Harold Ramis and the Death of Baby Boomer Suberviseness

I’ve
got a piece up at Time.com about the death of Harold Ramis, the
writer-director-actor who played a leading role in many of the
biggest comedy films between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Here are some snippets:

Ramis was nothing less than one of the subversive auteurs behind
a whole new way of laughing at the world that mixed brains (he was
a National
Merit Scholar after all), cheap gross-out gags
(see Caddyshack’s scene in which a Baby Ruth candy
bar is mistaken for a turd in a swimming pool), and
unapologetically anti-authoritarian antics
(Ghostbusters enjoys a strong reputation as
the most
libertarian movie ever due to its hostile depictions of
regulators as figuratively “dickless”).

From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, he made it seem as
if the Boomers were not simply going to inherit the Earth but
transform it into an edgy paradise that our parents, stuck in a
past where Bob
Hope and Johnny Carson and
other dinosaurs still roamed the world, could never really
grok….

Ramis’s oeuvre flattened out
after Groundhog Day. In the wake of critical and
commercial success, his output became increasingly programmatic and
uninteresting. Rather than taking chances and blow up comic forms,
he directed movies such as Analyze
This and Analyze That, schmaltzy,
safe-as-milk comedies featuring Billy Crystal as the shrink for
Robert DeNiro’s by-the-number mob boss. He appeared in vanilla
roles in forgettable movies such as Baby Boom, a late
’80s fantasy in which Diane Keaton’s businesswoman protagonist not
only turns her back on New York’s demanding capitalist but gets
rich by pushing gourmet baby food.

The raging bulls and easy riders of the boomer generation — who
had turned Hollywood and America on its ear in a sustained blast of
antinomian anger and humor — slowly became as dulled and
self-satisfied as their parents had seemed.

Read the whole thing.