Bill Murray is your Facebook friend—or else, a friend of a friend, showing up with regularity in your feed. You know what he’s up to. This week, he was the guy joining a couple in Charleston, South Carolina, during their engagement photo shoot. Last month, he was giving an impromptu speech about finding sturdy, true love to a group of cheering bros during a bachelor party. Then he lifted the soon-to-be groom onto his shoulders.
Murray, the man in public, is a promise of Internet virality, a gift to Web editors sweating clicks or visitors or impressions. In the world, he is mysterious, unexpectedly appearing among strangers. You have to call a special 800 number to get a hold of him. Online, he is ubiquitous, just one search away. He doesn’t have a Twitter account (just a fake one, of course), and why should he, since someone else will fill us all in on what he’s been doing.
In the past few years, he has worn Pabst Blue Ribbon golf pants; performed a cover of “House of the Rising Sun” at the restaurant he owns with his brother, in Florida; hosted a Christmas party that featured a vodka ice luge; agreed to be filmed walking in slow motion with a group of guys; joined a kickball game; tended bar in Austin; sat with a group of friends in a private karaoke room in New York; and was pulled over while driving a golf cart on the streets of Stockholm. He drinks champagne in a “big pint glass with ice.” Why? Hydration. “You don’t want to crash. You want to keep that buzz, that bling, that smile.”
It would not overstate the matter to call Bill Murray beloved. People write wild, hyperbolic things about him. He is “the best person alive.” He is a “national treasure” and “our greatest living celebrity.” He “simply does not give a good goddamn.” He is “America’s favorite uncle.” His “life is all one performance-art piece—and he does everything for an audience of one.” He is “Hollywood’s last eccentric.” He performs a vital public role: “Making movies is merely Murray’s hobby these days, secondary to these kinds of mystic, generous, Dadaist materializations.” Or, more simply, his “job now is to pop up in random spots and make your day.” Or, most simply, as Google has it, “Bill Murray is awesome.”
Murray is radically available, and yet unknowable. Counterfacts to the charming persona complicate matters. There were sordid allegations from his wife during their divorce. His collaborator and pal Harold Ramis told Tad Friend that during the filming of “Groundhog Day,” “At times, Bill was just really irrationally mean and unavailable; he was constantly late on set.” Murray still acts in movies and shows up on Letterman. He sits for more interviews than he used to. But these aren’t the versions of Bill Murray that we’re talking about here. It is the third Murray, neither the man nor the actor but the idea, the spirit.
His status as public jester, good-timing party-crasher, and Waldo-like impresario surely tells us things about Web culture, contemporary celebrity, and the ways in which people prefer their famous people to be both generous and too cool to care. Will we ever grow tired of these Murray moments? Is there such a thing as Peak Bill Murray, and then the backlash? It all demands a think piece. Yet his persona repels the very idea. He might mock the attempt, and surely never read one. And, worse, he probably wouldn’t want to hang out with you after you wrote it.
Mostly, we admire a composite of his zany public appearances. They seem like minor blessings, visits from a low-key saint. We might be forgiven for pausing a moment to imagine how we’ll act when Murray appears in our lives, as if such a thing were inevitable. We tell ourselves that we’ll be cool and not gush that he is a national treasure or America’s favorite uncle. We won’t quote “Ghostbusters.” Instead, we’ll display the composure that Scarlett Johansson does when she meets his character, also a famous actor, in “Lost in Translation.” Yet we remain pretty sure that he’d forgive us if, instead, we blew it and asked about “Caddyshack.”
Photograph by James Veysey/Camera Press/Redux.
