the groundhog day project

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...

Subtitle: notes on the original (and I’ll still probably just harp on the voiceover today), because I didn’t finish doing it yesterday. So, I left off with the original version of the “god” scene, in which Phil ultimately tells Rita, “if tomorrow would ever come, you would fall in love with me.” In voiceover, he adds, “Even as I spoke the words, I knew they were true. And I knew that as sure as tomorrow never comes, Rita would forget them all over again.” Then, Phil gets on his god kick. Convinced he must be a god, he decides he has “to act more godly.” Faced with the unnamed guy he’s been punching every time he sees him (i.e. Ned), Phil tells us in voiceover: “One thing I know—a god wouldn’t use violence.” Apparently, he hasn’t read The Bible or the The Quran or, well, any religious text or ancient myth. That’s gods’ shtick—use violence… or trickery. Hell, by not hitting Ned, Phil has just proven he is not a god. Anyway, he explains (and sets up the Ned punchline): It had be...

Subtitle: notes on the original (and mostly I’ll probably just harp on the voiceover), because I never really did that yet. I can’t tell you when it began, other than to say “on groundhog day.” And I can’t tell you why it happened to me, other than to say I deserved a break in my career, and this was certainly it. So begins Phil’s forgotten voiceover. The time loop is already in effect, he’s already been mouthing the DJ dialogue and answering Mrs. Lancaster’s questions before she’s quite asked them. And, here you also see a bit of how Phil was different in the original, i.e. before they cast Bill Murray; Phil was young. While that “break in my career” becomes a break from his career in the time loop, what Phil is getting at is this is his first time in the field, not Rita’s. Though Rita is “about Phil’s age,” she’s a much more seasoned producer than he is a reporter in this version. The voiceover continues: How do I know these things before they happen? You may call it cheating,...

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 ...

I think we in the “west” or the “global north” or the “core”—whatever you want to call the more privileged nations where we like to enjoy having options in our lives, things like traveling to see the world for example—are spoiled. I’d been thinking of Phil’s stay in Punxsutawney as horribly isolating geographically. But, I realized a couple things recently: 1. It’s a limited perspective to assume that geographic isolation is such an aberration as to be horrible. So many people in this world spend their entire lives within small areas. Whole cultures are so geographically isolated that they are still only barely getting infected by the so-called modern world. 2. That being said, Phil’s story could only take place in such isolation because the culture that produced the story is just the type of culture that would find said isolation scary. I think, in fact, that Phil’s visit(s) to his mother in Rubin’s original—after he steals a plane and flies through the blizzard—for example, would ...

In Ramis’ second revision of the script for Groundhog Day —and, no, this isn’t part four—Rita has an interesting take on Phil’s situation. Phil is working away at a “small hunk of marble” (this would switch to ice sculpting after the recon trip to Punxsutawney, in which Rubin et al discovered the ice sculpting competition held on Groundhog Day). Rita is watching. Phil asks her, “But what if the rules changed? What if none of your actions had consequences?” Rita’s response: “There would still be an absolute morality. There has to be an absolute good, regardless of circumstances.” Rita’s not a fan of moral relativism, apparently. Phil proceeds to call her “Miss Plato” and asks, “Where does this ‘absolute good’ come from? From the sky?” Page 102 and Phil’s still snarky. But, this reminds me a line from Suzanne M. Daughton’s “The Spiritual Power of Repetitive Form: Steps Toward Transcendence in Groundhog Day ” ( Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (1996), 138-154). Daughton writes...