On Christmas Eve, after the gifts had been opened, the buffet of cocktail wieners with deviled eggs and quiche among other things left alone and its leftovers put away, after my adult children had gone home for the night and after my wife, very ill with a holiday cold threatening to become pneumonia, returned upstairs to her sick bed, I sat for awhile in the living room listening to the rain fizzing and percolating outside in the alley and splashing against the window sills. The Christmas tree shoved up against the so-called “hot bench” – that is, a radiator concealed under a wooden frame once lined with pillows (the pillows are all long lost now) – showed itself to itself in the black mirror of the picture window and a red star with long red rays was also doubled in the glass, both hanging ornament and its reflection floating in the darkness. Such moments conspire with the gloom of winter and sad, fragrant nostalgia to engender morbid thoughts and, so, after looking into the rainy shadows for a few minutes, I thought it best to watch something on TV.
Usually, over the Christmas holiday, I watch a Netflix show called A Very Murray Christmas, a program that takes the form of a dysfunctional variety show, eight or nine songs performed as part of a sentimental musical comedy. For some reason, I enjoy this show and admire its performances and beautiful cinematography. No one else in my family cares anything at all about this TV program, streaming on Netflix always at this time of year, and, so, I always watch it alone. (I have written about this on several other occasions and it might be interesting to consider my earlier reflections on this subject as set forth on my blog – but this would require that I delve into the past and I always find this topic disturbing, unsettling even, since my past is now vastly larger than my ever-diminishing future. After I am gone, perhaps, someone can find these earlier essays, print them down from the cyberspace where they are now archived, and collate the writings into a slender memorial volume.) Sofia Coppola directed A Very Murray Christmas and the show is beautiful in a reticent, stammering sort of way – it seems a variant on her famous 2003 movie starring Bill Murray, Lost in Translation, a film that has the same bittersweet and lonesome texture, also involving a half-forgotten entertainer stranded in a luxury hotel. Indeed, I suppose the A Very Murray Christmas is a sort of elegant, abbreviated pendant to Lost in Translation.
Here is what A Very Murray Christmas is about: Bill Murray, the comedian and movie star (famous for movies like Ghostbusters and his appearances on Saturday Night Live) is trapped in a blizzard in the Hotel Carlyle on Christmas Eve. Murray has agreed to emcee a variety show scheduled to be shot live in Bemelman’s Bar in the hotel. This show is to be shot on-the-cheap: famous audience members are represented by canned footage from last year’s Golden Globes Award Show – it’s possible, but not probable, that the heart-throb George Clooney will appear with the singer Miley Cyrus; however, this seems unlikely and, indeed, it seems possibnle that the contracts engaging those luminaries are merely aspirational, notional, as it were. Murray is morose and humiliated by the TV show that he fears will be a disaster. And his anxiety has increased exponentially due to a blizzard that has, in effect, cut off the island of Manhattan and rendered travel impossible. With his side-man, the pianist, Paul Shaffer (also the film’s musical director), Murray complains about the situation, reprising to some extent his earlier role as the title character in Scrooged (1988 - Richard Donner); he sings some Christmas blues while Shaffer tickles the ivories as the star’s factotum, Dimitri Dimitrov (called “Double D”), makes martinis in the posh, if somewhat desolate-looking, hotel suite overlooking Central Park – the movie is shot in wintry blues and greys with the Bemelman’s set filmed like a warm earth-colored grotto, the famous Central Park mural in the bar sporadically visible behind the actors. Murray, who looks ridiculous wearing reindeer antlers, complains about the show. But his contractual obligations lead him down from the hotel room, descending the stairwells since power is only intermittent in New York City, to the Carlyle’s Bar and Café. At the bottom of the steps, he meets Michael Cera in an inconsequential throwaway part as a rapacious Hollywood agent – part of the film’s charm is its haphazard, improvised-seeming script. The scene with Cera, which has an abrasive tone, can’t go anywhere and the character vanishes from the show, establishing a thematic motif – later Chris Rock press-ganged into singing a song with Murray will flee the set when the power, finally goes out once and for all and plunges the café and bar into darkness; Murray’s two producers, cynical women who bully their star, also vanish as the show progresses. As the live-feed begins, Murray is overcome with despair and begins weeping. He runs out into the storm where he encounters Chris Rock. Murray treats Rock as his long-lost friend and confidante but, in fact, they seem to be strangers – for instance, in a slightly racist moment, Murray assumes that Rock is a rapper, causing the Black comedian to ask: “Man, do you really know me at all?” When the power goes out, Rock escapes to everyone’s relief – he can’t sing and his rendition of “Do you hear what I hear” with Murray is an atonal mess. (By contrast, Murray’s voice is wrecked with whiskey and he sings as if he has a bad cold, but his phrasing is immaculate, jazz-inflected – he assembles his lyrics in a charming way that reminds me of Frank Sinatra or Willie Nelson or, even, Louis Armstrong; the instrument is terrible but it is beautifully played.)
The power failure yields a force majeure defense as to Bill Murray’s contract and the variety show is abandoned. Everyone gets drunk and feasts on lavish food that is sure to spoil if not consumed immediately – the freezers and refrigerators aren’t operating. The film’s characters, crowded together in the dark, warm cavern of the café and bar, sing Christmas songs to one another – there’s a bravura blues performance by Maya Rudolph as a lonely middle-aged woman drinking what she calls a “Soiled Kimono”, several other songs are excellently performed and, then, this part of the show ends with a great version of “The Fairy Tale of New York City” in which everyone takes a part. (“It was Christmas Eve in the drunk tank / An old man said to me: “Won’t see another”; the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, the creator of the song, died on November 30, 2023). A couple’s marriage ceremony has been ruined by the storm; no one can attend their wedding. They are quarreling but Bill Murray counsels them to reconcile and, soon, all is well with them – these tiny subplots don’t amount to much of anything and, although they are efficiently presented, seem intentionally inconsequential. Alternately drinking shots of tequila and fiery Slivovitz plum brandy, Murray gets very drunk and passes out. While unconscious, he dreams of a somewhat tacky, if effectively staged, Christmas show featuring George Clooney and Miley Cyrus who appear on the wintery white set riding on Santa’s sleigh. “Very elegant for a soundstage in Queens,” Clooney remarks. There are three or four more songs performed in faux Las Vegas-style. Murray wakes in the cool, chill light of his hotel suite. After the technicolor extravaganza on the soundstage, the world is monochromatic again except for the sunny highlight of a tall glass of orange juice served by Dimitri. Paul Shaffer is still tickling the ivories. Murray goes to the window overlooking Central Park and mutters “Merry Christmas to all.”
A Very Murray Christmas is damned with faint praise: critics consensus is that it’s mostly okay. No one in my family liked the show when it first aired. I suppose that the exact nature of the program’s appeal to me, which remains mysterious as far as I am concerned, is one of the reasons that I watch A Very Murray Christmas every year – I scrutinize faces and songs and inspect the mise-en-scene for clues about myself. When you watch a program for sentimental reasons, year after year, you are really watching yourself watching. The images on screen are refracted through your past experience of them. Why did I laugh at that last year or the year before? Why am I not laughing now? What was it about this scene or this cameo appearance that once moved me? Layers of previous interpretation and emotion color the experience of the show. The show is no longer about its ostensible subject matter but has become a sort of mirror in which you see yourself reflected and, not just at the current moment, but historically, across previous viewings of the program. Re-watching a TV show or a movie, at least if this occurs at regular intervals, is a meditation on the self.
When I was a child, TV shows and movies were experienced once and, then, lost. Of course, there were re-runs but they were unpredictable. People didn’t control what they saw and when, but, rather, were at the mercy of the networks and their advertisers. A movie shown on TV, at least, before I was forty, was a radically different experience than the same film projected in a theater. In the theater, the movie was bright and big and immersive. On TV, particularly the little black-and-white sets on which re-runs of movies were shown, the pictures were tamed, domesticated and, even, censored – famous scenes were missing or defanged and the footage was all fissured with veins of tawdry advertising that ripped you out of the movie and hurled you, like a castaway, onto the beaches of particularly desolate commerce. I studied movie reviews and knew that there were certain filmmakers that one should admire and, on late-night TV, between 11 and 1, I watched movies like Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but couldn’t for the life of me see what all the fuss was about – attractive people with dubbed voices stalked about shadowy landscapes, everything listless and depopulated and demoralized. The only movie that appeared regularly on TV at predictable intervals was The Wizard of Oz and, so, that film became the mirror, the speculum par excellence: children memorized the lines and observed themselves observing the movie and, I suppose, millions of men in my generation first discovered that they were Gay by investigating their own responses to this movie that appeared every year like a comet in its mathematically precise orbit, dragging its glowing tail across the planet and irradiating everyone under its influence. Otherwise, TV shows and movies were experiences that you threw away like used kleenex. Nothing was really built to last: Hollywood hid its past products in vaults and periodically recycled the film-stock for its silver nitrate surfaces and, now and then, the combustible celluloid ignited and whole decades of movies and movie-going went up in smoke to no one’s particular chagrin. It was all disposable, engineered for one-time use and, then, flushed away. Even the film repertory houses of my college years were complicit in this culture of abandonment and desuetude – I recall seeing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on a disfigured 16 millimeter print, the silent film haphazardly spliced together from fragments and scored to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring playing incessantly on a loop; Renoir’s The Rules of the Game was screened with subtitles so bleached-out at the bottom of the screen that I had no idea what the movie was about and Kurosawa pictures were projected through celluloid that seemed to have been drowned in salt-water or buried in the earth like pots of fermenting kim chee. It was so hard to simply see these pictures, to grasp what the faint and blurry shadows meant on the screen, that all your energy went into the simple act of watching, decoding the ruined images, and, therefore, you couldn’t attend to yourself watching the movie and reacting to it.
But this is different today when everything, more or less, can be seen by clicking a button on a digital menu and, so, watching A Very Murray Christmas becomes an exercise in watching myself watching, a descent into memory and the illusion of meaning, a nostalgia that is not about a real past, but about a sentimental or intellectual reaction to a reaction that is now distilled by memory. It’s the ghost, as it were, of Christmas past, an admonitory warning that what you were you are now longer and soon will no more. Because this is the paradox, the deeper you go into this hall of mirrors, the more you study yourself studying yourself, the closer you come to something really impenetrable: in the end, there is no one really there at all; it’s all imaginary – in the heart, where you thought your soul was to be found, there is only an absence and darkness. Bill Murray’s sad eyes and the mask of his face, his sudden mercurial bursts of rage or despair or joy simply expose the truth that here and now, on this darkest day of the year, there is no one even home: the self that watches itself watching finds no foothold in the cold shadows – no one is here at all.
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