the groundhog day project

"When a narcissist's sense of control is challenged, he feels threatened, and responds as if his survival is at stake," writes Kristina Nelson in Narcissism in High Fidelity (2004, p. 19). This is Rob Gordon's existential crisis--his girlfriend has just left him and he turns inward because, basically, who is he without his conquest, without his companion, without his distraction... depending on his mood, of course? He looks back at his top five all-time breakups like they are the building blocks of his being. Well, them and all the music he's got catalogued in his head, in his record shop, and on the shelves that crowd his apartment. And, he's not wrong. There's a realism in the horribleness of Rob Gordon. His obsession with music, his obsession with his sexual (and non-) partners, his obsession with himself--there is familiarity and believability there. His excessive voiceover is our ticket to something that rings true and may even ring biographically. I...

The opening of Falling Down reminds me of two very different things. (And, no, neither one is Fellini's 8 1/2 because, for some reason, that film has slipped through the cracks of my moviewatching experience... Which seems wrong, now that I think about it. I'm sure both Joel Schumacher and Jake Scott had the opening to 8 1/2 in mind, but I just cannot speak to Fellini's film... yet.) The first thing is the music video to REM's "Everybody Hurts" (directed by the parenthetically aforementioned Jake Scott)--which I just had to doublecheck was out around the same time this film was. All those people stuck in traffic, all the different, sometimes vague, ways that they are hurting. Until they separate themselves from the monotony of that unfortunate part of everyday life in Los Angeles (and Chicago when it's funny), Like D-FENS (Michael Douglas) does in Falling Down . The other thing is the "We'll Follow the Sun" episode of Married... Wit...

Speaking of a repetitive day-to-day, Phil Connors embodies that. I mean, in Pittsburgh, going to the station, repeating the same barely accurate weather information day in and day out, then a little banter with Nan and Kenny, then out on the town to pick up a woman to bring back to his apartment. He's already made his way through the secretarial pool, even has to avoid a few of those women. He's starting to feel as if he will never be able to settle down... at least in the moments that it occurs to him that he should. And, in an earlier incarnation of the script, he has found Stephanie. He didn't mean to treat her badly. He even told her, explicitly, that he didn't have time for a "real relationship." One of these days, a major network is going to call him up and he doesn't want to have to worry about a girlfriend or, worse, a wife, to affect his decision to go. His immediate decision to go, that is. Leave Pittsburgh as far behind him as he did Clevela...

"Everyone takes, everyone gives. Life is like that." - Siddhartha (p. 52) Davies (1995) tells us, "Through its small-town setting and its manipulation of time, [ Groundhog Day ] keeps the most discussed ills of nineties America (gang war in California, sex and violence in the movies) at a distance" (p. 226). In fact, those more serious topics don't even make it out of the opening scene, and the first one is just part of Phil's humorous weather report: Out in California, they’re gonna have some warm weather tomorrow… gang wars and some very overpriced real estate. Up in the Pacific Northwest, as you can see, they’re gonna have some very, very tall trees. It will be clear across the Rockies and the Great Plains, mostly. Sex and violence in the movies--that's a topic that has been with us as long as movies have been, and will still be until we turn as hedonistic as the latter days of the Roman Empire. Actually, then we'll probably still talk abo...

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 ...

We're 80 days out and The Groundhog Day Project is winding down. Eighty days seems so short right now. I've still got a few weeks of school left for the spring quarter, then summer, for which I'm hoping for some very specific plans but don't have them yet. Before I even realize it, this thing will be over and then where will I be? But anyway, I was just reading Day 80: i have an alcoholic now , one of the only entries where the title has pretty much nothing to do with the subject. I used it because the previous day's entry had used the preceding line: "most of my work is with couples, families." In retrospect, I shouldn't have done it, but we must live with our mistakes... (well, most of them). So, I was reading the 80th entry to maybe echo it's subject--gender-defined quests--today. I keep wanting to turn the whole project into a sort of palindromic structure. Not sure why. I also keep wanting to revisit old topics to improve on them. But, wit...

Michael Faust, in Philosophy Now , is one of those who put Phil’s transformation as something driven by his love for Rita. He says it is this love that …proves decisive. By immersing himself in ‘otherness’—by learning everything that makes MacDowell’s character tick—he is transformed. 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’). Claire S. Bacha, in Psychodynamic Counseling , suggests (though she sides more explicitly with Faust’s take later) instead that “Rita becomes a goal for Phil, a test.” She further adds: The film does not explain why this happens, but the feeling is that Rita becomes the object of Phil’s desire exactly because she seems so much his opposite. She possesses all the qualities that he lacks and thus becomes a challenge. Phil no longer wants himself. He wants the other. Now, both of these authors put Phil’s transformation solely in his ability to connect to “the ...