the groundhog day project

From 12 years to a couple days, love, especially on film, can sneak up on you. It can also leave just as unexpectedly. Loretta Castorini Clark (Cher) waited for love before she married the first time and her husband was killed by a bus. Ronny Cammareri was engaged to be married then he lost his hand and his fiancé left him. In Moonstruck , Ronny is clearly the more damaged of that pair, prone to emotional outburst and threats (demanding the big knife to cut his own throat) and acts (knocking over his kitchen table) of violence. Loretta is more sedate. And, early in the film, when her florist client—she does a few small businesses’ accounting—gives her a rose, the film lingers on her and that rose. It’s a beatific shot, a romantic shot. However much it must have hurt to lose her husband, Loretta is still a romantic. Later, after she has gone shopping and has gotten her hair done for a night at the opera, there’s a scene that adds little to the plot but demonstrates again that Loretta...

I wanted to start this final entry for When Harry Met Sally.. by mentioning tarot cards. Long time readers of this blog will know that tarot cards came up a few times in relation to Groundhog Day , and returned in relation to both The Ring and The Sixth Sense (the latter without any cards being in the film at all). And, sure enough, When Harry Met Sally... includes both Harry throwing cards into a bowl— —and a specific reference to tarot cards—among the book titles where Marie and Sally are standing in the bookstore is The Mythic Tarot : But, it is late—the conference day has gone very long, and I have a few notes to get to before I move on to another romantic comedy. Hinnant (2006) details “seven different scenarios or narrative possibilities” or “models” of courtship and romance as demonstrated in Jane Austen (p. 295). When Harry Met Sally... has a tiny bit of what he calls the “drama of prior commitment”—really, the film only employs that as an excuse as to why it doesn...

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 ...