Harold Ramis, who died Monday at age 69, was a comedy supergenius. He made movies for
everyone, but I was drawn to them for their absurdity and wit via a very specific breed of person they highlighted: Smart
people with bad attitudes, the people you might describe as too clever for
their own good, AKA wiseasses. Though many of his movies, from Meatballs to Caddyshack to Stripes to Ghostbusters, double as tales of
juvenile pranksters at basically what amounts to endless summer camp, they also hide Big Messages about
what it means to be alive. Take his end-all be-all masterpiece of a movie, Groundhog Day.
For starters, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like the
movie Groundhog Day. It was even beloved
upon release in 1993, and usually, art beloved upon release by all comers is known
among snootier types to be Bad Art, or merely passable art, you know, dumbed-down art,
art for people who don’t want to have to think about “art.” It’s just a funny flick about a smug,
egocentric weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) who repeats the same day over and over again (Groundhog Day, to be exact) until he convinces Rita (Andie MacDowell) to fall in love with him, which breaks
the “curse.”
And yet, underneath that is actually a movie about time,
metaphysics, the meaning of life, the redemptive power of love, and a bunch of
other important sh*t. But its genius is in how it manages to achieve the triple
whammy of art: It was hugely popular
and actually great in its heyday. This makes it The Beatles
of comedy movies, the chart-topping pop song of cinema. It employs many of the
same techniques of pop songs, too — it’s Repetitive (it even uses a massive hit
song repetitively, “I Got You Babe” within it), it’s Simple (guy
has to do one thing, just one thing!)
and it’s So True (in order for it to work, he has to really mean it).
Most people wrongly assume it’s the serious art that
teaches us about the Real Meaning of Life — dark films, serious poetry, boring
documentaries, heavy-handed religions. But I posit the
opposite: Everything you need to know about what it means to be alive can be
found in comedy, particularly of this kind. Comedians are far better prophets because they
are deeply flawed, but at least in their quest for laughter to blot out the
horrible, they transcend the plodding omniscience of philosophers and gurus to
go for the jokes.
So here, in honor of Ramis, nerdy soothsayer, are all the
things his Groundhog Day taught me
about living. (For lessons about what to do in the afterlife, see Albert
Brooks’ brilliant Defending Your Life.
Seriously. It has Rip Torn in it. Put these two movies together and all your questions are answered).
A Consequence-Free
Life Would Eventually Become Boring
When Phil first realizes he’s living the same day over and
over again, he takes advantage of it. He steals, he lies to get laid,
he’s lawless. And it gets boring! Eventually he realizes manipulating people to get exactly what you want all the time isn’t that satisfying, and begins to help them instead.
People Make People
Better
It isn’t money or stuff or careers or fame or superiority
that makes you a better person, it’s giving yourself to something bigger or other
than yourself — a person, a cause, an endeavor. Other people make you better! That’s what people are for!
Don’t Try Too Hard
Life requires effort, but more importantly, it requires some
degree of sincerity. When Phil courts Rita again and again and again while
stuck in the loop, his first efforts at winning her over are 100% fakery, a
total act — who among us hasn’t quoted 19th century French poetry or toasted to world peace if that’s what it took to worm our way into the hearts and minds of others? But it isn’t until he taps into something authentic — an actual, honest to god appreciation for his fellow man/woman — that he stands a chance in hell at being happy, OR waking up to February 3rd.
We are All in a
Prison of Our Own Making
Everyone is living out their own Groundhog Day as we speak. You’re bumping into the same problems,
the same issues, the same challenges in most of the situations you’re in,
because, duh, you’re you, and this is your heavy, heavy synthetic bag. You could even argue that this
is The Point of why you’re here. To overcome this sh*t.
The Only Way Out is Through
Since suicide doesn’t always work (Groundhog Day joke!) there is no quick fix through our issues and hangups. We
have to face them, take them on individually, one by one, until the sh*t is worked out.
It is so very very boring, and yet, so very very true.
It’ll Take Forever (But You Don’t Have Forever!)
One of the enduring mysteries of the movie is how long
actually passes while Phil is stuck on repeat learning all these skills to be less of a dick. He
becomes fluent at jazz piano, for one thing, learns French, some card tricks, and
memorizes everyone’s name and backstory in the town. Ramis and others have said
the passage of time is anywhere from 10 years, to 30 or 40, to even 10,000. (In
the script, it’s
said he was supposed to have read a page a day from a book in the library,
eventually completing every book.) The point is, Phil is in a movie, and us nonfiction mortals have no such luxury when it comes to facing our bullsh*t. Tick tock.
Love is All You Need
Obvious, but always bears repeating: There is no
transcendence like the transcendence of luv. It soothes what ails you. And that
love doesn’t have to be romantic, it could be spiritual: In fact, that seems to be the Big Message many people took from Groundhog Day, an answer to the deep persistent questions wrought by simply being alive. In an interview, Ramis said
he’d heard from nearly every religion that the film pinpointed the heart of
their beliefs:
Harold
Ramis, the director of the film and one of its writers, said last week that
since it came out he has heard from Jesuit priests, rabbis and Buddhists, and
that the letters keep coming. “At first I would get mail saying, ‘Oh, you
must be a Christian, because the movie so beautifully expresses Christian
belief,’ ” Mr. Ramis said during a conversation on his mobile phone as he was
walking the streets of Los Angeles. “Then rabbis started calling from all
over, saying they were preaching the film as their next sermon. And the
Buddhists!
At one point, the film was screened for a class on Buddhism
at NYU:
Angela
Zito, a co-director of the Center for Religion and Media at New York
University, screens the film for students in her Buddhism class. She said that
“Groundhog Day” perfectly illustrates the Buddhist notion of samsara,
the continuing cycle of rebirth that Buddhists regard as suffering that humans
must try to escape. … “In Mahayana,” she said, “nobody ever
imagines they are going to escape samsara until everybody else does. That is
why you have bodhisattvas, who reach the brink of nirvana, and stop and come
back and save the rest of us. Bill Murray is the bodhisattva. He is not going
to abandon the world. On the contrary, he is released back into the world to
save it.”
Ramis may no longer be of this world, but I can only imagine what someone who thought so deeply, and so hilariously, about what it meant to be in it would think about what comes after it. To that, I raise my glass to world peace, 19th century French poetry, and to one of the very, very best.
Image via AP.
