Groundhog Liberation Day
How to break the world's cycle of despair by repeating it [LINK DROP]
Sometimes, especially when I compile news for this newsletter, I feel like I’m in Groundhog Day, the 1993 Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell movie that terrified me as a child due to its central plot device—a man wakes up repeating the same day over and over again. Watching that movie made me think I might someday get trapped in a cycle of never-ending sameness and be gaslit by everyone around me into thinking that that wasn’t true.
Which, I guess, in many ways, is what my life is, TBH. What else is this life but Groundhog Day? What else am I supposed to feel upon reading the news each morning? What else is a world in which we wake up repeating the same disasters and being told by everyone around us—politicians, the news media—that we should expect different results?
I am confused how anyone ever saw Groundhog Day as a lighthearted family comedy.
The movie made a lot more sense to me when I learned that director Harold Ramis was a Jew-turned-Buddhist and saw the screenplay as a meditation on Buddhism. He said that weatherman Phil Connors’s repetitious day took place not over a few weeks, as many of the film’s viewers assumed, but over something like 10,000 YEARS, because that is how long it takes a soul to achieve perfection in some Buddhist philosophy.
The film’s screenwriter Danny Rubin also saw the movie as a commentary on how long it takes to change one’s life and/or soul.
“It became this weird political issue because if you asked the studio, ‘How long was the repetition?’, they’d say, ‘Two weeks’. But the point of the movie to me was that you had to feel you were enduring something that was going on for a long time.... For me it had to be—I don’t know. A hundred years. A lifetime,” Rubin said in 2005.
Angela Zito, who was a director for the Center for Religion and Media at NYU in the early 2000s, told the New York Times in 2003 that the movie was a perfect distillation of samsara, the notion of constant rebirth in Buddhism. She said the most important theme of the movie was a central one to Mahayana Buddhism—that you cannot escape the cycle of samsara without helping everyone else do so too.
“Nobody ever imagines they are going to escape samsara until everybody else does,” she said. “That is why you have bodhisattvas, who reach the brink of nirvana, and stop and come back and save the rest of us. Bill Murray is the bodhisattva. He is not going to abandon the world. On the contrary, he is released back into the world to save it.’‘
This is a nice read of the movie, one in which the unending mental anguish of living the same day over and over again leads to something positive instead of, say, despondency and suicide (which also does happen in the movie—Phil Connors attempts to kill himself several times, only to wake up in the same day again).
And that’s how I’m trying to view life right now as well. Not just my life, but the world in general. It is easy to become depressed about how frequently and consistently we all repeat the same mistakes, both at an individual and societal level (see: reelecting Trump). But perhaps we are like Phil Connors: in need of more repetition so that we can learn a bit each time and, eventually, add it all up into something that finally allows us to escape this closed circuit of hellish nowness.