"Groundhog Day": review and meditation

L to R: Bill Murray as Phil and Stephen Tobolowsky as Ned "The Head" Ryerson

[WARNING: spoilers for a 1993 movie.]

GROUNDHOG DAY!! (imagine male voices on the radio shouting this at 6 a.m.)

Given my appreciation of philosophy and religion, it's hard to believe I've never reviewed this philosophically dense 1993 film before. (Before you read my review, though, check out the "production hell" video about "Groundhog Day" that The Critical Drinker had done a while back. Director Harold Ramis and actor Bill Murray ended their friendship during the making of this film.) "Groundhog Day" is directed by Harold Ramis (Egon Spengler in "Ghostbusters," Russell Ziskey in "Stripes" among other roles) and stars Bill Murray, Andie McDowell, Chris Elliott, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brian Doyle-Murray, Marita Geraghty, Angela Paton, Rick Ducommun, Rick Overton, and Robin Duke. Murray plays Phil Connors, an acerbic, depressed news-station weatherman from Pittsburgh who is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania every year for the city's famous and "traditional" Groundhog Day ceremony, which involves Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog who is brought out to "communicate" to the town—and the nation—whether winter will end soon or go on for another few weeks.

Someone at the news station must have initially thought it would be cute to send the unlikable, cynical Phil out to meet Punxsutawney Phil every year, which could be one reason why Connors, already bitter, dislikes this particular assignment. Before leaving for Punxsutawney on February 1, Phil predicts that a major snowstorm will miss his broadcasting area, then he sets out for the small town (2026 population under 6,000, making it a third the size of the small town of Front Royal, Virginia, where I used to live) with his chirpy, optimistic producer Rita Hanson (McDowell) and slyly humorous cameraman Larry (Elliott). In Punxsutawney, Phil takes a room at the Cherry Street Inn and wakes up on February 2, Groundhog Day morning, to the sound of his hotel's bedside radio clicking on and blaring out Sonny and Cher's "I Got You, Babe," followed by the DJs' cries of "It's Groundhog Day!" Defying Phil's prediction, the snowstorm closes in while Phil sulkily goes through the motions of covering the Punxsutawney groundhog festivities. With the news segment now done, Phil tries to leave town and discovers his snow prediction was wrong: Instead of diverting to Altoona, the snowstorm rolls into the Punxsutawney area, and Phil finds himself trapped in Punxsutawney for the night. All the routes out of the town are snow-covered, and long-distance phone lines are down (1993 is before the heyday of ubiquitous smartphones): Phil is trapped. He decides to explore the town, meeting many of the townspeople from workers to old bums to unremembered classmates. He despises the locals, whom he views as small-town hicks, and he can't wait to leave the area. At 6 a.m. on the following morning, however, Phil wakes up in exactly the same way: The bedside clock clicks on, Sonny and Cher sing "I Got You, Babe," and the radio guys shout, "It's Groundhog Day!" Phil looks out his hotel window and sees no snow on the ground, and as he moves about the day, he sees the same events and hears the same dialogue he'd heard the day before. He begins to realize he is now reliving Groundhog Day. His third time through this process, Phil drags his producer—who is unaware that everyone is in a loop—away from the festivities to beg her for help; there's nothing she can do, though: She thinks Phil is crazy, and she has no godlike power to affect ontology anyway.

As Phil settles into this new, causality-loop phase of his existence, he sets about exploring the town and learns about the individual lives of the townspeople. Devilishly at first, Phil takes advantage of the consequence-free aspect of his new, looped existence and gorges on junk food, has sex with one or more of the local women and, in a fit of depression because of the inescapability of his circumstances, tries to commit suicide many times. Every time, though, he wakes up in the same hotel bed and lives the day over again. But as the loops continue, Phil starts to change. He begins to care about the townspeople's individual lives. He starts to drop his cynical demeanor and perspective. He begins to pick up new skills, learning French and the piano and ice sculpture. He starts acting nice to the cheerful Rita, who means no one any harm, and even to the sneering cameraman Larry. He tries to save the drunken old bum who, over the course of many causality loops, ends up dying again and again from a combination of alcohol, age, and the cold. He rescues a kid who falls out of a tree. Far from being a devil enjoying the consequence-free nature of his looped existence, Phil becomes a sort of superhero: Having learned everyone's routines, Phil times his walks through the town to be in the right place at the right moment to be of service. His relationship with Rita starts to warm up, and one day, Phil wakes up and discovers it's February 3. The loop is done with him, and Phil can go on with his life, forever a changed man.

Time-loop or causality-loop scenarios are a science-fiction staple and have been used in novels, short stories, TV shows like "Star Trek," and plenty of other movies before "Groundhog Day." There's nothing particularly new or innovative about this sort of story, which dates back at least to the 1800s. The rebooted "Battlestar Galactica," with its notions of eternal return, could be considered a long-form version of the causality loop. But ever since the 1993 movie came out, people have referred to such loops as "Groundhog Day" scenarios—such has been the movie's cultural impact. As a comedy, "Groundhog Day" is modestly funny, with no truly laugh-out-loud moments. I think the movie's staying power and cultural impact come less from the quality of the acting (which is fine), the cinematography (which is also fine), or with the direction (Ramis is fairly unobtrusive) than from the movie's philosophical, moral, and possibly religious import. This is a weighty, meaning-saturated movie that uses comedy to smuggle in profound notions about existence and morality, exploring these things through the notion of do-over days. One popular question, about which there exist many articles and YouTube videos, is How long was Phil trapped in his loop? I've seen estimates ranging from weeks to months to up to ten thousand years.

Another aspect of the movie's cultural impact is how major religions like Christianity and Buddhism have interpreted the story from their own perspectives. Christianity—and Western culture is still largely informed and impelled by Christian notions and values—looks at "Groundhog Day" and asks, Who put Phil into that loop? There must have been some conscious power who placed Phil in the loop, then plucked him out of the spin cycle once he had become a better person. Phil's change of character reflects the Christian concept of metanoia (from the Greek meta/change and nous/mind), which can refer to conversion, repentance/penitence, a profound change of heart, etc. This is as much a moral causality loop as it is a spatiotemporal one. Buddhists see the looped nature of Phil's trapped existence as a reflection of samsara, the painful wheel of existence and re-existence on which we're all trapped by karma—the momentum of our actions—until we learn to liberate ourselves through enlightenment. Phil's character arc matches the Buddhist notion of a moral causality loop, but in "Groundhog Day," the time frame is compressed to a single day, over and over again, instead of being stretched out over the multiple lives needed from the Buddhist or Hindu perspective. By Buddhist reckoning, Phil has, at the end, gained a kind of enlightenment such that he now puts others first and acts compassionately, not cynically. It's not a god who put Phil into the loop, nor did a god take Phil out of it: it was Phil himself, through his own actions, through the momentum of his karma (which is the law of action and consequences), that saved him. For even as we are burdened by karma, we also make karma as we live our lives. And we are not merely borne along by the momentum of our choices: Our choices steer us along the trail we both follow and blaze.

It occurs to me that Bill Murray's own life has a kind of "Groundhog Day" aspect to it: Murray has, several times through his career, played assholes who eventually become nice people. Think: "Scrooged" (from the Dickens story that is also about metanoia) and "St. Vincent." In fact, the trope of the meanie who becomes a good guy is found in plenty of stories, a testament to the human belief that we can all improve ourselves through our own actions or improve with help from outside sources.

As you can imagine, though, I have a lot of questions about the metaphysics of the "Groundhog Day" universe. Let's assume for a second that Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is, for whatever reason, placed inside some kind of ontological bubble, separated like a pocket universe, so it can allow Phil to relive the same day hundreds or thousands or millions of times until he improves. I assume this means that, when Phil exits the loop, Punxsutawney is removed from the "pocket" and goes back to being a regular part of the United States and the world and the universe we all know. And what about the people that Phil encounters with each iteration of the loop? Like in a video-game scenario, these people go about their daily lives in the same way every single time unless and until Phil comes along and interrupts their day somehow. So if we stay with the video-game metaphor, are the townspeople basically NPCs (non-player characters) bereft of free will, following preset tracks until Phil sets them on new paths (that have no effects beyond Punxsutawney)? One thing I noticed is that, even when Phil approaches people in a different way with each time around the loop, many of them try hard to revert to whatever their preset path is, which seems to be evidence that the townspeople aren't real people in this pocket universe: they're NPCs for sure. For example, the old bum that Phil tries to care for and, later, take to the hospital always ends up dying; another example is Ned Ryerson (Tobolowsky), who always reverts to preset dialogue whenever he encounters Phil, as does the friendly-if-daffy hotel owner whenever Phil sees her. Phil can predict when spills and crashes occur, and he knows what people will say at any given moment. This is because each day is, except for his differing actions from day to day, a perfect repetition of the previous iteration of the loop. So if these townspeople started off as real human beings before being put in the pocket universe alongside Phil, they've been turned into NPCs by whatever karmic or theistic force generated the loop to begin with. It really is like a video game, with the daily reset of the loop restoring all of the initial conditions... except for Phil's memory of previous loops (without memory, you have no experience on which to build wisdom). But this leads to disturbing implications: If everyone around Phil, including Rita (whom he eventually falls for), is an NPC in this pocket universe, then Phil is learning to be compassionate to NPCs, and he's fallen in love with an NPC. That's the price to be paid for learning compassion and unselfishness while living inside a Potemkin universe.

It's also interesting to ponder the theology of a being or force or dynamic that would concern itself with or focus on the life-path and moral health of a single soul to the extent that it would create an entire scenario just to give that one soul a chance to improve—to rescue itself or to be rescued. Christians might nod sagely and see the hand of God in such a scenario: Despite God's infinite greatness and grandeur, he is personally concerned with—and perhaps affected by—even the humblest of his creatures. In Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," it takes the concerted efforts of a dead Jacob Marley and three powerful ghosts to finally turn Scrooge toward his personal metanoia. We can assume these spirits are all working on behalf of divine Providence. With so many stories about character change and moral improvement through great cosmic efforts, perhaps the point isn't that the gods will go to great lengths to save mere individuals, but rather that changing one's basic character is a herculean and often impossible effort. Which could be taken as a caution to us all: If we need to change, that change is going to be hard to enact.

But what makes the universe of "Groundhog Day" un-Christian is the causality loop itself. The Judeo-Christian way of thinking is that history is linear; in Christianity, it eventually leads to an eschaton (the end times), or to what priest-philosopher Teilhard de Chardin called an Omega Point. This belief deeply affects how one views something like, say, the cosmic battle between good and evil. Can the battle in fact be won? If you believe in linear history, then the answer has to be yes—definitively and permanently. I suppose a Christian could counterargue that the movie's message is surely Christian because the loop comes to an end, and Phil can live out the rest of his life. There's linearity in the story.

What makes the movie un-Buddhist, by contrast, comes down to at least three things. First, none of the Indian religions believes that history repeats exactly. As the trite proverb goes: History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. That's closer to what Indian traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism teach. It's what we in the religious-studies biz call spiral time versus cyclical time: repetition, but not exact repetition. One could counter that Phil himself, consistent with spiral time, is different with every passage through his causality loop because his memory is the one condition that doesn't reset, and he's building a storehouse of wisdom from his lived and relived experiences, slowly working against his stubborn nature to become a different person. Second, another problem for Buddhists is the causality loop's unique focus on Phil, which makes more sense from a Christian point of view than from a Buddhist one. Sure, Phil's loop looks a lot like samsara, and his eventual release from the wheel parallels Hindu moksha (liberation) or Buddhist nirvana ("blowing-out"), but why just Phil? No one else is getting this kind of heavenly help? Third, Buddhist rebirth doesn't include the notion that you remember your previous lives: Only enlightened people who have attained the siddhi (sacred power) of seeing past lives (Buddhist pubbenivāsānussati; Hindu jatismara) may do so. Of course, for these people, since they're already enlightened, they don't really need the wisdom of their past lives. Anyway, with the Buddhist view being a spiral view of history, no battle between good and evil can ever end: Those forces are locked in eternal contention because there is no eschaton, no final state. There is only the eternal struggle.

Or—and here's another disturbing implication—are we all trapped in our own solipsistic pocket universes, with everyone around us being NPCs? And what does that mean for things like biological birth? Is my own mother an NPC in my pocket universe? If so, how did two NPCs conceive me and give birth to a full-fledged human being imbued with free will and the ability to learn from experience? Or did Mom and Dad start off as free people, only to become NPCs when I was born? Or—and here's a weird one—what if Mom and Dad are still free people existing in their own pocket universes while the Mom and Dad I know in my pocket universe are NPCs? And if everyone is in his or her own pocket universe, and some of those people also know Mom and Dad, are there Mom-and-Dad NPCs in those pocket universes as well? Just how many copies of Mom and Dad are out there? The ontology gets very messy very quickly as we're pretty much in multiverse territory. Conclusion: As with many movies that jigger with real-world physics and metaphysics, the world of "Groundhog Day" starts to break down and look unsustainable when you think about it too hard.

But thinking too hard is the province of nerds like me. For the regular proles, "Groundhog Day" is a decent story about a man who improves himself with each iteration of the cycle, eventually becoming good enough to deserve to exist among normal people, and normal world affairs, again. Actually, I was wrong: The movie does have at least one laugh-out-loud moment. It happens when Bill Murray's Phil is sitting at a diner, his table covered in breakfast and dessert items, and he nonchalantly stuffs a huge slice of cake into his mouth knowing there will be no consequences for a poor diet. Meanwhile, Rita watches him, mouth agape.

As much as "Groundhog Day might have philosophical implications about the nature of existence, I think the movie's moral implications fall more clearly along religious lines. Pluralist theologian John Hick argued that most religions move us from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. The turn away from the self is what we see happening in the movie as Phil opens himself up to the lives of the townspeople around him and starts to care about something other than himself. Rita tells Phil, in that same diner scene, that egocentrism is his defining characteristic. By the end, Phil has become a better person—someone who cares, someone for whom other lives have meaning. In the spirit of both Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism, Phil is, by the end, ready to live a life in service to others, motivated by love or compassion, even as he continues to improve himself. One can only hope that Phil doesn't go through all of this metaphysical nonsense only to die in a plane crash on February 4.

See "Groundhog Day." It is guaranteed to provoke thought and discussion.