ever learn"-- treating equipment sloppily, setting things up wrong, getting distracted with a very demanding romantic relationship (in one show, he was on his cell phone with her almost the whole time). It was this last that led him to leave the series for an extended time. When he returned, you could see he was more mature.
He was still Brian, though. In a clip that always makes the favorites list, he and another crew member get scared by a ghost, and before spinning around and booking it like track stars (all caught on digital video) Brian calls out, "Dude, run!" A couple of episodes later, while he and fellow techie Steve Gonsalves are editing footage, we see Brian has replaced his TAPS gimme cap with one that boasts the phrase, "Dude, run!" And when Steve teases him about it, as if Brian is a fool for reminding everyone about how he ran --"What, are you proud of what you did?" Steve needles him-- Brian stands his ground. What's the big deal? he seems to be saying. Everybody saw it happen anyway. I admire that honesty; also, I think that Brian is more media-savvy than Steve, and the custom cap was a wink and a nod to the audience, as if he knew the running clip would end up on a favorites list. In the next scene, the cap was gone, replaced with a TAPS cap. Brian may look like a mouth-breather, but inside? busy busy busy.
Steve likes to tease Brian. When Brian says he's going to "zeroize" an instrument, Steve goes on and on about it: "Zeroize? Is that a word? Zeroize?" "That's what I call it," Brian stubbornly answers.
Steve is not one to speak of fear and running away, as Brian reminds him. He is phobic about flying, heights, the dark, and spiders --and those are only the ones we know about. He's a policeman. No kidding. Oddly, he is not afraid of tattoo needles; he has sleeves going on both arms and both legs.
But it's Brian who takes home the prize for most original phobia. In one episode he confides to the camera, "I'd rather face a hundred demons from Hell, one by one, than a porcelain doll on the move."
A porcelain doll on the move.
It chills you to the bone, doesn't it? It would easier to explain if he was referring to something like Chuckie, wouldn't it? But no. I told you: busy busy busy.
The rest of the crew --and there are more women than Donna Lacroix, by the way-- are less quirky, and are distinguished, so far, mainly by their earnestness and professionalism. Personally, we'd like to see more of the demonologist twins, Keith and Karl. GH has plenty in the way of tech; a little spooky balance might shake things up a bit.
Finally, I can't leave these people without mentioning their creative use of language, something I'm always on the lookout for. "You've got to take the mentality that . . ." I laugh when I hear these words, not in mockery at the ignorant hicks, but in admiration of fluid imagination and creativity. So we get Jason saying "rationable" and Grant saying "malintent." We have Brian referring to a full-body appartion as "The Mona Lisa of paranormal phenomena." Jason refers to the same thing as "The Golden Grail."
"Ghost Hunters" is one of the few places in any media where irony stays offstage. Maybe that's what bothered Ms Heffernan; she didn't smell its rancid odor, she didn't hear its whining sneer. Just people listening hard for the voices of the dead, and, y'know, once in Tombstone, Jason and Grant swore they smelled jasmine perfume.
Posted by Jerome at June 21, 2007 05:20 PM | TrackBack