Warmest greetings to you lovely email friends on Groundhog Day. While we wait at Gobbler’s Knob for Punxsutawney Phil to emerge and see, or not see, his shadow, we have a chance to reflect upon the movie based on this esoteric meteorological tradition.
There can’t be many Nineties comedy films that hit upon a cultural and perhaps spiritual significance, intentionally or otherwise. What’s uncommonly interesting about Groundhog Day is it doesn’t leave you with a particular joke or wise-crack or pratfall, but rather pondering the big questions. Perhaps the biggest questions.
ā»ļø Reliving Groundhog Day: Following the film’s release, its writer and director began receiving letters from followers of every known religious organisation and discipline, from yogis, monks, Hasidic Jews, Jesuits, Kabbalists, Buddhists, Nietzscheans, excitable therapists and psychoanalystsāall claiming the movie, all saying this movie so perfectly expresses their philosophy. The makers of Groundhog Day appeared to have struck, almost by accident, a water main of meaning. Incidentally, the screenplay uses Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of death and dying as a template for Bill Murray’s character’s progress.
š§āāļø Groundhog Day: Breakthrough to the True Self: If it’s been a while, here’s a decent primer. What is so powerful about Groundhog Day is it shows us a character who is like the worst in ourselves. But 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 telling this story, the movie hits on a message that is commonly found elsewhere and that appears to express an essential truth. Murray’s character is like all kinds of saviours 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. He condenses images of Buddha and the Beast, Scrooge and Jesus. But the movie keeps myth, archetype and message blessedly in the background.
š List of films featuring time loops: Groundhog Day is far from the only movie with a time loop in it. Fortunately Wikipedia has a long and growing list. I think I’d be comfortable with time loops becoming compulsory, especially in works of narrative non-fiction.
šæ ‘Groundhog Day’ Writer Danny Rubin Lived His Movie: Danny Rubin is really only known for a single screenplay but, if you have to be stuck with just one movie, it could be a worse movie than Groundhog Day. He wrote the beloved movie and, 24 years later, the musical. In between, he lived it.
š Review of Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day: This article comes out batting strongly: how many recent films, never mind comedies, actually have a story arc where the main character, instead of going through some process of healing his inner child, or whatever, improves himself by becoming a better member of society? What’s the last comedy you saw that both made you laugh and made you think? This movie runs counter to two of the worst trends in modern culture, the appalling focus on the self, and the annoying tendency to dumb art down so that it can be marketed across societal and national borders without losing anything in the translation.
ā± How Long Does Bill Murray Spend in Groundhog Day? As the film makes no attempt to frame its timeline, blessed are the geeks who step in to try and figure it out. Director Harold Ramis gave something of an arbitrary answer on the DVD commentary of the film (ten years). This estimate comes in in the eight-to-nine-year range. But then in Just How Many Days Does Bill Murray REALLY Spend Stuck Reliving Groundhog Day? the answer comes out at close to 34 years. There, so now you understand it less than you did before. You’re welcome.
āøļø Harold Ramis didn’t intend Groundhog Day to be Buddhist, but it’s a dharma classic: If ever your interest in reincarnation were piqued, you might run into the idea of dying unto oneself. Huh? Well that’s when a Buddhist would perhaps direct you towards Groundhog Day to illustrate the cycle of rebirth until the discovery of a true self in which kindness, intimacy and creativity come naturally. See also: Recurrence, salvation, and the bodhisattva way.
š The force Is With You: mystical movie messages that inspire our lives: In this relentlessly positive book, Stephen Simon observes that Groundhog Day offers “a metaphor for that growth process and has become a common term now in modern life for a day that seems to go on forever. When a phrase from a movie takes on that kind of life (‘Trust the force, Luke’) there is something going on in our hearts and minds that extends well outside the confines of a strip of film.”
š¶ Bill Murray Saw the Groundhog Day Musical Twice in a Row, Because Art Imitates Life: Murray explained why the show moved him to tears: “The idea that we just have to try again. We just have to try again. It’s such a beautiful, powerful idea.” I saw Groundhog Day in London and for me it was right up there. I can’t think of a musical I enjoyed more. See also: Groundhog Day The Musical.