Groundhog Day Revisited, Yet Again

It's the winter holiday season, so, naturally, I turned to Groundhog Day. There was the usual déjà vu in the realization that this is one of the very best romantic comedies ever, but the machinery of those generic expectations in the viewing experience work so well that I had never noticed until now how very odd the romance actually is.

About a third of the way through the film, when Phil (Bill Murray) says to Rita (Andie MacDowell) that what he "really want[s] is someone like you," I was struck this time how out of the blue the statement actually felt. I'm apparently not the only one: Bill Chambers notes how Phil's enactment of his godhood "entails wooing Rita (mostly because Andie MacDowell is second-billed)." There's a slight look of bemusement when Phil first sets eyes on her playing with her disappearing torso in front of the weatherman's blue screen, but it certainly couldn't be mistaken for a gaze of desire of any kind. And Phil makes the requisite dirty jokes to her early on about how much she was missing by sleeping alone, but we get the feeling that this is just Phil being Phil (easily mistaken for Bill Murray being Bill Murray). No sense of real need for her at all ... until he randomly decides in the middle of a diner that she is what he really wants out of life.

But the randomness of the decision is precisely what makes it so important: at a narrative level, the film easily would have ground to a dead halt at exactly that moment unless he had made the decision that would bring his day--and thus the film--to its climax. Only by making the absurd decision to latch onto something and to apply such meaning to it could he actually work toward forging (both in the sense of "creating" and in the sense of "faking") a narrative of himself that he could actually work with into the future. The manner in which he had previously identified himself had brought him nowhere in life, and the film's great conceit is that it literalizes this narrative dead end by forcing him to relive the moment in which he derailed over and over again. The movie is charged through with religious contemplation: sure, his suggestion that he's a god is played for laughs, but after a half an hour of existential questioning over the nature of our actions when they have no social consequences and after a morbidly hilarious montage of suicide attempts, the statement seems to take on a little more gravitas. In this context, it wouldn't be entirely out of place to suggest that the random choice to love Rita until the day he dies is the rom-com equivalent of Pascal's wager: it was the moment in which he earnestly decided to believe his own bullshit, and he eventually awoke (this kind of religious "awakening" is especially significant after the enormous amount of effort directed toward achieving that belief) to find that it was empirically true.

But beyond the abstract metaphysics of the film's philosophy, the decision works even more effectively as a kind of pragmatic meta-cinema. A scene can be shot any number of ways, a film can be edited any number of ways, a narrative can turn any number of ways unless choices are made to direct the film toward ends prescribed by the expectations viewers hold about the film's genre. Groundhog Day works both as an example of how this generic effect can work successfully and as a critical examination of its inner workings during film production. The entire premise seems to rely on the fact that Phil is the only person "on set" who actually realizes that he's in a film, that his actions can reverberate differently depending upon how he performs himself to his fellow actors. In this context, Phil is given multiple "takes" and we see Phil the method actor searching for his motivation (the weird choice to believe that he loves someone as bland as Rita) and researching the role in order to perform it in a way that meets everyone's expectations. This is a surprisingly slow process for him: Phil is kind of a dunce as an actor, first assuming that he's in a horror film, then in a raucous sex comedy (his seduction of Nancy and his John Belushi imitation as he eats a table full of cakes), then in an Ingmar Bergman film (his angsty suicides), then in a film of social awareness (his attempts to save the old homeless man). Only then does he finally settle on the romantic comedy genre, and it's still quite a feat to pull off the performance properly.

But even as Phil navigates his own attempt to revise his character's narrative according to his viewers' expectations, the film itself does something radical by allowing us to see this actually happen. After all, strip away the other elements and leave only the bits that genuinely fit into this genre, and you're left with only his final experience of Groundhog Day, which would be completely dull if not for the narrative chaos--that difference in the constant repetitions--that had ensued before it. In its subtle reveal of how film production works when it plays to audience expectations, the final version of Groundhog Day that Phil experiences becomes for us the version of Groundhog Day that could have ended up on the DVD I was watching. In other words, the film is highly critical of the ways that films give audiences what they think they want out of a genre film. This film reaches out for a higher purpose: to make the audience believe in those expectations as limits within which to improvise something more affirmative. And this is the Groundhog Day that really makes me believe in the kind of power that film has on a larger scale.