Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is now nearly universally hailed as a masterpiece that exhibits exemplary spirituality and ethics.  Let’s unpack this claim a bit.

First, the ultimate goal for Bill Murray’s character is not explicit.  Murray is stuck in the same day, living it over and over again.  It is never clear why Murray is stuck in Groundhog Day, nor is it clear what he must do to get out of the day.  Unlike Clarence the angel and George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Murray is never told what he must do.  The repeating day is an inscrutable mystery, and no higher power intervenes to reveal anything to Murray.  Heck, the movie contains no religious imagery.  Not a church, not a cross, not a Buddha statue. In that sense, we could call it functionally secular.

With no higher revelation available within the movie, we must infer what Murray’s goal is from the way he finally ends the repeating day.  Murray, it seems, must win the nice-looking (to him), intellectual woman who he otherwise cannot easily conquer.  To win this woman, he must avoid directly wooing her and instead must indirectly woo her by performing acts of kindness to strangers in Puxtatawney, Pennsylvania.  Murray’s acts of kindness win over many of the townsfolk, who boast about Murray’s character to the intellectual female, who eventually sleeps with Murray to end Groundhog Day.  Murray thus attains his goal by earning a sleepover without sex.  Here, we see what movie genre we are in.  The sleepover is the goal of most modern Hollywood date movies – of for example romantic comedies as different as Roxanne and Say Anything.  To Murray, Hollywood is saying “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Murray’s relative indifference, a state of being he attains by living through years of a repeating day, is Zen-like.  The inscrutable, repeating day is basically a koan that Murray has to live through.  He can’t figure out why Groundhog Day keeps repeating, it’s completely perplexing, and so he adopts a “why care?” attitude typical of the spiritual emptying that Zen Buddhists are supposed to achieve to attain enlightenment.  And that’s what Murray achieves in the end: enlightenment.

But Groundhog Day is more complicated than this.  Murray does achieve certain goals, such as piano-playing and ice sculpting.  One of the points of the repeating day is to show Murray what he can accomplish, given time, effort, and discipline.  Just look at the structure of Murray’s journey through the repeating day:

1) Relishes in hedonistic pleasures (e.g., junk food and loose women).

2) Despairs of his existence and tries to kill himself.

3) Attempts to directly woo his female and fails.

4) Actively seeks to be charitable, partly succeeding and partly failing.

5) Learns a kind of indifferent selflessness, woos the female, and ends the day.

From #1-5, we can easily see the hierarchy of most ethical systems.  Murray progresses from materialism, to can-do individualism, to selflessness.  Or, another way to view it, he goes through Kierkegaard’s three stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the spiritual.  Murray’s progression is general enough to be taken a number of ways, but specific enough to be appreciated by anyone who values selflessness over selfishness.  No wonder all the mushy religionists of the day love this movie.  And no wonder we can all get something out of the movie, even if we disagree with its positive portrayal of shack-ups.

One technicality we enjoy about this movie is its interesting use of closure.  Closure is the word for the way we movie viewers connect one shot with another.  If a movie jumps from an outside shot of a spaceship to an inside shot of a spaceship (like the opening to Star Wars), we viewers mentally make the assumption that the second shot is of the spaceship we just saw from the outside and not another spaceship at another point in space or time.  In Groundhog Day, there are a number of second takes that exemplify closure.  Murray walks into a bar, talks to a female, and then we see him walking into the bar again.   This second bar scene we all automatically assume is another day that Murray is living through.  There is no announcement that that’s what is happening, but we don’t need such an announcement.  The movie does a great job of establishing its own world and the premises of that world, which is why it’s worth studying for you future filmmakers out there.

Entertainment: 10

Intelligence: 5

Morality: 5