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Groundhog Day:
Breakthrough to the True Self
An example of an exceptional work of moral fiction is the apparently minor comedy,
Groundhog Day, which shows us a character who has to be exiled from normal life so
he can discover that he is in exile from himself. In the movie, actor Bill Murray
plays Phil, an arrogant, Scroogelike weather forecaster who spends the night in
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where he is to do a broadcast the next day about the annual
ritual of the coming out of the groundhog. He wakes up the next morning, does his story
and is annoyed to discover that he is trapped in Punxsutawney for a second night because
of a snowstorm that comes in after the groundhog ceremony.
When he wakes up in his guest house room the next morning, lo and behold, it is
the morning of the day before all over again. Everything that happened to him the previous
day -- the man trying to start a conversation at the top of the stairs; the old high
school acquaintance recognizing him on the street, the ritual of groundhog day -- it all
happens again.
And, once again, due to inclement weather, he is forced to spend the night. When
he wakes up the next morning, it is the same day as yesterday and the day before, with the
same oncoming snowstorm keeping him stuck in town and the same events repeating themselves
like a broken record.
And so it goes, day after day, as this misanthrope of a human being finds himself
trapped in Punxsutawney on groundhog day in what science fiction would refer to as a time
loop. If he does nothing different, events will repeat themselves as they were on the
original day. But if he changes his behavior, people will respond to his new actions,
opening up all kinds of possibilities for playing with the unfolding of events. Either
way, with each "new" day, he alone remembers what happened in previous editions
of the same day.
At first Murray's character responds with bewilderment. Then he despairs and
begins to treat life as a game: he risks his life and gorges on food, expressing both his
sense of hopelessness and his growing recognition that, no matter what he does, time will
reset itself and he will wake up as if nothing had happened.
In one scene, which turns out to be central to the movie's theme, he expresses his
despair to two working class drinking buddies in a local bar.
One of his two inebriated companions then points to a beer glass and sums up the
way he is responding to his situation: "You know, some guys would look at this glass
and they would say, you know, 'that glass is half empty'. Other guys'd say 'that glass is
half full'. I bet you is (or I peg you as) a 'the glass is half empty' kind of guy. Am I
right?"
But as the days pass endlessly into the same day, this half-empty character
finally finds a purpose in life: learning everything he can about his female producer,
Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, so he can pretend to be her ideal man and seduce her.
When that fails, and his efforts net him slap after slap, day after day, his despair
deepens and he begins to spend his days killing himself. He kidnaps the groundhog and
drives over a ledge into a quarry; he takes a plugged-in toaster into the bath; and he
jumps off a building, always waking up whole in the morning.
In desperation, he reveals his plight to the female producer and she stays with
him (without sex), in his room, through the night. Once again, he wakes up alone in the
same day.
But, enriched by this experience of intimacy, and by the fact that someone
actually liked him for who he is, he finally figures out a constructive response -- he
begins to live his life in the day allotted to him, or, rather, he begins to live the life
he never lived before. Instead of allowing circumstances to impose themselves on him, he
takes control of circumstances, aided by the fact that he has all the time in the world
and the safety of knowing what will happen next.
He begins to take piano lessons from a music teacher who is continuously surprised
at how proficient he is, since she always believes it is his first lesson. He learns how
to be an ice sculptor, which is the perfect art form for him since everything he does will
have melted away when he wakes up anyway. And he becomes more generous.
Then, an encounter with death -- an old vagrant dies in his day -- has a deep
effect on him. At first, he can't accept the man's death and, in at least one subsequent
edition of the day, he tries to be good to the old man, taking him out to eat (for a last
meal) and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep him alive.
When he stops trying to force death to relent, his final defenses fall away and
his compassion for the old man transfers to the living. He begins to use his knowledge of
how the day will unfold to help people. Knowing that a child will always fall from a tree
at a certain time, he makes it a point to be there and catch the child every time. Knowing
that a man will choke on his meal, he is always at a nearby table in the restaurant to
save him.
Slowly, he goes through a transformation. Having suffered himself, he is able to
empathize with other people's suffering. Having been isolated from society, he becomes a
local hero in Punxsutawney.
Now, he sees the glass as half full, and the day as a form of freedom. As he
expresses it in a corny TV speech about the weather that he gives for the camera, at the
umpteenth ceremony he has covered of the coming out of the groundhog:
"When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft
of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing
here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the of warmth of their hearths and
hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter."
In other words, having accepted the conditions of life and learned the pleasures
afforded by human companionship, he is no longer like all those people who fear life's
travails, and try to use the weather forecast, by human or groundhog, to control events.
He accepts "winter" as an opportunity.
Finally, the female producer falls in love with the good person he has become and
she again spends the night (although he falls asleep so, again, there is no sex.) They
wake up in the morning. She is still there and it is the next day.
In a last bit of irony, the couple, (who get to know each other, in the Biblical
sense, once the new day begins), decide to settle down in Punxsutawney. Like Maxwell
Klinger in the last episode of MASH, Murray's character will end up living in the one
place he couldn't wait to escape.
What is so powerful about Groundhog Day is the way it lets us experience what it
would be like to make a breakthrough like this in our own lives. The movie shows us a
character who is like the worst in ourselves. He is arrogant and sarcastic, absorbed in
his own discomforts, without hope, and cut off from other people. Like us, he finds
himself in an inexplicable situation, seemingly a plaything of fate. But, unlike us, he
gets the luxury of being stuck in the same day until he gets it right. Whereas most of us
go semi-automatically through most of our (very similar) days, he is forced to stop and
treat each day like a world onto itself, and decide how to use it. In the end, he
undergoes a breakthrough to a more authentic self in which intimacy, creativity and
compassion come naturally - a self that was trapped inside him and that could only be
freed by trapping him. Like many of the heroes of fiction, he can only escape his exile
from himself by being exiled in a situation not of his choosing.
In telling this story, the movie hits on a message that is commonly found
elsewhere and that appears to express an essential truth. When we get beyond denial and
resentment over the conditions of life and death, and accept our situation, it tells us,
then life ceases to be a problem and we can become authentic and compassionate. Murray's
character makes two such breakthroughs: first he accepts being condemned to being stuck in
the same day, then he accepts the fact that everyone else is condemned to die.
Inevitably, the movie also has mythic resonances and literary counterparts.
Murray's character is like all kinds of saviors and heroes in well-known stories, secular
and religious, who experience some combination of suffering and courage, until they go
through a transformation to a new state of knowledge. Among the religious and mythic
elements we can recognize in the story: he fights off his demons; he is changed by an
encounter with death; he experiences a kind of rebirth; he appears to people to exist in
time but he also exists outside of normal time; he manifests deep compassion; he is in the
world but not of it, suffering with a special knowledge that he uses to save those around
him; and he is given a second chance in life by the love of a beautiful woman. He
condenses images of Buddha and the Beast, Scrooge and Jesus.
But the movie keeps myth and archetype, as well as message, blessedly in the
background. It also employs only a little visual spectacle and only the barest minimum of
fantasy, in the form of the ever-repeating day, to tell the story. It is effective because
it is understated, allowing Murray and the theme to engage us.
Perhaps it gets a little too sweet as it moves toward a conclusion, but that
is forgivable. At the end, it saves itself from going over the top by revealing that
Murray's character still has some of the old, calculating, self inside him. As he and his
new mate walk out of the guest house into the new, snow-covered day, he exclaims, with his
new enthusiastic wonder at life: "Its so beautiful -- Lets live here."
Then, after the obligatory kiss, he adds: "We'll rent to start."
Happily-ever-after is very nice, the character slyly tells us. But in the real
world it's important to keep your options open, just in case you need to beat a quick
retreat.

The Symbolism and Significance
of Groundhog Day

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