Slightly Off Center

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/25/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-five-groundhog-day/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58877

Is there a day in your life that you would want to live over and over again? I can think of one or two perfect days I’ve had, and at least initially I might be okay stuck in them in an eternal loop. But eventually, even a perfect day would get monotonous, and there’s the fact that the reason it was a perfect day was because you didn’t know it was going to be perfect when you woke up that morning. Knowing would take the shine off it. Also, you wouldn’t be able to replicate that day perfectly, over and over and over.

Like smelling a rose forever, eventually you would become immune to the charms of the day. You would get a repetitive strain injury of the soul, and eventually, that perfect day, eternally on repeat, might be a working definition of Hell.

Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is not having a perfect day in this film. A Pittsburgh weatherman, he’s slated to go to Punxsutawney, north of Pittsburgh, to take part in the town’s annual Groundhog Day celebration, a day where (for those you who have just beamed onto the planet), a large rodent forecasts how long winter will continue depending on whether he can see his shadow or not. Phil loathes Groundhog Day because despite his professionally genial nature, he’s a misanthrope and finds people and their quaint little traditions annoying. But it’s his job, so he heads up to Punxsutawney with his cameraman Larry (Chris Elliot) and his new producer Rita (Andi McDowell), and does a perfunctory and slightly nasty stand-up.

Then weather happens and the three of them are trapped in Punxsutawney, one of them more than the others. Phil wakes up and it’s Groundhog Day again. The day repeats, he’s weirded out, and then it happens again, and again, and again.

Why is it happening? We never get an explanation (rumor is Columbia Pictures demanded an explanation and the filmmakers made one up to make the studio happy, and then intentionally never got around to shooting it). Why is it happening to Phil? Mostly, because the jerk needs it. Many of us take years and years to deal with our shit and come out the other side a better person. Phil needs only one day, it’s just that this one day is going go on forever until he gets it right.

In this, Groundhog Day feels like A Christmas Carol turned on its head. Ol’ Ebenezer Scrooge needed the intercession of three ghosts and one night to realign his worldview; Phil Connors gets no ghosts but eternal recurrence to sort himself out. Given the choice I think I’d rather have the single night; it feels more efficient that way. But I suppose not everyone can do it all in a single night, and Phil doesn’t seem like the kind to take a hint with a single whack to the skull. He’s going to have to get whacked, again and again and again and again.

Which is fine, because it’s fun to watch Phil play the changes: first panic, then glee, then methodical trickery, then despair, and then… well, you’ll see (or have seen, this film is universally acknowledged to be one of the great film comedies of all time). At one point someone asks Phil, who seems to know everything because he’s well into the middle of his eternal loop, how he can know so much. Phil says, “Well, there is no way. I’m not that smart.” And you know what, he’s right. He’s in this loop because he’s just not that smart. He can’t learn his way out of this conundrum; he has to experience his way out of it, if he is going to get out of it at all. This isn’t a criticism of Phil, per se. I’m probably not that smart, either, and probably neither are you. If Phil could be taught to be a better and more decent human, he probably wouldn’t have been a candidate to be in that loop at all.

(This does bring up the question of why the universe or whomever thinks Phil, of all the pinched, unhappy people out there, merits a loop to sort out his issues. This is also left unanswered, and maybe there is no answer. The universe is weird and capricious, and if you or I or anyone could really understand it, we’d probably try to find a way out of it. As ee cummings once said, “Listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”)

Groundhog Day is a tale of existential horror played for laughs, which is one of the reasons I think it resonates for so many people. It’s an easy way to approach the concept of how hard it is to turn ourselves around when we only have a single life to do it in. There are a lot of different theories about how long it is that Phil is stuck in his loop, ranging from ten years to 10,000. There’s only one correct answer: He’s in it for however long it takes to fix himself. There’s no escape before then.

The rest of us are not so lucky, or unlucky, depending on your perspective. We have to live with our mistakes and screw-ups and disappointments; there are no do-overs, only occasional second chances. I don’t want to be stuck in a time loop for years or decades or centuries, but hurtling heedlessly through time with no brakes or track-backs also seems not a great way to run a universe, at least for the humans in it.

Another reason the film resonates so much is that Bill Murray is the perfect person to play Phil Connors. Like his character, Murray’s a funny and acerbic fella who is also, if the various stories about him on set and in his personal life are close to true, fully capable of being a real asshole. There’s a “biting on tin foil” edge to Murray that makes it easy for him to sell Phil as a person who doesn’t much like people, or himself, and it’s a toss-up on any given day which he likes less.

The production of this film had Murray butting heads with director Harold Ramis to such an extent that the formerly close friends had a falling out that lasted nearly until Ramis’ death in 2014. Apparently Murray wanted the film to be more philosophical; Ramis, who was the one who had to deliver a hit to Columbia Studios, needed it to be more comedic. In the end, they both got their way, so I think it’s a shame this was the film they fell out over.

In the end, though, who else could have been Phil Connors? Of all the actors in Hollywood at the time, I can only think of one on a similar tier of fame who could have pulled it off: Tom Hanks, who despite his current reputation as “America’s Dad” was capable of some real acidity and anger back in the day (see the movie Punchline for a Tom Hanks character who is basically a talented asshole). But even Hanks would have been second best here; Hanks doesn’t teeter on the edge of being unlikeable as well or as long as Murray. Murray makes you believe in Phil’s redemption arc.

Early in the film, when he had only recurred a few times, Phil remembers a day where he was in the Virgin Islands, met a girl, with whom he drank pina coladas and got busy, and wonders why he couldn’t be repeating that day. As you might imagine from my first paragraph, when it all came down to it, I don’t think he would eventually like recurring on that day any more than on Groundhog Day. Eventually the pleasure of it would stale and he would end up the same place (metaphysically) as he was in Punxsutawney.

That’s because, as the noted philosopher Buckaroo Banzai once said, no matter where you go, there you are. The problem was not Punxsutawney, or Groundhog Day, and never was. The problem was always Phil, just as the problem would be, inevitably, any of the rest of us in the same situation. Phil gets as much time as he needs to solve himself. Groundhog Day reminds us, however, that we just have the time we’ve got, and we better get to it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/25/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-five-groundhog-day/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58877