Perhaps the most under-examined sequence in Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1993) is the conversation between Phil, dryly and cynically played by Bill Murray, and two of Punxsutawney’s lowest citizens, Ralph & Gus. Camped out at the dive bar inside of a bowling alley, only a couple days into his repetitive predicament, Phil poses the question:
What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph, in a drunken but oddly clear stupor replies, “that about sums it up for me.”
This minor moment in an otherwise fairly light-hearted comedy belies a global truth: that a repetitive, inescapable and disappointing life is a daily reality for a majority of the population. Representing a lower class are Ralph & Gus. Their station will never change. They are always struggling against the impenetrable wall of class division.
When COVID-19 first hit these shores, and lockdown went from a theoretical possibility to a living reality, movie theaters were closed as a matter of course. Dimly lit and poorly ventilated rooms in which hundreds of strangers chomp on buttery popcorn mere inches away from the next person hardly fit the bill as an essential business, and we all had to start turning our living rooms into premier cinemas.
One of the first films to be screened at drive-ins was, inevitably Groundhog Day. The romantic comedy with a sci-fi twist has had a lasting stay in our zeitgeist, even though the film, at the time, was seen as a major risk not worth trying. Ramis and the film’s star, Bill Murray, had trouble getting any funding until, suddenly, it was there. Once released, the film was a hit, and it’s perennial popularity only seems to grow. Why? The obvious answer is Bill Murray, and the 2020 answer was the film’s narrative about being stuck in the same day over, and over, and over (and over) again.
This last element of the film is overwhelmingly its most widespread influence. It’s also its most resonant part. Who in 2020 didn’t identify, especially in those early months, with the monotony of everyday life? It seems almost cute to think now that there was a moment we all shuddered at the mention of a two-week quarantine, which was what the initial lockdown was supposed to be. Now, as 2021 says goodbye to its first month, the repetitiveness is the rule. Murray’s Phil Connors, like us, is stuck in a never ending day in which the light of the next morning has become a near impossibility. We went from two weeks to “who knows” when the question of a return to a normal reality got brought up. A staycation turned into nightmarish levels of boredom and then into a morose resignation.
But, something else happened, too. In June, awakened once more by another brutal murder of a Black man at the hands of a police officer, many people took to the streets. In Los Angeles, a rising houselessness epidemic gave rise to a massive uptick in people suddenly interested in mutual aid. More recently, people stayed angry when a throng of far-right white nationalists tried to literally overthrow the government, even as the incoming President yelled out empty rhetoric about “healing divided wounds.” This last moment feels especially exciting, and is only possible because of an extended global trauma which has laid bare the morally hollow institutions that rule each of us. Wins in progressive action are scarce, so it feels doubly important to acknowledge that many people are getting involved in repairing a broken world for the first time.
Groundhog Day is, ostensibly, not a political movie. I’m sure Ramis and Murray would shudder at the suggestion. But, importantly, Connors does not move on with his life until he learns that community care, solidarity and a rejection of gluttony are more rewarding acts than material gain. Though it’s impossible to say exactly how long Connors stays stuck in his hell, the most conventional calculation puts it around a few years. Of those years, it feels equally difficult to calculate how long, or when, exactly, Connors went from being a self-serving, nihilistic, hedonistic asshole into a uniquely caring community liaison. But the change is what’s important, and Ramis is careful to show us that the change only happens once Connors has gone through the stages of stealing, self-loathing and perpetual suicide. In other words, Phil Connors does not reach salvation because he is promised a way out; he only reaches it because he starts caring about the people around him with no expectation of reward.
Much of us began watching Groundhog Day in 2020 when we simply needed a cinematic reflection of the monotonous box we suddenly found ourselves living in. Along with Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), the parallels seemed all too obvious. But the promise Groundhog Day offers is more important than its accidental mirror to a pandemic it could never have predicted. That promise, that we are only going to get out of this moment with a commitment to radical solidarity, feels especially resonant when much of the American electorate is coming to terms with the notion that fundamental change will never be brought on simply by voting for the other guy. It’s a promise worth fighting for.
For me, Groundhog Day has always occupied that space in my most affectionate films which entered into my consciousness first and foremost because of the comedic performance at its center. But on an unconscious level, it spoke to me as a film about the prison of mental health. On this last bit I cannot claim on behalf of Ramis any legitimate intention; I am, admittedly, projecting my own personal experiences onto a movie Ramis made because it was funny to him to think about what Murray would do with an endless amount of time. But film, and art more generally, is at its best when it hits an audience on the most personal of levels. As a teenage kid battling crippling social anxiety and suicidal ideation that nearly took my life, Groundhog Day spoke to me as a film about struggling to break free from one’s own circumstances. That meant a constant battle with my own brain; for Murray’s Phil Connors, that horror is physicalized, but the trauma is the same. When Phil tells Rita, his colleague and the woman he has inevitably fallen in love with, “I’ve died so many times, I barely even exist anymore,” I always feel a regretful tinge of envy.
I watch Groundhog Day at least once a year now, and I always feel the same odd sense of jealousy for Connors predicament. I honestly feel most days that I would adore living in a quaint snowy town in which I could do nothing but find avenues for self betterment. Connors learns how to play a virtuosic piano, picks up completely erudite artistic hobbies like ice sculpting, and becomes fluent in French by reading obscure 17th century poetry in a diner (speaking of diners: I love diners, unironically one of the more painful personal losses for me during this pandemic). Though I know this situation is tortuous for anyone, I cannot help but envy someone who’s world is suddenly and irrevocably shrunken. I subscribe to the theory of the Paradox of Choice put forth in 2004 by psychologist Barry Schwartz who argued that the minimizing of consumer choice can reduce anxiety. How often have I dreamed of an alternate life where I don’t live in Los Angeles, denizen of social climbing and falsely democratic leadership, and instead reside in a college town with two coffee shops, a diner, one movie theater and a darling central square? Strangely, Groundhog Day has always been my wish fulfillment for a life in which I can abandon that sickliest of virtues, ambition, and live with diminished choice, and therefore with diminished anxiety.
Watching it this year provided yet another resonance, for watching Phil Connors realize that living for the good of the world-at-large is the only fulfilling route is another kind of wish fulfillment all together. We live today in a so-called Democratic society where our two-party system has instead devolved into an amorphous, imperialistic blob. Watching Democratic leaders espouse in public the progressive virtues that leftist coalitions have been pushing for for decades only to do quite often the opposite once in power has been a years long struggle against the quick-sand of cynicism. It can be difficult to find inspiration in our political leaders, but that source has instead shifted towards our community leaders. More groups have sprouted up in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, increasing numbers of Jews are fighting for Palestinian freedom, mutual aid groups have gotten to work blocking evictions in an attempt to stem the tide of rising houslessness in our cities, and grassroots support has ensured that this new administration will enact bold climate defense action. It is a difficult time to be optimistic, but it can be found.
Optimism or cynicism, Groundhog Day continues to sound the 6:00 alarm. It can be enjoyed on its surface as a fairly conventional 1990s era Hollywood romantic comedy, complete with all the tropes of its era (including a cringingly strange opening theme song called “I’m Your Weatherman” that Ramis himself wrote); it can also be enjoyed as a bit of schadenfreude during a time when we are all stuck under similar circumstances, looking to laugh at rich, powerful, egotistical men getting their comeuppance.
But it can also be enjoyed as a roadmap. We’ve all had our time to revel in the sudden free time, and we’ve all sunk into a collective depression that has absolutely taken more lives than it ever needed to. Even if a vaccine is administered easily and fairly, and we do all return to a normal routine, the political and social ills that plagued us long before the pandemic will continue to plague us now. We’ll only get out of this day if we start treating our neighbors like neighbors.
I know I am being overly generous in attributing a culture of world-change to a goofy romantic comedy, but, I really believe that, like Phil Connors, we all just have to start caring about others more than ourselves.
Otherwise it’ll just be Groundhog Day... again.