the groundhog day project

In 1966, Harold Ramis met artist Anne Plotkin. He was twenty-two and had just avoided service in Vietnam "by checking every box on the Army's medical history form, claiming to suffer from conditions ranging from night sweats to bedwetting to homosexuality" (Friend, 2004). Anne was a free-spirited kind of 60s girl. She would "fly to Bulgaria on a whim to find a Bulgarian psychic to teach them French, or slap [Harold] just to gauge his reaction." Tad Friend recounts in The New Yorker , 19 April 2004, how Anne recalls "the time a soap bubble from the sink glistened on their wall for three miraculous days. She told me, 'I consider that one of the high points of our marriage." Thoughts are too brief but also far too long They linger long enough to pain and bleed In my head echoes a melancholy song The agonizing future is still but a seed 15 May 1984, Harold wrote "NEW LIFE" on a red index card and taped it to the inside of a kitchen cabinet...

So, Phil is a bodhisattva. In Buddhism, the bodhisattva is a human (sattva) who has achieved enlightenment (bodhi) and now carries out altruistic acts. Unless one wants to argue that Phil is still selfish at the end of the time loop, then whether we take the film as a Buddhist treatise or not, Phil still qualifies under the umbrella of the bodhisattva. Soka Gakkai International tells us, "Compassion, an empathetic sharing of the sufferings of others, is the bodhisattva's greatest characteristic." Phil demonstrates his compassion even before we see him attempting to save O'Reilly or performing any of his good deeds on the last resumption of the time loop. His inspirational interaction with Chubby Man, his bringing pastries for Larry and Rita--these are already signs that Phil has learned to have compassion where before he would make fun of someone before he's ever consider trying to relate in any genuine fashion. Mrs. Lancaster is nothing but nice to Phil but...