Harold Ramis RIP

[mogrooves]

Oh, for f***ks sake, a bit overwrought, don't you think? But to tease out one thread like that and pretend it is somehow the true nature of the work is nothing but a labored piece of rhetorical bullshit.

"Overwrought" or no, I can only respond that in its essentials it rings true to me. As always, ymmv.

I had the same reaction, Chris, and was going to respond in kind. And then I saw who authored the article. Now I'm just confused.

Hal, would it have been easier--less "confusing"--to "respond in kind" had it had been written by, say, David Brooks? Or "Anonymous"?

[Hal...]

Hal, would it have been easier--less "confusing"--to "respond in kind" had it had been written by, say, David Brooks? Or "Anonymous"?

Absolutely. lol I could see valid points in relation to Ghostbusters but not with Animal House or, especially, Caddyshack. But even in Ghostbusters, I always saw the mayor as a liberal one while William Atherton, the jerk-off EPA lawyer, was the uptight, sexually repressed bureaucrat, representative of the Reagan administration & their compatriots in the Religious "Right". Besides, Ramis was a lifelong liberal:

But Ramis' connection to liberal politics extended far beyond that. He grew up in Chicago where he said he identified with the beatniks and “always felt countercultural,” he told the New York Observer in 2005.

“I had that kind of healthy righteous indignation and I had this big sense that history was a series of great injustices against the poor, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised," he said.

Ramis said in an interview, with Believer magazine, Second City – the comedy troupe he performed with in the late ‘60s – is often associated with the liberal idealism of Chicago's progressive politics, in part because of the work they did while he was there.

“Our shows were much more overtly political than what Second City was known for,” he said.

His films continued this strain of cultural subversion, be it mocking the institution of the American family (“National Lampoon”) or skewering the U.S. military (“Stripes”).

Even “Animal House,” his 1978 college romp, had a political subtext, Ramis said, as it was set in around 1963, on the eve of the social turmoil that shook the American youth later that decade.

“I thought the anarchy of ''Animal House' was really a precursor to the political anarchy that swept my generation in the later '60s,” he said in the Observer interview. “Even in those early, dumb comedies, for me, I invested them with meaning. Whether the audience ever saw it or got it, to me they were statement movies.”

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Thomas Franks, but I think he missed the boat on this one.

[notallwhowander]

"Overwrought" or no, I can only respond that in its essentials it rings true to me. As always, ymmv.

Well, the films can be broken down that way, though he's importing key concepts into the texts. The whole anarchy = unfettered capitalism is one of them. You have to project that onto the texts for the whole analysis to work. By the same token, I'm sure given enough reflection, and enough beer, I could project Joseph Campbell's Heroic Journey onto the films with equal success, if I was so inclined.

Ramis wasn't any kind of socialist, as far as I can tell. He poked fun at the people at the top, at inherited wealth, but he was into money. Being wealthy wasn't the problem for him, wealth being locked away inside established circles of Anglo-Saxon privilege was the problem. So, while there was a kind of social subversion going on in his films, there was no political or economic subversion. So capitalism itself is reinforced as the norm, as it is in all Hollywood wide-release films. But tracking the evolution of some kind of Reaganite ethic? That's reaching, methinks.

[Casey]

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[rcarlberg]

And the late-'60s student political movement was not "political anarchy" -- it was our reaction to being drafted to fight a war we didn't believe was justified or moral.