But what if not mattering doesn’t mean not mattering, as in “Nothing’s important enough to care about,” but not mattering: nothing is, so there is not a thing to care about one way or the other? This half-ass koan’s solution reveals why Bill Murray’s performing is the opposite of camp: vital, sublime, transcendent, redemptive, wise.
Murray’s Nick the Lounge Singer points to these qualities, but his Tripper Harrison, from his first film, the 1979 Meatballs, embodies them fully. Tripper is head counselor at Camp North Star, a bottom-shelf summer camp that annually closes its season by competing against the elite Camp Mohawk in the Olympiad, which includes traditional sporting events such as boxing, basketball, and cross-country, as well as more casual ones, like hot dog–eating and cup-stacking. As usual, Mohawk is crushing North Star at the end of day one of the two-day contest, 170 to 63.
That night, in the North Star lodge, Morty, the camp director, tries to motivate the kids with a flaccid cliché: “Just ’cause we’re losing doesn’t mean it’s all over.” After a counselor, Phil, retorts that such optimism is a load of crap, Tripper leaps up in front of the group. He is sporting white bell-bottom sweatpants, held up by a bow-tied drawstring; a burgundy bowling shirt, trimmed in white and with the name “Dennis” stitched near the left lapel; and a fez, which he pulls off his head by the tassel and tosses into the crowd. He steps toward the fireplace, front and center, before all the campers and says, with a mixture of facetiousness (he knows it’s a cliché) and earnestness (clichés, like it or not, have power), “That’s just the attitude we don’t need, Phil.” Then, moving freely around the makeshift semicircular stage, he drops this admonishing tone and rises to football-coach motivational, his best Lombardi, shouting, with that compelling leader-of-men mix of reasoning, cajoling, and berating, “Sure, Mohawk has beaten us twelve years in a row. Sure, they’re terrific athletes. They’ve got the best equipment that money can buy.”
This is the setup, we think, to be followed by “But we can beat them because we have heart, character, spunk, gumption,” etc. Tripper can’t stick with the fire-up speech for long, though. Midway through the next sentence, which might have been the last part of the setup, his mind veers: “Hell, every team they’re sending over here has their own personal masseuse”—pause—“not masseur, masseuse.” Into this speech gap he falls, sliding from stern coach to cool dude, guy who sports Hawaiian shirts and hangs loose with the kids. He pictures, it seems, a hot chick massaging him, closes his eyes, nods approvingly, as a connoisseur of good pot might, after a long draw on a Jamaican hog leg. At the same moment that he shuts his eyes to savor his erotic reverie, he lifts his right hand to his heart and taps his chest gently, twice, with his index and middle fingers. Is he intimating that his heart, aroused like his loins, is palpitating?
Perhaps, but probably not. The lightness of the touch suggests otherwise, another shift, inward, to the heart of the matter, a shift signaled by what he says next: “But it doesn’t matter.” Now the coach, the dude fall away, and in their place is a crazed performance artist, mustering from somewhere deep the desperation of being alive in a world in which you are doomed to lose and be sad or to win and be sad. Though his words connect to the earlier Lombardi setup, his voice becomes increasingly hysterical, the unflappable leader, honest and righteous, morphing into a profoundly flappable bloke, willing to lie, cheat, con, in hopes—doomed—of beating the terrible odds. If the claim that summer camp kids can command personal masseuses is dubious, then the ensuing assertions, trickster-worthy (think Native American Coyote, Loki of the Norse, Chaplin’s tramp, Puck), are beyond truth and falsehood. They are tall tales, redolent of old summer campfires, no, wait, more like surreal visions, each more hyperbolically weird than the last, concentrically circling, wider and wider, a cyclone forming, careening, rushing.
“Do you know,” Tripper the Trickster yells, barely holding the intensifying shrillness in his chest, “that every Mohawk competitor has an electrocardiogram, blood and urine tests every forty-eight hours to see if there’s any change in his physical condition? Do you know that they use the most sophisticated training methods from the Soviet Union, East and West Germany, and the newest Olympic power, Trinidad–Tobago? But [and here the abandonment of any pretense of control or logic, and the giving over to powers entrancing, shamanic, expressive only in the screaming chant where words once more become sounds and only sounds, barely holding to their semantics] it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter [screaming now, louder with each syllable]. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER. I tell you [now gesticulating like an epileptic, lunging forward into the crowd, shaking a boy wearing a yellow hat, knocking off the hat, grabbing the legs of the person to the left, moving them side to side, screaming louder and louder] IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER [and now the group joins in, in unison, louder and louder, clapping along with the words, more and more passionately]. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER.”
Just when the chanting reaches a violent pitch—will the North Stars burst from the door, canoe like Vikings across the lake, pillage the Mohawks?—Tripper reappears—how did he get there?—at the center of the demicircumference and morphs into an old-time revivalist preacher, out in a tent somewhere in Mississippi, his white suit soiled to gray, half-moons of sweat swelling from his pits, selling salvation and snake oil. He extends his arms to his sides, striking the crucifixion pose, and wails, quieting the crowd, drawing out his syllables, just as Robin Williams impersonating Ernest Angley later did: “And eeeveeeen, and eeveen if we win, if we win [then a quick break into the crazed piety, one shattering syllable “HA!” that might start a long laugh but here reveals, in an instant so rapid you almost miss it, that the Trickster is still in charge, can’t help blurting a guffaw over his own over-the-top performance; back then to the evangelist, repeating himself, as all good evangelists do, and repeating with apocalyptic exaggeration, anything to get the bodies down to the altar]. Eeveen if we win! Eeveen if we play so far over our heads that our noses bleed for a week to ten days. Eeveen if God in heaven above [and now he points to heaven, Moses-like, just on the verge of going too far, overacting, hamming it up to the point that everyone knows it’s a sham; but he stops short] comes down and points his hand [he points to earth, still playing Moses, holding the role, barely, together] at our side of the field. Eeveen if every man, woman, and child held hands together and prayed for us to win [hands by his sides now, waist-high, fists clenched, making us imagine the joining of hands], it just wouldn’t matter [why? Will he finally tell us why winning or losing won’t matter? Yes] because all the really good-looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk ’cause they’ve got all the money! [Are we deflated by this cynical assertion? No, because the evangelist has become James Brown at the close of a roof-raising, pelvis-exhausting, ankle-torqueing concert, falling down in exhaustion, reminding us that the words in this case don’t mean shit, only the groove, the energy of the sound, the meaning of meaninglessness, the thundering, “DA,” of the thunder, not its allegories of wrath and rain, listen to it, listen: such are our thoughts as we watch Tripper turn his back to the frenzied kids, who are now not chanting but dying to begin again, and fling himself toward the hearth, bellowing like a man who’s just been shot or had an orgasm, and pick up a fire log—so obviously fake, looks like Styrofoam—and bang it rhythmically on the floor, a percussive accompaniment to the lines, now as meaninglessly meaningful as the banging of wood on wood, he yells, yells…] It just doesn’t matter if we win or we lose. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! [He bangs the log harder and faster, hollers louder and faster, and the kids join in again, clapping to the log beat, chanting once more.] IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! [Up Tripper jumps, makes his way into the bacchanal he has created, pulls several campers by the hand into the sacred semicircle; others follow, until the group has moved en masse to Morty, the director, standing ecstatic to the right of the fireplace, and lifted him up on their shoulders, as players a victorious coach, or as believers the Jesus recently baptized by Tripper, who moves in the waters of his sounds, eating honey and wild locusts.]