When he wakes up the next morning and finds the pencil unbroken, that is the first moment of terror he experiences. Plato; Groundhog Day; Aristotle; Soul; Socrates; Phil; … He then has only four choices: to go insane; to be sane, but exist in a state of constant distress; to accept his fate and make the best of it; or to actively affirm his strange new life and wish for it never to end. The movie Groundhog Day (1993) is a dramatic comedy about a man stuck in the same day, over and over again, and it offers some existential clues of how to find a way out of this repetitive hell we are living, or at least how to make the most of it. As Connors discovers, it’s a tough lesson; but to learn it is to gain the means to transcend the troubles of life. Phil Connors makes a lot of choices that are seen as irresponsible and wrong. Groundhog Day contradicts both the outlined hypotheses. Ned invites him to dinner and he says no because he has no time for that either. Ned is the one who runs away nowânot Phil. There’s no way out. She writes, “The eternal recurrence – what is that but the will to recapitulate all projects within yourself?” (Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1991). Groundhog Day manages to do just that, and therefore rightly takes its place in the pantheon of great philosophical movies. Perhaps repetition continues, albeit in attenuated form, even as he starts a new life – but if he’s mentally free then he has achieved everything he needs. Phil refuses to accept this, and spends the next few days focusing on helping the old homeless man get healthy and get some warm meals. This is another core philosophical problem that Nietzsche deals with. Himself. In Groundhog Day you witness a man struggling with the practical choices he makes while reliving the same day. Ned says he has to get going and runs off, and Phil smirks, victorious, and walks away in a calm, confident wayâhe doesnât even have to worry about the puddle anymore, because he isnât crossing the street to get away from Nedâhe just calmly walks on the sidewalk. The doctor (played by the filmâs director and fellow Ghostbuster Harold Ramis, RIP to a true king) examines his head X-ray and finds no problem, and suggests he see a psychiatrist. He gets off stage and starts dancing with Rita, but he keeps being interrupted by the people who he helped that day. 6 Pages 1381 Words November 2014. This question might be unanswerable). He isnât just interested in her anymoreânow he really cares about her. Groundhog Day also brings to mind the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, in which the eponymous anti-hero defies the gods and is punished by being sentenced to push a huge rock up a steep hill in the certain knowledge that as soon as he has succeeded, the rock will roll back down and he must start the process again. But he is definitely interested in her, existing at the aesthetic stage of Kierkegaardâs Stages on Lifeâs Way. So he is not quite a god yetâhe is just a hedonist with a big ego. Rita is blown away by his eloquence, and invites him to get coffee with her. He of course knows every answer (or rather, since itâs Jeopardy!, every question to every answer), and the old people applaud him. Plato and the Groundhog Michael Ventimiglia People are always surprised when I mention my favorite holiday. Whatever he does during the day he finds that he wakes up at exactly the same time in the same bed with the same song playing on the radio. You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. It’s something new, with its own rules. He steals the truck with the groundhog in it, and his plan is to drive straight off a cliff. The next morning is Groundhog Day! This is part of Nietzscheâs inversion of Kantâs ethical systemâfor Kant, ethics reduces to doing your duty, which really means to diminish yourself in many cases. They decide to live in Punxsutawney and start the rest of their lives together. Is that what love is to you?â So his manipulation and lack of immediacy also causes him to lose her. But his cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) immediately says, âYeah, the Home Shopping Network!â Phil is a man trapped in his cycle, and all he can do to get through it is be smug, narcissistic, and ironic. He’s not dealing with a hypothetical notion of eternal recurrence: he is conscious of it, and living it whether he likes it or not. Doing this is curing his existential despairâhe is abundant now, overflowing with power and spirit. She spends the night with him, and she falls asleep next to him. Then they have their first kiss, and walk back to Philâs hotel. He reads poetry in the coffee shop. But that doesnât bother Phil. After rushing through his report at the ceremony, Phil, Rita, and Larry pile into the van to hightail it out of town. Rita says âHas this whole day been some kind of set up? He just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. He isnât going to hide it, but he isnât going to wield it to manipulate either. The moment of affirmation is the sublime moment when a person can look at his life, no matter what it consists of – good, bad, or indifferent – and find within himself the desire never to be freed from any aspect of it. Heâs never present anywhere, because his mind is on his futureâbut his future doesnât exist yet. Phil embarks on something like the journey of the character of A in the section of Kierkegaardâs âEither/Orâ called the Seducerâs Diary. If we perform exceptionally well in our courses, we go … Using his powers to improve himself is the positive directionâitâs the way out of the cycle. Realizing that he is trapped in this time warp, he initially chooses to look at his situation as a curse and he does not try to find any good, let alone "the Good," coming from this nightmare (43). But, for me, … His problem is that he is a godâhe just doesnât know it, and he isnât ready to accept it. And no repetition is more affirmative than the last - Groundhog Day presents a far more human version of eternal recurrence. âI know your face so well, I couldâve done it with my eyes closed.â âItâs lovely,â Rita says. Which creates another existential dilemmaâwould it have been better if this movie never existed, and we had another Ghostbusters movie with the original cast instead? It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resists it. He had no time and now he has too much of it. He asks Larry if he has kids (apparently he has known him for years and never bothered to ask). Philâs response is âPeople like blood sausage too! It is a comedy directed by Harold Ramis in 1993. One of Nietzscheâs most famous ideas is the Eternal Recurrenceâthe hypothesis that existence, and the cosmos itself, endlessly repeats or recurs, and that all we can do is either accept this, or reject it. Indeed, it seems a somewhat perverse reading, since it implies that the world should be ‘improving’ with each iteration. He just keeps rushing in panic. Phil Leaves his bedroom and encounters a man in the hall, who will be the first man he sees every day as long as he is trapped in his cycle of repeating the same day. He is violating something Nietzsche says in his preface to Beyond Good and Evil: âSuppose that truth as a womanâwhat then? But you canât do that to eternity, you canât eject from eternity, you have to take eternity with into you, harness it, and use it. You can read four articles free per month. He gets the plan to kill the groundhog, because he thinks that will end the cycle. An Übermensch, having unconditionally affirmed his repeating existence, would be appalled to be ‘set free’ from it. Please, 4 replies by Theodore Metrakas and others. He goes to his fancy bed and breakfast, and a minute later itâs the next morning. The the endless repetition of the same day was a crushing burden before, now it has become the ultimate freedomâit is revealed as power itself. A car full of old ladies breaks down, and he makes it a point to be there to fix their flat tire. Then he rushes off. What is The Daily Dialectic by Ted Metrakas. He first lays this idea out in The Gay Science, a book from his middle period, in aphorism 341, titled âThe Heaviest Burden.â In the aphorism, the repetition of the same day, the same moment, is presented as either a heavy burden that crushes us, or, if we have lived our life correctly, it is the greatest liberation. But it doesnât work, thereâs a montage of her slapping him over and over and over again as he fails night after night. At his liberation Connors is certainly no Nietzschean Übermensch, but he’s unquestionably become a more highly-developed individual, with far greater self-understanding. He takes her around the diner and tells her everything about everyone in the placeâknowledge he has gained from living that day an endless number of times, he has talked to everyone there at one point or another. Heâs already trying to move on, to break out of his cycle, moving past his present before it even begins. He wakes up in a good mood. He is laying on the ground and seemingly near death. If not, eternal recurrence may strike us as a curse. Reaching out to others canât help you with problems of your own integrityâreaching out is precisely what breaks your integrity, since integrity comes from the root integer, wholeness. Camus says of Sisyphus, “The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile… The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. He makes the same mistakes because he is even angrier than he was the first timeâhe already tolerated this nonsense, and he has to do it again! Philâs main quality is that he has no time. He has access to eternityâhe could become an expert, a genius, in any field, any art, any science. Like Camus’ Sisyphus, Connors comes to fully accept his fate. At first, understandably, he experiences complete shock, before enjoying a brief sensation of godlikeness. Itâs going to be gray. Because he thinks he can just go through the motions and get back to where he was before when he almost slept with her, only heâll be able to get it right this time. There was even a Broadway adaptation - "Groundhog Day: The Musical." The biggest philosophical principle that Groundhog Day operates on is existentialism. In Nietzsche’s conception of eternal recurrence, the individual, crucially, has no memory of his previous lives. âI donât know what to say.â Phil responds, âI do. As we roll out of bed each morning, we set in motion a disturbingly familiar chain of events, often so automatic that we can’t even remember having performed some of the steps. Now he is just revealing his godlike abilitiesâhe is allowing himself to be who he is, a god, not for her, but just because thatâs who he is now. Our misery, far from being over when we die, is destined to echo through eternity. No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, Iâm happy now, because I love you.â Instead of slapping him, or telling him he doesnât even know her, Rita responds with a smile, and says âI think Iâm happy too.â She believes that he loves her, because he showed her that he didâonly someone who loved her couldâve done a sculpture like he did. In Jungian terms, MacDowell’s character represents the elusive Self that we all strive to find during our life’s journey. Sometimes he’s less affirmative, sometimes more. Do you read The Stone, the weekly New York Times column on philosophy? (which theory of free will do you think applies to the movie?) But what is this burden, really? Isnât it right to suspect that all philosophers⦠have had trouble understanding women? Needless to say, I could not possibly relate to this any more. To Phil, it hadnât been fast at allâit had basically been forever. We might think of it as a type of parthenogenesis, or ‘auto-birth’: it provides men with the ability to give birth to themselves over and over again, thus denying the role of the female as lover and mother. He tucks her in, and as theyâre both falling asleep, he finally tells her how much he loves her, but not in the manic, desperate way he did at her hotel when she ended up slapping him. If all of us could undergo such a process, could Groundhog Day’s version of eternal recurrence and eventual escape lead to the best of all possible worlds, as envisaged by Leibniz? He sheds his old sexist, masculine carapace, and emerges as a far more rounded human being, in touch with his feminine side (his ‘inner other’). He wakes up the next morning and the first guy he sees every day, who he usually blows off or has a sarcastic remark for, he greets with âBuongiorno signore!â and a hug and a kiss. He spends the night in jail and wakes up the next morning back at his bed and breakfast, ready to hear that Sonny and Cher song yet again. Ned tries to get Phil to remember him and catch up on their old friendship, which is vagueâthey used to know each other, and it was an important relationship for Ned, but barely on Philâs radar at all. Nietzsche is saying that we should only do something if we would do it an endless number of timesâwe should never do something purely out of duty, but rather because it brings us joy and fills us with ascending life, with power. The next scene is the next day, back to the snowball fight, right before they get to the hotel. This day plays out as mostly just a surreal déjà vu experience. If it doesnât feel in some way like it could last forever, then it isnât really love. His hope is that killing the groundhog will break the cycle. Manifestly, we haven’t. It’s not so much about philosophy, as it is a column written by contemporary philosophers, using the … (SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "GROUNDHOG DAY: THE MUSICAL") He tells his producer Rita that he is too sick to work, so they skip the report on the groundhog ceremony and he confesses his predicament to her in the diner. By accepting his predicament he is in a sense released from it, but his delight when he is allowed to return to the normal world demonstrates that he’s no Übermensch. There’s no party in Times Square. He has reached the end of his ability to endure his failed attempts to win her love. Are we really so different from Connors and Sisyphus? Phil, a TV weatherman played by Bill Murray, finds himself trapped in a time-loop re-living exactly the same day. Bill Murray, in one of his best roles, plays a small-time TV weatherman named Phil Connors who, even before he gets trapped repeating the same day over and over, is trapped in a cycle of life that he doesnât like. Phil has an abundant, overflowing generosity of spirit now. And how does it feel to be in the present moment? Phil has finally wonâor so he thinks. Irigaray wishes above all else to promote the value of the other, which she largely conceives in female terms, in opposition to the traditional philosophical subject that she considers rigidly male and masculine. Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and Plato: All influential philosophers with differing opinions on what it means to be marked by morality. This is significantâhe is literally saying Yes to life. And, what can Groundhog Day tell us about philosophy? Like Murray’s character, Sisyphus cannot die, even though he might long for death as the only means to escape his personal Hell. Phil, on the other hand, is a No-Saying Spiritâthis is why his dominant mode is negative, ironic detachment. He longs for his self-created life to be repeated endlessly in every detail. And so thatâs how people relate to him, in turn, trapping him in this cycle. Although the task confronting Sisyphus seems soul-destroying, Camus imagines that Sisyphus can transform his situation through acceptance: ‘This is my lot, so let’s get on with it.’ Even enjoyment becomes possible. The madman is mad because his reasoning leads to thinking that you are a god, but you just havenât realized it yet, and so you have an epistemological problem (problem of knowledge). All rights reserved. The groundhog dies in the big explosion with him, but Phil still wakes up the next day. This is not something that anyone else can solveâit is a problem of your own existential spatiotemporal integrity, how your selfish particularity relates to the infinite totality of time. âSort of like a science experiment,â Phil jokes. If Deleuze is right, we should have reached a world of supreme affirmation. But he tells her that they will get married to make her feel better, to put some kind of universality an eternity into this very particular and one off encounter. So Phil doesnât want to escape the day and no longer worries about anything, he has changed his perspective about his infinite access to timeâhis overabundance of time is no longer oppressive, but it liberates him. How can different attitudes lead to different choices? Then he is off to the ceremony, but on his way Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) greets him. He knows that the day will just reset tomorrow. He has no time for anyone or anything but himselfâ but even so, he doesnât really love himself, and all the time he spends on himself isnât paying off, because he is returning to the same job four years in a row that he hates. with the old people there. He goes to sleep, and the alarm clock goes off at 6AM. Did Phil still have control over his actions, or were they predetermined? Connors belongs more to the Camus camp than the Nietzschean. He jumps out of bed ready to seize the day, because heâs not in prison. Then we have a scene with Phil and Rita in the diner, and he has taken a new approach. The next scene he is back reporting from the groundhog ceremony, and for the first time we see him bring the full power of his existential cynicism to bear on a present moment. In Groundhog Day, Connors most certainly does. After this, Phil wants to go back to his town but he can’t go because of storm and bad weather conditions. Philâs name, after all, means love. He doesnât say he is a god (not yet, he says that later). He focuses on his piano lessons, and he spends his time ice sculpting at an expert level. She slaps him and leaves. By immersing himself in ‘otherness’ – by learning everything that makes MacDowell’s character tick – he is transformed. But Nietzsche is not the most Hollywood-friendly philosopher: he doesn’t do trite happy endings! X. Although Aristotle does make many great points, they weren’t as strong as Plato’s. In the film Groundhog Day eternal return is the fate suffered by the main character. As coronavirus shows no signs of going away any time soon, that means that the restrictions of Covid World will remain part of our lives for the foreseeable future. He was ready for eternity, and she wasnâtâshe said it was moving too fast for her. About this crime of killing god, deicide, Nietzsche says asks: âMust we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? It doesn’t come with presents. At the groundhog ceremony, he delivers a brilliant meditation on the joys of a long winter, winning the admiration of all who hear it. He eventually gets to sleep with her, though he refers to her as Rita when theyâre making love, which she doesnât like. Classic smartass answer. They end up back in his bedroom, but they donât sleep together, they are just hanging out. Instead of just rushing past the homeless man on the way to the groundhog ceremony, he stops and gives him a big wad of cash. He is trapped in this cycle, and he knows he canât get out, and he doesnât seem to have any intention of stopping his attempts at winning her. Every day is seemingly given over to practicing ice sculpting and learning piano. He hates the cycle of his life, so he can only regard it with a kind of ironic detachment. Like them, we’re plunged into the visceral fact of our existence and have to decide how to cope. Not so long ago, that metaphysical treasure, Groundhog Day, celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its release to your local multiplex. This is symbolised by the fact that at last he secures the love of the woman he has pursued from the beginning. All the others with whom he shares his eternal recurrence are in the Nietzschean position of having no recollection of their past existences. In postmodernist thought, especially the thought of Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), simulacra eventually cease to resemble what they were originally a copy of: so much so that they become freestanding entities without identifiable originals. By continuing to browse the site with cookies enabled in your browser, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our privacy policy. He spends the next few scenes helping the homeless man, who is always in the alley. No fireworks or barbeques. Itâs not clear yet if he really even cares about her that much, let alone loves her. They finally make love. So he isnât really a god if he canât even be fully present when heâs making love, and has to lie, to her and to himself about imagining that sheâs Ritaâwhat kind of god is that? Michael Yuille Athabasca University Philosophy 367 Author’s Note Michael I. Yuille, Athabasca University Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Michael I. Yuille, Email: miyuille@bu.edu NIETZSCHE, GROUNDHOG DAY… This is him bringing the power of eternity and infinity into his relation to her in a matter of fact way, trying to mediate the temporal disjunction more deftly than he did before. The guy is filled with good energyâPhil is so abundant that he lifts up everyone around him. Philâs problem is reconciling eternity with immediacyâhe has to bear the weight of the eternal, and heâs aware of it, he doesnât like it, it is the heaviest burden. However, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence is logically problematic, because if an individual’s life is an exact repeat of previous lives he would appear to have no free choice; yet at the same time Nietzsche seems to want us to alter our attitude to life in the face of the realisation of the stark truth of eternal recurrence. We see nothing of that first night. So he took zero advantage of what was going to be his only night in the town. Finally, it updates the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, casting its protagonist, played by Bill Murray, in the role of Sisyphus, the absurd hero. So one morning he trudges up to her at the groundhog ceremony and looks at her blankly, emptily, miserably. He brings coffee and donuts to his coworkers. He has the idea to break a pencil in half and leave it on his nightstandâif it is still broken the next morning, then he is out of the time loop, but if it is in one piece, then the loop starts again. He avoids land mines, and finds something better to say as a toast to drink to. Running head: NIETZSCHE, GROUNDHOG DAY, ETERNAL RECURRENCE AND SELF 1 Nietzsche, Groundhog Day, Eternal Recurrence and Transformation of the Self. He just runs away from Ned, in a panic, rather than trying to ironically engage him and get him away with his sharp words. Groundhog Day Clips Related This entry was posted in Beliefs , Family , Health , Movies , Native Speaker , Personal , Politics and tagged english , groundhog day , mental health , philosophy , teacherluke on March 11, 2021 by Luke Thompson . What "Groundhog Day" Teaches Us About Happiness Life is like school. He has decided to smash timeâhe wants to destroy time, destroy the cycle, and break out of it that way.