Why I can't mourn Harold Ramis as my friend would like

Harold Ramis died yesterday.

At 69.

Although I am not yet 50 I feel the man largely responsible for Animal House, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Caddyshack etc. is my contemporary.

That is because like any white boy who grew up in America in the 70s, 80s or even early 90s who had any kind of socio-economic support system (money to go to the movies, time to laugh and screw around with friends with a reasonable sense of comfort and safety, IQ over say, 95, etc.), his ethos -- his relentlessly ironic stance towards the world -- taught me how to be.

I would like to say it was my father and his "Greatest Generation" that left a lasting impression, or all the screaming sports coaches, or the sincere  female public school teachers who -- had they been born 15 years later -- would have been physicians, lawyers, businesswomen, etc.

But, in fact, it was the films Ramis helped create, Animal House and so on, that shaped me and many -- if not most -- like me. And though I know I risk alienating many in saying this, that is a rather depressing fact. For all the pleasure he gave as comedic "artist" -- and he was an extraordinary one -- I simply can't give way to the overwhelming mourning, a mourning you might note, led by lots of (still) boys like me.

Don't get me wrong. Ramis was brilliant. ROLF. Roll on the floor laughing as we text to day.

Yet, again, in all honesty, it wasn't his humor per se that appealed to me as much, again, as his ethos, his critical stance. That is the problem.

For Ramis, quite literally, everything was a joke. No matter how serious the situation -- flunking out of college, inability to find a job, combat behind enemy lines, supernatural terror -- could be managed with a clever quip amongst male friends. Bill Murray mainly. The time of the day kept continually at arm's length with a laugh.


This is depressing to me now because this ironic stance, while comforting in many ways, like the food from my boyhood I still over indulge in (chips, ribs, cheeseburgers), is damaging, both to myself and those around me.

Grown men don't laugh about everything.

Not everything is a joke.

It certainly was not for my father. A Goldwater Republican, he would have stood hard and firm and formally polite against, for example, the lunacy of privatizing public education.

Yet for most like me, everything can be a Ramis like joke. That is the nirvana, the happy state we seek for when we can. Taking something seriously is a sin. It invites ridicule. Men of my age and background -- who still enjoy extraordinary privileges -- keep our Ramis like distance from the world while the remarkable country we were handed tilts backwards and sidewards in to racism, sexism, gross inequality, gross stupidity, and violence. Ugliness towards both women and children.

What seems left of white men my age when they are called to act or take something seriously is just pure anger. Without the irony: hate and fury.

At what? A world that can't be so easily laughed off?

We are utterly unequipped to confront those like us once they forego the ironic mode for a "political" passion. Only John Stewart comes close to finding some equanimity here so we cling to him like a superhero, a warrior poet, a philosopher.

Unlike our fathers and grandfathers we prefer above all else to be funny -- or try to be funny -- like the characters Ramis created in Animal House, Stripes and Ghostbusters. What we want is to be indifferent, free from care.

After 9/11 there was a call for the end of irony, and David Letterman's television manner caught a lot of heat. Ramis, however, made Letterman's popularity possible. No Animal House, no Letterman. Johnny Carson was not the progenitor here. Ramis was. Letterman was a Ramis character occupying a live TV set for us.

It is telling, I think, that the Ramis masterpiece -- Groundhog Day -- was for many years under appreciated. The film is brilliant, a piece of high seriousness, maybe one of the best films of all time, and  perhaps for Ramis a shot at redemption. I have no idea what film critics say. But there he depicts a character who has to live eternity, the same day over and over again, before simply learning to be decent. But for years it could only be understood as a Bill Murray vehicle for ironic distance -- with a weird and disturbing twist. "It isn't as funny as Animal House," I remember a friend saying.

No, it isn't. And I wish that film had had been made first. I would have been different. So, I think, would have much of the country.


As most know, in the Ramis film, Murray plays a somewhat nasty weatherman who somehow gets "stuck" in or on "Groundhog" Day, Feb. 2, in Pennsylvania. That is, he is condemned to live that same day over and over again. Murray's character panics at first, a panic that provides SNL comedy (what most Murray fans, especially back then, expect) to the first section of the movie. Then things get more interesting.

Murray gets depressed and tries multiple forms of suicide. Nothing works. He can't escape this day, this time, even through death. Gradually he uses the time given to him to improve himself -- learning French, the piano, etc. His skills provide some amusement for himself but only superficial satisfaction (he learns enough about individual women in his strange time outside time to seduce them -- but not enough to seduce the woman he actually loves).

Eventually, he gives in -- but not to despair. Rather, he gives in to time, this time, living the same day over and over again only in a fuller and richer way that involves him engaging on an intimate level every person he meets.

No irony. Just the day as it comes.

When he gives himself up and over to time which we have left to us he, in fact, finds love, sleeping with the woman he has been seeking for a seeming eternity and waking up the next morning to discover he has broken through: it is Feb. 3.

 Groundhog Day derives from the Hebrew bible, Ecclesiastes to be specific and its narrator, Koheleth, who straddles the line between pessimism and optimism that Murray's film walks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4

A Time for Everything

3 There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

²     a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³     a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴     a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶     a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷     a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸     a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet^[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ¹² I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. ¹³ That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. ¹⁴ I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.
  
What I mean to say is Groundhog Day is a profoundly religious film that explores with perfect Murrayesque  pitch the thin line between pessimism and optimism, secular and sacred that one finds in Koholeth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NjNOAncIlI 

For Koholeth, the best we can do is embrace the day to day routine of our lives, our time. God has put eternity in us, but deep in our heart where, paradoxically, we can't fully access it -- or him. This day, this time, we never really get outside of. We don't get close to Go'd's time until we embrace the time he has given us in full. 

Ironic distance from life ala Animal House -- for all its call to party and have good time --keeps us from living in that time that is given to us.