the groundhog day project

Twenty years ago, I worked at the United Artists Marketplace theater in Old Town Pasadena. INSERT: me pausing to watch the awesome opening credits to SE7EN . Hell, not only are those credits amazing, but I love the establishing shot that follows--nothing but buildings. Like this city has no sky, even though the incessant rain would suggest otherwise. And in the next few minutes, the shots outside are framed to leave out the sky or include the slightest glimpses of it at the edge of the frame. There was supposed to be an opening sequence with Somerset (Morgan Freeman) looking at a house outside the city, to buy for his retirement, but the production reportedly ran out of money before they could ever film that sequence. I'm kind of glad they didn't because the open space of such a sequence would have countered the way this stuff is being framed a little too much. We're offered a dark, wet, melancholic city, and Somerset is the buddy cop stereotype, the guy about to retire...

Briefly in class tonight we were talking about the "mean-world syndrome"—a part of George Gerbner's Cultivation Theory that tells us basically that the more we watch television, the gloomier our view of the world tends to be. Essentially, we watch TV shows or the news that includes say violence and murder and, while it's entirely unlikely for a lot of us to actually be exposed to such things in real life, we start to think it's more likely because, well, that's what we know . TV becomes reality. That got me to thinking about Groundhog Day because, well, everything gets me thinking about Groundhog Day . And, I wanted to say, basically, that Phil Connors, even pre-loop, is not a bad guy. I tend to think that fundamentally none of us are bad people. But, sometimes only certain actions of ours get a response, so those actions get repeated. And, we don't even need responses to be positive, we just need them to be . Phil's insults get more immediate resul...