the groundhog day project

Yesterday was about, well, bookmarks left behinds, articles left uncited... stuff I won't get to, stuff I don't need to get to, maybe even stuff I shouldn't get to. There's an imaginary Groundhog Day Project entry that didn't happen once upon a time that is at or near the top of that list. I wrote a poem, so the story goes, while under the influence of something stronger than this water I am drinking right now. You can read that poem, if you like, on my website . The thing is, there were more lines written that day, as I turned on Groundhog Day . Those lines follow: words have different meaning for each of us i want to save them all anyway is it a trick of the light or a trick of the haze? sundown growing brighter dogs eating from a baby’s bowl the earth tries to drop me and the blindness falls away skip moments and everything is funny like watching “ rabbits ” every direction is the right one (impact out groundhog day to nuclear war ) feeling ocd and ...

( 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 ...

So, anyway, meaning shows up where we find it. And, that meaning may just be that Phil has found God in the time loop. It isn't like Michael P. Foley is the only one that thinks so. Rick Wade, author of "Will Winter Ever End? Groundhog Day and Modern Thought - A Christian View of American Modernism" would seem to agree, for example. He even cites Foley. But Wade's primary point is not necessarily to express a Christian take on the film, but rather comment on the modernist elements of Phil Connors (pre time loop especially) from a perspective that happens to be Christian. His way of doing things doesn't get my confirmation bias ire up as much as Foley's does. Wade specifically critiques what he calls "a major philosophical shift in modern times, namely, the abandonment of a teleological view of the world." In lay terms, that last bit means we (the increasingly larger secular crowd) have abandoned the notion that there is inherent purpose to our exi...