How Bill Murray Movies Taught Me Everything I Need To Know About Life
But only the early ones
If you are a regular reader of my stuff, the title of this piece likely shocked you. Surely I must have learned everything about life from Springsteen, given my stalker-like devotion to the man. That would be true for the greater philosophical questions in life, like “is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” But day to day existence is rarely made up of the Big Questions.
More importantly, it was clear from the first time I picked up a guitar that I would never be able to emulate Bruce in even the smallest way; I love music, but am completely and totally unmusical. What I am, even in my 50s, is a sarcastic, wisecracking goofball. And it was Bill, rather than Bruce, who taught me this was the only sane way to walk through an insane world.
Let me be very clear on one point, especially for younger readers who (sadly) only know the older, more dramatically inclined Bill Murray who loves to photobomb random strangers’ weddings. As dire chance and fateful cockup would have it, though I always wanted to be pre-Lost in Translation Bill Murray, I have turned out much more like his current real-life self: grumpy, sarcastic, and unable to work and play well with others. It sucks when you get your wish 30 years too late.
All that said, I can look back with hindsight and see that the Great Sensei from Evanston formed me over a period of years in the same way an abbot would mold a young monk: slowly, patiently, adding a new lesson with each film. After all (to paraphrase the Buddha), when the goofball is ready, Bill Murray will appear.
Between 1979 and 1992, I received an education that no Ivy League school could match, all for the price of a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn. It’s no coincidence that this began when I was 13 (the age at which a male typically stops any emotional or psychological growth) and 26 (the point at which we all think we know everything). This was a time when the powers-that-be said we should all be jumping into the corporate world, worshipping Ronald Reagan, and bootstrapping our way to wealth and power like little Gordon Geckos.
Bill Murray taught me what useless nonsense that really was. Could a punk kid from Texas ever be the center for the Los Angeles Lakers? Not at 6 feet tall, he couldn’t. Would I ever run a Fortune 500 company? Not when my inheritance was likely to be $27 and a stack of Johnny Cash records. Plus, did I really want to work that hard anyway?
No, what I wanted was to be Bill, perhaps the only film hero I could actually identify with. He wasn’t particularly handsome, he didn’t try very hard at anything, he was funny, and yet he always got the girl. And consider for a moment the girls he got: Kate Lynch in Meatballs, P. J. Soles in Stripes, Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, and Andie MacDowell in Groundhog Day. George Clooney never had a streak like that.
There were glimpses of what he would become as a Master even on the early Saturday Night Live skits, but it was the vastly underrated film Meatballs in 1979 that served as the first book in the Bible of Bill. The entire performance is classic, but he reached the mountaintop with his “It just doesn’t matter” speech. It is a mantra I repeat at least once a day.
Admittedly, all I gained from Caddyshack was an intense hatred of both golf and gophers, but as those have served me well through the years, I thank his Carl Spackler for that lesson. Where he really ratcheted up my training was with Stripes in 1981. It gave me lines I use to this day: “And then depression set in;” “I’m not parking it, I’m abandoning it;” “Ma’am, I’m sure there are a lot of ways I’ve gone that you haven’t,” and the ever useful “I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy” after getting a shoeshine.
Stripes proved surprisingly prophetic, because I can assure you that when I joined the Army in 1990, both Basic Training and the overall experience were far more like Stripes than Full Metal Jacket. Bill somehow knew, and prepared me a decade in advance. He also summed up all of American history in 28 seconds:
Lest you think his impact has only been comedic, it was not. In 1985, he released a film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge. In fact, the studio agreeing to finance that project was his condition for taking the role of Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. It was his first dramatic role, and while the film itself is not stellar, it introduced me to the book that changed my life. I first read The Razor’s Edge in 1985, shortly after the film came out; I have re-read it every year since. If all Bill Murray ever did was introduce me to that book, I would owe him more than I can ever repay.
He gave much more than that, of course, ending my tutelage in 1992, midway through my Army time, with perhaps the greatest comedy film ever: Groundhog Day. It gave me a line I have used in social situations for 30 years: “I would love to stand here and talk with you, but I’m not going to.”
It also gave me hope, because much more than just a great comedy, Groundhog Day is a meditation on life itself, and in a way a logical continuation of the themes he tackled in The Razor’s Edge. In it we experience his journey from self-centered, prima-donna jackass to someone who actually cares about people. It took some time, of course; though we see it compressed into two hours, film geeks more mathematically inclined than me calculate that he actually relived the same day for 12,395 days (that’s almost 34 years).
What that tells me is that I still have time. Time to move beyond 13-year-old me to a more enlightened, more evolved incarnation. Perhaps, like Carl Spackler, on my deathbed I will receive total consciousness. It may never happen, but at least I’ve got that option, which is nice.
Thanks Bill, for everything.
