"It just doesn't matter": The weirdest — and secretly greatest — motivational speech of all time

Toward a Camp North Star theory of the creative life

As motivational speeches go, Tripper’s big rally cry to the decidedly average Camp North Star campers as they face off against the rich kids across the lake, the pivotal moment of Ivan Reitman’s 1979 comedy Meatballs, is not exactly Harry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. But I have come to understand it as the one that speaks most directly to my heart.

A bit of obligatory throat-clearing first: If you are new to me or my writing, you should know there is much about Meatballs I don’t celebrate, like the clumsy nerd referred to by everyone by his nickname, an ableist slur. A lot of Tripper’s jokes are bluntly sexist and gross. (I haven’t done a careful rewatch in a while so I’m sure I’m missing more casual bigotry sprinkled in as “humor” so new viewers, proceed with eyes open.) But I’m also not a fan of throwing the whole baby out with the bathwater. Some stories shape us, and I don’t necessarily want to memory-hole ones that retain some meaningful notes. We can identify the shitty parts and acknowledge this movie might not be a fun watch now for a lot of people. If you’re not into it, I get it and I support that. But I hope you will stick around for my takeaway, at least.

So, it’s 1979 and we’re somewhere in Canada. The campers and counselors and counselors-in-training of Camp North Star are, in a word, despondent. They are losing the annual Olympiad to wealthy cheats who have all the resources and no heart. Camp director Morty tries to cheer them up: “Just because we’re losing doesn’t mean it’s all over!” but the North Stars are not having it. Camp Mohawk — whose name reeks of the kind of cultural appropriation that wasn’t particularly noteworthy in a late-’70s comedy but which now feels perfectly selected to represent d-bag colonizer types — wins every year. They will win again. And then head counselor Tripper (SNL star Bill Murray, in his first feature film starring role) steps in with an attitude adjustment.

“Sure, Mohawk has beaten us 12 years in a row,” Tripper begins, citing all the perks their competitors have access to that they do not. “But it doesn’t matter! Did you know every Mohawk competitor has an electrocardiagram, blood and urine tests every 48 hours to see if there’s any change in his physical condition? Did you know that they use the most sophisticated training methods from the Soviet Union, East and West Germany, and the newest Olympic power, Trinidad and Tobago? But it doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!”

Tripper then leads the whole camp on a rousing cheer of IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! And you have never seen such a rousing bout of collective ecstasy outside of a tent revival. And with every repetition of IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER! the campers are more invested in the meaning of what Tripper is trying to teach them — not nihilism, but rather the kind of abandon you can only throw at a problem when you have nothing to lose.

“AND EEEEVEN IF WE WIN, HA!” Tripper breaks into the chant, that “ha!” so necessary to sell this mindset to skeptical campers, because in what world could they win against those kids? Not this one! And we all know it! So it just doesn’t matter, because EVEN IF WE WIN, “even if we play so far over our heads our NOSES bleed for a WEEK to ten days, even if GOD in hea-VEN ABOVE comes down and points his hand at our side of the field, even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn’t matter, because all the REALLY good-looking girls would still go out with all the guys from Mohawk because they got all the MONEY.” And he kind of cries out and falls to his knees, because, speaking of church, Tripper has clearly seen some James Brown shows in his life.

And before you even have time to pick a bone with the dumb-dumb sexism of Tripper’s kicker, his voice takes on a higher pitch, the tone a bit frantic, like some higher truth is coming out of his mouth almost beyond his control, and he’s banging a log against the lodge floor to emphasize every word: “It just doesn’t matter if we win or lose! It Just. Doesn’t. Matter!” And the campers again are swept up in this moment of collective passion: IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER. IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER.

I mean, just WATCH:

And yeah, the next day they go out there and they win every event, because they play to their unique strengths and they know now it doesn’t matter if they lose, because it’s just a game, and why not play it? The kids from Camp D-Bag will still be rich if they lose the Olympiad, but they can’t use that money to buy Rudy’s morning runs with Tripper, where he built up all that speed and endurance almost by accident, just by having fun with a friend he badly needed.

What I think Tripper was really saying with it just doesn’t matter is this: You can’t change the resources, access, and skills anyone else brings to the game, so why let that affect how you play? Win, lose, whatever — we are still all going to be the same people we were when we started. And if winning won’t change anything fundamental about the person you are, then neither will losing. When we really understand this, we’re more likely to take risks, to stretch ourselves when the game is on the line. The score? That doesn’t matter. What happens when we trust ourselves does.

I have found myself thinking about this moment in film more often than not in recent weeks. When Twitter imploded after Elon Musk bought it and threw an already-chaotic platform into full-on shambles, we saw big IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER energy in the response—users changing their names to impersonate him, daring to be kicked off and banned for life after abusive accounts had been allowed back in, leading the value of Elon’s new toy into chaos depths, essentially reminding him, it just doesn’t matter if you make all the rules here — you don’t own us, and we don’t work for you. And now people are breaking away from Twitter and reinvesting that time in building more intentional community elsewhere, like Mastodon (I’m there) and (ahem) newsletters. Twitter doesn’t actually matter. What we bring to it does.

I have also been thinking about the sudden burst of cultural awareness surrounding “Nepo Babies,” a cutesy term coined by campers who figured out that the kids across the lake had their athletic facilities built for them by their well-connected parents. We called that “a legacy” in my day; the only thing novel about it is the nomenclature. It is important to be aware of how class and access shape and constrain our opportunities, of course. But I can’t help but feel a Tripper response to this particular discourse bubbling up. Those of us who have never been legacies know there is a kind of benefit to being an unknown quantity, too, of not having to fight our way out of anyone’s shadow. The key is to extend that access to your fellow non-legacies once you’ve made it into a room you can see them in, too. It just doesn’t matter if someone else got there because of who their parent is. Who we are matters. The connections we bring with us do, too.

This is what I want to carry into my 2023 creative work. I want to take risks, knowing I will still be the same person whether I finish a project or leave it on the field; I want to make surprising connections, and trust that my community is as powerful as any other. I want to know about the things you’re reading, watching, listening to, and making that have that It just doesn’t matter energy.

And if I have to watch a movie clip of Bill Murray screaming his lungs out every day to remind myself that my real competition isn’t some guys across the lake, it’s my own last best effort, so be it. It just doesn’t matter.

But here are some things that do:

• “Finding My Way — And Staying Alive — During the AIDS Crisis,” a diary of 1980s Manhattan by Thomas Mallon, the New Yorker; made me laugh and cry

• Salon’s favorite books of 2022 (fiction and nonfiction), find yourself a good book or three from this list

• Letterkenny is back with a new season (have you watched Shoresy yet? Why not?!)

• “Raise a Toast to St. Joe Strummer,” Caryn Rose, Jukebox Graduate (I remember exactly where I was when I learned Joe had died; in the car, driving to work, and a Clash song was on the radio, WFPK, very good I thought, very good, but then another came on, and back then, you see, before social media, the second song in a row meant it was either a birthday or a death announcement, and.)

New things from me:

• “Why do guys like George Santos lie? I asked myself the same thing about my father,” new in Salon. After years of working with authors on the “book tie-in essay,” I finally had the news cycle line up with my own

• Speaking of Runaway, my memoir-in-essays Belt published this year, I just scored some sweet LOCAL features coverage from places where my byline used to be, which feels a bit like a Christmas miracle. A nice review from LEO Weekly here, and a lovely interview with WFPL here. Paperback is coming in 2023, Courier Journal, your move!