April 1, 2013 | Film,

“You’ve Made A Cuckold Out Of Me” – On Wes Anderson’s Tendency to Write Characters for Bill Murray in Which His Wife Is Cheating On Him

 

Any profile of Murray written after 2005 is likely to open with a paragraph about Murray’s peculiar antics as of late: firing his agent, surprising strangers on the street, unsolicited bar tending, crashing random parties, and always, how he’s been using an answering machine as his new agent. The perception of Murray as a wandering-magical-novelty-distributor has recently come to a head with this winter’s news that Murray had accidentally captured a bank robber in Japan (after seeing the story posted on Facebook and Twitter ad nauseam one morning I tried to find its original source which traced back to a website called SuperOfficialNews.com which I can assure you delivers very little of any of the three words that make up its website name). The point being, Murray’s career and public persona have taken on a mythical status in which fact often co-mingles with fiction, the stories take on a life of their own and everyone loves to love the Ghostbuster turned elder statesman of Not Caring What You Think Of Him.

If you haven’t visited Bill Murray’s IMDB page in a while you might be surprised to find you may have engaged in a bit of revisionist history in regards to his career. At least I did. To my recollection, Bill Murray’s top-notch performance in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore appeared like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I remember it as if Murray had been gone for years and hadn’t been particularly funny for even longer.  It turns out this has a bit to do with my faulty memory but more so just how singularly outstanding he was in Rushmore. His fresh and hilarious supporting roles in Ed Wood and Kingpin had occurred only within a couple years of Rushmore (in my memory, I placed these after Rushmore). However, it was true that Murray hadn’t been a successful leading man since 1993’s Groundhog Day. In other words,  it had been quite a while since he was considered a box-office-sure-thing. His pre-Anderson attempt to reinvigorate his comedic leading man status tanked with 1997’s mildly funny The Man Who Knew Too Little. Then in late 1997 Wes Anderson convinced Murray to play Herman Blume and the whole story changed.

In Rushmore Murray disappears into the character of Blume-–  a wealthy, uninterested industrialist whose home life is falling apart. In act one we learn that Blume’s wife is cheating on him and he actively dislikes his two sons. A quick Google search for the character’s name will yield thousands of pieces of fan-created art and odes to Murray’s lonely, sad, but somehow magnetic character in the film. If you find the character of Herman Blume to be a bit of a downer, enter Raleigh St. Clair – Murray’s terminally dour and ceaselessly put upon character from Anderson’s next film, The Royal Tenenbaums. If one could find some dignity in Herman Blume’s reaction to learning his marriage is a sham, you’ll be hard pressed to repeat the trick with St.Clair whose answer to learning that his wife Margot has “cuckolded” him is so pathetic it’s utterly difficult to watch. Raleigh receives the news and says, “Well I wanna die” in a monotone voice, nearly bringing a cookie all the way to his mouth to take a bite but placing it down before actually doing so.

Murray is definitely single in the follow up film (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) but perhaps not quite as put upon as the previous films – in this script we don’t learn exactly how his marriage ended but we do know that Zissou’s ex-wife is now married to his professional rival, preserving the perfect streak of casting Murray as a romantically tragic loser. Likewise, Murray is barely in The Darjeeling Limited but, for what it’s worth, he’s definitely alone in every scene in which he appears. He voices an animated badger in Anderson’s following film (The Fantastic Mr.Fox) and we will refrain from conjecture about that character’s love life.

Lastly, we come to 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom where Murray plays Walt, who is married to Frances McDormand’s Laura who is, naturally, cheating on him with Bruce Willis’ Captain Sharp, placing Murray right back in the Anderson-cuckold-wheelhouse.  Again, the romantic tragedy of Murray’s heartbroken performance is celebrated at large on internet fan sites in which his line “I hope the roof flies off and I get sucked into space” is hoisted up like some kind of mantra for the betrayed. And why not? It’s a great line but, even more impressive, Murray’s sadness is somehow hyper-relatable to viewers of all ages. One imagines that it’s largely people in their twenties celebrating these Murray moments with all of these animated GIFs and Tumblr posts and that’s surprising considering that, statisically, none of them would be embroiled in a mid-life-divorce-with-children type situation themselves.

All of this should lead you to some kind of variant of this question: Why do the majority of Murray’s post-1997 roles, especially the ones directed by Anderson, revolve around scenarios in which his character is a cuckold, a broken man, or incredibly sad and isolated (see also Lost In Translation and Broken Flowers for non-Anderson examples)? Why do we enjoy Bill Murray being incredibly downtrodden on screen while at the same time reveling in his off-screen jester type behaviors? Think of the roles that made Murray famous—Ghostbusters, Stripes, Groundhog Day. Essentially, Murray became a movie star by portraying incredibly confident, smart asses without a care in the world. It’s almost as if he carried this movie persona over into his real life while turning his personal sadness into material for the big screen. Just look at Murray’s explanation for what initially appealed to him about the Rushmore script:  Murray said he appreciated the characters’ “struggle to retain civility and kindness in the face of extraordinary pain. And I’ve felt a lot of that in my life.” Meanwhile, recall that right around this time it wasn’t an impossibility that Murray would crash your private karaoke session with a bottle of vodka in tow. Usually, with the archetype of the Sad Clown, we get the clown on the stage and the tears backstage.  Here, the dynamic is reversed.

And that is perhaps the crux of Murray’s later career reinvention– the sadder his screen roles are the more outlandish his comedic antics out there in the real world seem to become.  Something about this works. There can be no arguing the cult of Bill Murray has only grown in the last decade. As the NY Post wrote about Murray’s recent behavior, “he’s like a ghost in the night, who shows up out of nowhere, engages in utterly random conversations and then exits gracefully.” Coincidentally, Murray still refuses to sign on for Ghostbusters 3 despite an intense, prolonged public outcry demanding its existence. Has Bill Murray come to the conclusion that it’s more fun to be the ghost then to catch them? Leave the question on his answering machine, otherwise known as his current agent, and if you’re lucky he’ll get back to you.

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Moonrise Kingdom screens in The Bright Family Screening Room SAT, APR 6 @ 1 PM and SUN, APR 7 @ 1 PM.

Ryan Walsh is the External Affairs Coordinator for ArtsEmerson.