the groundhog day project

(No recap today. The last one was Day 608 - teens tonight . I should have one today--got 28 days of identity movies and 32 days worth of Westerns to recap--but I did not have time to prepare the list of links ahead of time. For my thesis work, I'll have a complete list of every entry and all the links put together within the next month, so expect a good recap on Day 730... which may be the last entry of this blog.) For today, though, the approach is simple: Groundhog Day is a Western. Specifically, Groundhog Day , structurally, falls right in line with Wright's (1975) claassical plot . (First, I suppose I should explain something. Phase 2 of this blog ends after this month, just today's viewing of Groundhog Day , four weeks with four different movies, then another viewing of Groundhog Day . And, I'm mulling over options beyond that. I could continue as I have been--but no more variant* months like that last one; different movie every day, but same theme, and I...

Daughton (1996) argues that by the time of Groundhog Day , the world no longer supported the "traditional masculine belief system" that Phil Connors represents. She calls it "the masculinity of the 19th century" and "no longer functional for men today" (p. 141). She cites Rapping (1994) in assessing the 'juvenilized' version of American manhood [as] Hollywood's answer to a real political crisis in the meaning of masculinity... We live in a world that has made old-fashioned heroism hard to believe in... (p. 141, quoting Rapping, p. 118-9) Daughton suggests the Groundhog Day answer as follows: "In fact, the rhetorical point of Groundhog Day has more to do with its protagonist coming to appreciate the stereotypically feminine focus on connection with others, than with reinscribing the stereotypically masculine individuation and domination glorified in films.... (p. 141) (And, I believe I've quoted that passage before, but I will ...

In the real world, it is Mother's Day. In the film it's about to be Groundhog Day, obviously. But, in honor of Mother's Day, I thought I'd share some detail of a scene I've mentioned before from Danny Rubin's original script so you can meet Mrs. Connors, Phil's mother. INT. APARTMENT HALLWAY -- NIGHT Phil stands facing a closed door. It opens. A little old LADY in a bathrobe answers. MRS. CONNORS Philip! PHIL Hi, Ma. THEY hug. MRS. CONNORS Philip! What time is it? What’re you doing here? They enter the APARTMENT PHIL Sorry about the hour. MRS. CONNORS You look freezing. Take off your shoes. PHIL I’m fine. MRS. CONNORS Put your feet up on the table. It’s warmer up there. PHIL I’m fine, really. MRS. CONNORS You’re gong to make yourself sick. PHIL Ma! MRS. CONNORS Go on. Phil pulls off his shoes quickly, like a petulant child. MRS. CONNORS Doesn’t that feel better? PHIL Much. MRS. CONNORS What’re you doing here at this crazy ...

I wanted to start with one of two lines today: What's wrong with you? or There's nothing wrong with you. I had a thought today that really there's nothing wrong with any of us. We have, as a society, decided certain things are wrong, certain actions, certain thoughts. But, those things differ from culture to culture. Sure, there are universals. Murder, for example--it's wrong everywhere. But, I don't think anyone comes to murder--to stick with that example--lightly or, necessarily, deliberately. The final act, even the plotting may be deliberate, but a whole chain of events leads up to such an act. I'm reminded of a passage from More's Utopia : If you allow people to be badly brought up and their habits to be corrupted little by little from childhood, and if you then punish them for crimes to which their early training has disposed them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it? (p. 11) I don't norma...

Benesh (2011) comes to a subsection of a subsection of chapter two on the Gestalt cycle of experience on page 45 of her dissertation. I'm only jumping ahead because she referenced it back on page 21 (where I left off). "The Cycle of Experience," Benesh explains, "presents a metaphor of 'metabolism' for taking in and expanding one's boundaries by exchanging boundaries with another entity" (p. 45). She explains further, "each point on the cycle is a microscopic reflection of the whole, like a fractal, and cycles of all sizes are presumed to be going on continually at interpsychic, interpersonal, group, and system levels. We can't attend to all of them at once" (p. 46). I'm reminded of Bacha (1998) who was once a mainstay of this blog. Bacha, at one point asks, "So, how does the mind work?" (p. 384). The answer is not a simple one. The immediate answer is this: A starting point might be to differentiate between three aspect...

I must interrupt my reading of Benesh for something brief, for two reasons: I haven't had the chance today to read any more of Benesh's dissertation. Today was the first day of winter quarter, not a very busy day, but I also made some dinner, some food for my lunch tomorrow, and went to the mall to get a coat and some gloves (for my upcoming speech team trip to Salt Lake City as well as my Groundhog Day Project trip to Woodstock) and some LEGO minifigures (for my voluminous collection of LEGO blocks). Tomorrow there's a bit of a gap between a couple of my classes so I will have time on campus to not only watch Groundhog Day but read a bit of Benesh, this time from the beginning. The article I am about to reference was shown to me by Victor, president of the speech team for which I coach. If someone points out a Groundhog Day reference and the article is about something else in which I have interest, I just gotta use it. So, Anthony Lane over at The New Yorker , 11 ...

Todd May, in " Love and Death " writes about Phil's love for Rita. May says, "One would not want to deny that Connors comes to love Rita during the period of the eternal Groundhog Day." I would. I have. Sort of. I suppose I don't deny that Phil loves Rita--I just question a) the extent of that love (By the time he loves her, I might argue that his attempt at "romantic" involvement with Rita has already come to an end. Of course, at the time he was pursuing a "romantic" relationship with Rita, I don't think Phil even knew what that entailed. For him it was all about getting Rita back to his room, into his bed. Any failure to do that was a failure as, well, who and what he believed himself to be. So then, it becomes a question of what sort of love Phil feels for Rita, because on some level, I think we could assume that Phil has learned to love everyone by the end of the film. This would include Rita. But, Hollywood convention and th...

This isn't really part two to yesterday's bit about therapy. But, it does follow in its way, and I just had to use the rest of the psychiatrist's line as a title. Having dealt with Daughton and Bacha again yesterday, I wanted to get back to gender. In particular, I'd reference the following from Daughton: Connors must embark on what is traditionally a feminine rather than a masculine quest, journeying inward in order to encounter and submit to the power of the dark goddess, rather than outward in order to master and claim some object in the external world. I don't know about the dark goddess bit--I'll get to more on that in a moment--but I appreciate that, in this instance at least, Daughton calls it "traditionally feminine " instead of simply "feminine." I've said before, dividing the quest into two based on gender seems, in the present, inappropriate. But, looking backward, it makes sense to look at stories in terms of gender-divid...

( Enough about religion... for now.) Let's talk instead about something light: psychoanalysis. In the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (87 (2006), 1387-98), Richard Almond tells us that "[i]n the paradigm of the therapeutic narrative, a troubled person plays out his/her typical pattern in relation to an other who is more anonymous, a foil who is depicted in idealized and/or mysterious terms." This "other" is Rita, and Phil is the one undergoing the therapeutic process in Groundhog Day . As I've mentioned before, Claire S. Bacha, in Psychodynamic Counselling (4.3 (Aug 1998), 383-406), claims Rita as "the object of Phil's desire exactly because she seems so much his opposite." Both Bacha and Almond are putting the onus for Phil's transformation, at least in part, on his attachment to Rita, whether it's idealization, attraction, or both. I think I'd side with Almond on this one. Almond tells us that Groundhog Day is of ...

Not too long ago I wrote about Groundhog Day as a religious film . That is to say, I discussed how folks of different religions see the film as exemplifying their specific belief systems. And, notably, when I cited Michael P. Foley's "Phil's Shadow" , I dismissed almost out of hand his suggestion that when Phil looks up after O'Reilly dies in the alley, he is looking to God. Specifically, what Foley says is this: But Phil’s conviction evaporates once he is forced to acknowledge the inevitable death of an old beggar whose life he repeatedly tries to save. In the final scene of this subplot, he is kneeling down, vainly administering CPR to the man, when he stops and plaintively looks heavenward. And in an unrelated moment, he indirectly acknowledges God as Creator by reciting the verse, “Only God can make a tree.” God alone, Phil learns, is the Lord of life and death. Now, I think it's presumptuous to link the mention of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" ...