Exit Egon: R.I.P. Harold Ramis

Writer, actor and director Harold Ramis died today at the age of 69. In all of the Ghostbusters-centric remembrance, it’s easy to forget that Ramis is also credited with co-writing that movie, along with National Lampoon’s Vacation, Stripes, Animal House, and many others, as well as writing and directing such movies as Caddyshack and Groundhog Day.

And yet all of the memorializing hews to the magnetic pull of Ghostbusters, as if that was the only movie with which Ramis had ever been associated. But there’s a reason for that: Egon Spengler was a geek hero of the highest order.

Many among us gravitated toward those characters who made science look cool. How many times did Spock save the day with rationality and deduction? Or the Doctor? Or Data? Daniel Jackson before he was Shanksed into Indiana Jones Lite? Even TV and film purporting to be science fiction had, for a long time, insisted on shaping its scientist characters in “the right stuff” mold: not only were they brainy, but they could throw punches, fire guns, and do all the pre-requisite action hero stuff.

Now, to be sure, Egon packs heat in Ghostbusters, but it’s a ghost-zapping proton pack (and he doesn’t start the movie as a crack shot with it by any means – good shootin’ there, Tex!). The closest he comes to physical violence that doesn’t involve a denizen of another dimension is when his fellow Ghostbusters have to pull him off of EPA peckerhead Walter Peck (though this might just be on the grounds that Peck, in ordering the shutdown of the ghost containment system, may have moved the schedule up for the end of the world ever so slightly).

But Egon is not an action hero. He’s as close to pure geek as a major movie could dare to give us in 1984 without resorting to the usual tropes of that character archetype (fat, acne-ridden, lives in mom & dad’s basement); he even had a romantic subplot involving the only major female character who doesn’t morph into an extradimensional hellbeast. Here, at last, was a character around which we could rally and chant “One of us! One of us!” without a freakshow being involved.

And Ramis was whip-smart in real life. He co-wrote Ghostbusters, a perfectly-cut gem of film that lands solid punches in nearly every genre it touches (comedy, drama, horror, sci-fi, disaster-movie-with-marshmallow-kaiju). Ghostbusters is a wonder of tight scripting and tight editing, every gag – even seemingly non-sequitur throwaways (“I looked at the trap, Ray!”) – carefully constructed. Every significant plot setup in the movie pays off; the closest thing to a dangling thread is the purely crowd-pleasing send-off from Slimer just before the credits. And I don’t think Scorsese himself could spend a year in New York City with a film crew on his heels and craft as quintessentially New York a movie as Ghostbusters.

By all accounts from anyone who ever worked with the man, he will be missed. Speaking as a mere (and frequently awed) fan of his ability to craft a decent story with the sheer volume of laughs and masterful setups and payoffs, I can only agree with how much he’ll be missed.

So, do we put those admirers of Ramis who seem to focus on Ghostbusters to the exclusion of all else in the same category as the hangers-on who mourn the breakup of a band when they’ve heard nothing more than the greatest hits album? No. I’m the kind of fan who latches onto someone and follows that favorite work into the rest of their career, but not everyone is that kind of fan. And here’s the thing: it’s okay to be a fan of Egon Spengler without being obsessively well-versed in all things Harold Ramis. Because even though we’re talking about a movie that turns 30 this year (and yet has aged remarkably gracefully – no remake needed, please), Ramis, in writing Ghostbusters and making sure he had a role to play in it, created a character that a lot of us were proud to hold up and say “I’m a little bit like the guy who collects mold spores and keeps a psychokinetic-energy-detecting gadget in his pocket. And he makes that look so cool that it’s cool being a geek.”

Long before the Big Bang Theory, Egon Spengler might just be where that particular dam started to break. And I think Harold Ramis, the assiduously-writing, college-educated, sweat-the-details comedy geek that he obviously was, would have dug that.