Criticism

The Groundhog Sees His Shadow by Dana Kaufman

I’ve been a person whose life has been uniquely defined by popular culture. I made it my field of study, my area of expertise, and often use it to express my identity. For example, when I walk down the street I wear headphones as I think there should be a soundtrack accompanying my life. I remember people’s names by associating them with soap opera characters. And, mostly, I still speak in “movie lines” as do many in my generation. We seem to often feel as if someone else said what we think better than we could. Yet by quoting them, we’re not only showing we know that but showing we’re a  part of something bigger. We’re signifying we’re a generation.

It’s within this context that I come to the sad news that Harold Ramis died yesterday. When I saw it being reported in the Chicago Tribune, I lost my breath and said aloud to no one “Oh My God”. I didn’t know Mr. Ramis, although I saw him around town over the years, but he was important to me. How else could I have been a teenager in the 1980’s without him?

Harold Ramis made a lot of movies that made a lot of money. He gave me “Animal House” and “Stripes” and “Caddy Shack”. I don’t think I could imagine my adolescence and teen years without his voice in my head. I first saw him on "SCTV" that ran after "Saturday Night Live" in Chicago. I would be babysitting and I'd be delighted by this highly superior sketch show. "SCTV" introduced to the comedy “stylings” of Ramis and John Candy and so many others. He was just outrageously funny.

Maybe he was so important to me and my generation as he was one of us. He was older but he was a real Chicago guy, part of the Jew Circle, as we call it. Ya know, his cousin was friends with my Uncle Sam and he went to Senn with so and so.  He was the just like one of any of the guys who went to high school with me. He was just funnier.

His films spoke in a language I could understand and felt he was always winking at us here in Chicago. He and the Murrays were locals whose humor often had a deep Chicago undertone. For example, he told me to treat Czechoslovakia as if it were Wisconsin. As we do with the state just north of us,  “you zipped in, you zipped out”. It was a foreign place with people with funny accents and bad teeth. It was all very Wisconsin to my mentality at the time. Maybe less cheese

Yet Mr. Ramis proved his allegiance when he left Hollywood to raise his family and live his life on the North Shore. It seemed fitting that the man who basically wrote the dialogue of my childhood lived down the street. You’d see him at the coffee shop or the body shop. He was just normal and looked like every other Jewish Dad. But he wasn’t. He was Harold Ramis and he was brilliant. He wrote the words in my head.

How would I know what to expect from college without “Animal House”? How would I know what double secret probation was or what a pledge pin meant or how to rush a house? I wouldn’t understand the class situation that existed without his mocking of the “upper crust” (which many of us knew was ethnically based) had I not seen Kevin Bacon getting paddled and thanking Greg and Neidermeier for the pleasure….and another. I wouldn’t react to the yells of “Food Fight” randomly and I wouldn’t giggle when I heard friends say “Do you mind if I dance with your date?”  I wouldn’t have jumped like a freak to “Shout” or known the relevance of the toga party…or been to so many. I have Harold Ramis to thank for teaching me about college.

How would I understand class relations without “Caddy Shack”? Often called the most quoted movie of all time, how could I know what the caddies who worked at the golf course across from my house felt without seeing Danny Noonan struggle? How could I know what an Evan Scholar was without it and why the world needed ditchdiggers, too? How could I understand “total” consciousness, as the President cited yesterday, without Carl’s discussion of how he urged the Dali Lama for “a little something for the effort”? My life would have been a little dimmer without seeing Rodney Dangerfield’s golfing outfits and not realized the importance of asskissing as it relates to Fresca. I wouldn’t know what it meant to “cannonball”…maybe that would have been better. But  I have Mr. Ramis to thank for teaching me about it just the same.

Mostly, I learned about the military from watching Mr. Ramis and Bill Murray go through basic training. As I mentioned earlier, I learned that Eastern Europe was really just like the land up north from my house.  I learned about calling people Francis and touching his stuff. How could I have gotten through the awkward years without asking “who’s your buddy, who’s your pal?” and seeing  mud wrestling at its most disgusting.  I wouldn’t have been describing people as a “lean, mean, fighting machine” for all these years without Mr. Ramis teaching me what it meant.

I could go on and on and list the quotes that have become part of my everyday existence but I won’t. I can’t. It would take forever and I don’t have time. I’ve spent much of the past seven years losing vital parts of my life so I see time as being at a premium. I’ve watched as people I love disappear, suffer terrible diseases and succumb to them, be abandoned by those who were supposed to support them,  and lose everything they always thought defined them. They lost their money, their memories, their limbs, their loved ones, and, the lucky ones, their lives. And today, as I look at Harold Ramis’ face slapped over the newspapers, I feel I’ve lost another piece of myself.

How will I get through middle age without Harold Ramis writing my dialogue?  I’m sure I’ll muddle through. I just won’t be as clever. I guess I could just rely on advice he gave me through Bluto years ago. “My advice to you is to drink heavily”.