Bill Murray, The Movie Guru

My son recently saw some kid wearing a Bill Murray T shirt and wondered why there seems to be Bill Murray cult forming.
    “Bill Murray is okay,” my son said, “but he’s not so great that people should be wearing him on their T shirts.”

True, that honor is usually reserved for rock stars or the dead but I think Bill Murray represents something deeper than just another bad boy, wise-ass comedian. This may be surprising, even somewhat shocking but I would venture to say that Bill Murray is one of, if not the most, spiritual of Hollywood stars, certainly of comedy stars.

Richard Gere may grovel at the feet of the Dalai Lama (if there’s a photographer around) but Bill’s spirituality comes out in his work. His first movie after attaining enough success to do any project he wanted was a remake of The Razor’s Edge, a story about a man’s quest for inner peace. Next came Ghostbusters which helped usher in the age of the New Age Sci Fi / Horror movie such as Poltergeist 2.

His take on A Christmas Carol, Scrooged (1988) is more a tale of Karma than it is a ghost story and what is probably the most spiritual, New Age and perhaps now even Quantum Physics of all motion pictures, Groundhog’s Day, must surely prove that there is more to Bill Murray than a lot of laughs.

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