ithelpstodream:

“There’s a scene, late in the movie, with Kate McKinnon, that made me feel like I’ve never felt at a movie before. (No, it wasn’t the vibrating chair talking, this was real.) I should confess: Some of this is personal. My favorite character, in any big action-ensemble movie, is always the demolitions guy: the mad scientist, the weapons expert, the damage-dealer, the one who just wants to see stuff blow up. I say “demolitions guy” because he’s always a guy; they never cast the mad scientist or gun nut as a woman. But in this movie, he’s Kate McKinnon.

So she gets the scene these guys always get, in a movie like this. She has a wonderful new toy. The film slows down. She starts moving, and sure enough, she just starts unleashing raw havoc everywhere.

Something in my chest opened up. This is it, I realized. This is the thing I never got to see before. The scene where the demolitions guy is a girl. I was right: It actually does feel different when it’s a girl. This must be how guys feel every time they watch one of these movies. This is it, the version that’s for me, the scene I always wanted, and it’s here.

I don’t know what that feeling was, or how to describe it. But here’s the best way I can: For all the talk about “childhoods,” I got exactly 30 seconds in that movie where I felt like I was 8 years old again. Except that it was better than being 8 years old. It was like being 8 years old would have been, if the world had been fair.

I didn’t realize the political implications until I was out of the theater. I didn’t realize that this was also an openly queer actress, playing a more-or-less openly queer character (and we could do with more “more” and less “less,” Sony), that it might have hit other people in the audience even harder than it hit me, and for that reason. I didn’t think about anything, except that a woman was getting the same big slo-mo blowing-shit-up scene a million guys have gotten, and that scene is awesome. I’ve always loved that scene. Women aren’t treated as a big boundary-breaking historic symbol of progress and equality, in this movie. They’re treated like people.

And then you go out into the real world, where thousands of people are trying to hurt Leslie Jones on Twitter, and everyone hates Ghostbusters again. The same world you went into Ghostbusters to escape. But you can escape it, for a little while, in that theater. There’s a reason we need movies like these, after all.”

– Sady Doyle, These Times