the groundhog day project

Shrek: For your information, there's a lot more to ogres than people think. Donkey: Example? Shrek: Example... uh... ogres are like onions! Donkey: They stink? Shrek: Yes... No! Donkey: Oh, they make you cry? Shrek: No! Donkey: Oh, you leave them out in the sun, they get all brown, start sprouting little white hairs... Shrek: No! Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers... You get it? We both have layers. Donkey: Oh, you both have layers . Oh. You know, not everybody like onions. Cake ! Everybody loves cake! Cakes have layers! Shrek: I don't care what everyone likes! Ogres are not like cakes. Donkey: You know what else everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, "Let's get some parfait," they say, "Hell no, I don't like no parfait."? Parfaits are delicious! Shrek: No! You dense, irritating, miniature beast of burden! Ogres are like onions! End of story! Bye-bye! See ya later. Donkey: Parfait's gotta be the mo...

So, I made some notes about Altman and Taylor’s Social Penetration Theory for this blog and then I was looking at them and realized something interesting. In a way, the same stages that make up the theory fit the way I approach movies in this phase of the Groundhog Day Project . Allow me to explain. The basic concept, which I mentioned before, is like that bit in Shrek : we’ve got layers to our personalities/identities, and as we get to know someone new, we penetrate the layers. Like a wedge being driven into an onion. There are four stages to this penetration—orientation, exploratory affective exchange, affective exchange and stable exchange. All of these are driven by a cost-benefit analysis, in which we weigh the cost of revealing more and more personal information against the reward of the relationship (or, in a slightly more cynical way, the simple reward of learning more and more personal information from the other person). Orientation – Griffin (2006) tells us, “peripheral ...