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In the movie “Ghostbusters II,” the team discovers a river of pink slime (mood slime) flowing beneath New York City. The slime is a supernatural substance that feeds on negative human emotions, such as anger, fear, and hostility. It’s being used by the villain Vigo the Carpathian to return to life.
The slime becomes a central plot device. It reacts emotionally, moving when people argue. It powers paranormal events across the city and ultimately helps animate the Statue of Liberty during the finale. Beneath the comedy, the slime operates as a metaphor. If the cause and consequence of our anger is not supernatural goo, then what about today’s world fails to sit comfortably with our evolutionary history, pushing us toward irritation, outrage, and hostility with startling speed?
The Slime as Social Mirror
The slime materializes emotions that would otherwise go unnoticed. That is, the emotions that each individual shares with one another in the form of “connections” or lack thereof, become physical manifestations. They can be seen, felt, weighed, and also, to some extent, measured. Whenever a disagreement between two or more individuals occurs, the product of this disagreement (the slime) begins to churn. It thickens as the number of “connections” or “disagreements” between individuals accumulates. The way in which emotions expand and “evolve” between people in the social environment is comparable to their behavior in a physical way. The domino effect of anger spreads from individual to individual, causing anger to grow exponentially in the social network (Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018).
From a biological standpoint, human beings are extremely sensitive to societal dangers. When a person was ostracized or faced with hostility, there could have been dire repercussions on their survival in smaller societies. This is why the ability to notice and respond quickly to such feelings was an evolutionary advantage. In today’s cities with high population density, a high degree of anonymity, and an increased amount of stimulation at any one moment, the likelihood of continuing down an emotional path can spiral out of control. Inadvertently, as negative feelings become pervasive, their validation occurs from that universality alone. The slime is a representation of this process as it converts a society’s emotional state into the city’s architecture, which then creates the societal environment regardless of individual attitude or beliefs.
Evolution Meets the Modern World
The friction between ancient biology and modern life helps explain why anger feels both immediate and justified. The evolution of our stress system was made for episodes of crisis for short periods of time, not for constant experiences of symbolic threat or experiences of abstract disagreements. Today, uncertainty is an everyday occurrence. People must constantly make social comparisons. Disagreements are often viewed as failures of character, and stress is rarely diminished from a person’s body. The research on stress in the emotional hierarchy shows that social positions, or hierarchy, and perceived threats are converted into real and physical stress regardless of the existence of physical dangers. (Sapolsky, 2004).
Research in affective neuroscience and social psychology has shown that negative emotional states restrict the range of perceptions of potential threats. As these types of emotional states become more present, they begin to reinforce themselves, particularly if the environment around them places a high value on acting quickly and with confidence versus taking the time to think through an event (Barrett et al., 2007). The research on emotion regulation suggests that when people’s cognitive resources are tired or taxed, they will not use the mental skill of reflection to control their actions. Instead, they will use their habitual reaction (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009). The slime, in this movie, was able to grow due to this discrepancy in the way the system operated and how quickly the emotional triggers occurred. People are not cruel, but the system was able to trigger people to respond to their emotional buttons faster than they could learn to control them. The movie provides an exaggerated portrayal of what it is like to be in a system where it feels too costly to take one’s time and use patience to think through an event. People were much quicker to get angry than to be patient.
What Must We Do Instead
A symbolic counterpoint to the film’s conflict resolution is the notion that music, cooperative effort, and mutuality can change the nature of “slime.” The Statue of Liberty is not lifted by brute strength, but instead by collective “alignment.” In practical terms, redesigning how you respond to chronic anger, as opposed to suppressing it, allows a person to constructively respond rather than react to their environment. Taking time between stimuli and reactions enables a person to catch up with the impulse to react and gives them an opportunity to create a constructive response. Establishing norms that reward repairing relationships rather than escalating conflicts will create a positive emotional climate for using more adaptive regulation strategies (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009).
The question remains: how do you change the status quo? It is simultaneously very simple yet very complicated. The first step is to involve breaks in the systems that benefit from having a time constraint. Instead of defining your identity by the anger you feel, begin treating anger as information and a tool for change. Involve shared practices and storytelling that focus on creating a common direction as opposed to creating an ongoing struggle against someone else. By creating institutions that model calm accountability and social trust, the ability to pass on emotional distress is altered. It is important to note that “slime” is not needed as the work occurs within oneself, the relationships one has with others, and their respective cultures.
“Ghostbusters II” endures because it lets audiences laugh at an uncomfortable truth. If our world feels perpetually on edge, ready to boil over at the slightest provocation, the problem is not hidden beneath our streets. It lives in the gap between what we evolved to handle and what we now demand of ourselves. The slime asks us to notice that gap and to choose how we respond to it collectively.
