When I ‘re-watched’ Harold Remis’ Groundhog Day (1993) to write this piece, I realised I hadn’t seen it. Anyone who has watched the film — or anyone who, like me, as it turns out, is watching the film for the first time — will recognise this as a very Groundhog-Day-ish way to feel: an experience of jamais vu (“never seen”) in which a person believes that a situation that is actually very familiar and has happened before is entirely new.
Array“OKAY CAMPERS, RISE AND SHINE…”
In 2004, psychologist Chris Moulin presented findings from a study at Leeds University. 92 volunteers wrote the word ‘door’ 30 times in 60 seconds. 68 percent of volunteers showed signs of jamais vu, such as beginning to doubt that ‘door’ was a real word.
This year, I have repeated the phrase ‘Groundhog Day’ perhaps more than any other. ‘It’s like Groundhog Day,’ I said, when that one week that I was stuck at home in late March had been going on for several months. ‘We’re being Groundhog Day’d again,’ I wrote in an email recently, as we approached Lockdown 2.0.
I have begun to doubt that Groundhog Day is even a real film.
“OKAY CAMPERS…”
Real or not, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a self-hating, self-serving prima donna of a TV weatherman, who is sent to cover Groundhog Day, a pagan festival in Punxsutawney, a town in Pennsylvania.
Legend has it, original screenwriter Danny Rubin opened a calendar and picked the next nearest holiday, February 2nd, Groundhog Day — chosen surely because not very many people outside Pennsylvania would be aware of the festival, which uses a groundhog to predict changing seasons. Even as I state that the festivities involve a groundhog emerging from its burrow and seeing or not seeing its shadow due to clear weather (with ‘no shadow’ due to cloudiness indicating an early spring and ‘shadow’ due to a clear sky equaling six more weeks of winter) the specifics seem to melt away and what I’m left with is the texture of superstition and ritual, vague recognition. The familiar in the unfamiliar.
As mentioned, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors. He’s a prick, but he’s our prick. The critic Tom Shone notes on Murray’s face ‘the unshockable expression of a man who knows exactly what everyone is about to say seconds before they say it. That’s what deadpan is, essentially, a physiognomic register of omniscience.’ Even in 1993, Groundhog Day would have seemed like Bill Murray in his most Bill Murray-ish role — especially since he and Harold Ramis had been collaborating since the 70s. This film sees the pair doing something different, but the same; deadpan weatherman registering emotion as passing clouds.
Array“IT’S THE SAME THING EVERY DAY”
Phil Connors, of course, knows what everyone is about to say before they say it, because he gets sucked into a time loop: each morning, it is February 2, he awakes in a cosy B & B with Sonny and Cher’s ‘I Got You Babe’ playing on the clock radio. He’s forced to confront the same set of aggravating vignettes: Ned Ryerson (‘Bing!’) a Life Insurance Salesman stops him on the street, he steps in a knee-deep puddle of slush, and films his segment at the festival: ‘This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.’
Connors is trapped in a world of stock gags and interminable comedy, surrounded by the kind of folksiness he hates most of all, perhaps because it reminds him how much he hates himself.
“WHAT IF THERE IS NO TOMORROW? THERE WASN’T ONE TODAY”
6:00am. ‘I Got You Babe’, followed by the radio presenters saying the same lines, ‘OK, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties cause it’s cold out there. It’s cold out there every day.’ With each mention of ‘booties’, a part of Phil’s soul caves in.
Soon learning the laws of the time loop — no consequences — Phil opts for hedonism. He gorges himself on food, booze, and thrills, such as driving on the tracks playing chicken with a train. With an uncomfortable smack of Pick Up Artistry for a 2020 audience, Phil gleans information about women and uses it to manipulate them into bed.
It’s a strategy he pursues at great length with his upbeat producer, Rita Hansen (Andie McDowell). He replays their date day after (same) day, making edits, staging ‘spontaneous’ moments, learning her tastes and dreams. Eventually, he succeeds; ‘It’s a perfect day,’ Rita says. ‘You can’t plan a day like this.’ Still, she rejects Phil’s sexual advances.
After his Coke Zero attempt at love fails, Phil grows despondent, attempts suicide multiple times, to no avail. It takes time — possibly forever — but Phil eventually finds a way out of his self-deceit. He becomes caring, kind to others, in short: Christ-like.
Mastering ice sculpting and piano playing along the way, he spends his day(s) rescuing a child falling from a tree, changing a flat tire for old ladies, and performing the Heimlich maneuver on a choking man (pausing to light a woman’s cigarette for her, as he swivels away from the catastrophe he’s just averted.) Groundhog Day has its cake and eats it too: when Rita notices Phil’s transformation, the redemption arc is yoked together with what Frank Krutnik would call ‘the fantasy of the transcendent couple, achieved through mutual learning, negotiation and exchange [at] the heart of all romantic comedy.’ In other words, Rita falls for Phil; all it took was transcendence learned over an eternity.
Array“I’M A GOD. I’M NOT THE GOD, I DON’T THINK”
Parable-like, Groundhog Day solicits religious interpretation, though it’s not clear which religion we should use: Buddhist reincarnation and the karmic cycle? Jewish mitzvot? Christianity’s ‘love thy neighbour’? Freudian, Nietszchean, Kierkegaardian, and Deleuzian readings also aren’t too much of a stretch.
In other words, Groundhog Day leaves you with the air of profundity, a Big Takeaway on the nature of human existence — Embrace the Present! Be Kind to Others! Love Conquers All! But it also rehearses the ‘happily ever after’ of rom-coms, providing the neat satisfaction of a tock to echo the tick of Phil’s egomania at the film’s opening. As such, it would be disingenuous of me to leave with you a cheery dose of Self-Help when my overwhelming reaction to Groundhog Day was delicious, formulaic satisfaction and the urge to watch it again.
So I did. That is, I watched Palm Springs (2020), which follows two strangers who meet at a wedding in the Coachella Valley only to get stuck in a time loop. I got what I signed up for, a more up-to-date and fashionably irreverent Groundhog Day, in which two people turn repetition into entertainment, such that for a time I forgot the sameness of my lockdown days. Everything ties up quite neatly for the pair in the end, you see. I was satisfied.
I thought what separated me from Phil Connors was that I recognised my dysfunctional behaviour as it was developing; aha, I thought, so it’s easier to watch rom-coms than write this article, easier to seek comfort in the familiarity of ‘research’, while avoiding the unknown, that is, writing this article through to conclusion. But since I know that, let’s watch myself watching Palm Springs, and see where that takes me.
I didn’t stop there, either. I took some time to remind myself of other time loop films — The Edge of Tomorrow, Russian Doll, Source Code. I went down a YouTube spiral with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, watching works such as Bonjour (2015), which features two actors repeating the same five-minute vignette on a loop for 12 hours a day, and A Lot of Sorrow (2013-14), which sees The National playing their song ‘Sorrow’ for 6 hours straight. New tabs were opened. More articles were read. All this, I supposed, might make its way into the article — one that was fast becoming too huge even to think of embarking on, but one that would turn out to be great if I just googled ‘repetition in art’ or ‘Groundhog Day repetition compulsion’ one more time.
If Phil Connors is a narcissist in need of a wake-up call at the beginning of Groundhog Day, then my own vice is perfectionism, an elaborate system of procrasto-productivity that can leave me feeling like I’m churning mud. What (re-)watching Groundhog Day has taught me is that we all have our maladaptive patterns, habits and repetitive choices, and they can be difficult to shake. Repetition can be pleasurable and harmful, freeing and constricting. Aware that I should end with some kind of a tock, I say, tick — the sound of me allowing myself an imperfect conclusion, and the sound of the bedside clock striking 6:00am, cue Sonny and Cher.
