Another dose of groundhog day!

In this guest blog, Steve Taylor shares how a film could help change your life.

Groundhog Day film starring Bill Murray.

Just as we think we’re escaping from the groundhog days of Lockdown, I’m going to suggest another dose. Watch the film Groundhog Day about a tv weatherman trapped in an endlessly repeating day.  Even if you’ve seen it, watch it again. It bears repetition! And it could just be an inspiration in these strange times.

Seen as a little more than a light comedy when it came out in 1993, it’s taken more seriously today. There are articles, academic papers and even books on how the film can help us to understand, and perhaps escape from our own groundhog days.

Groundhog Day scriptwriter, Danny Rubin, is still getting mail from people telling him how much the film means to them. His story seems to have tapped into a common human experience of feeling trapped in a repeating cycle of daily life.

The obvious escape route is to change our life circumstances: move on; get a better job; find a more sympathetic partner.  The problem, however, is that decades of psychological research have shown that even dramatic changes in our life circumstances tend to have little effect on our long-term levels of happiness. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill: running very fast to stay in the same place. Even the 22 major lottery winners in Philip Brickman’s study reported no significant increase in their happiness.

So perhaps, rather than looking outwards towards more affluent locations and a better co-supporting cast to improve our well-being, we could try looking inwards at how we’re playing the scripts we’ve been given.  Many of the experts in the booming new Science of Happiness and Well-Being think so. Their research evidence suggests that our sense of well-being has as much to do with how we respond to our circumstances than the circumstances themselves. ‘The good news’, says Martin Seligman founder of positive psychology, ‘is that ways of significantly improving our lives are under our voluntary control.’ And Groundhog Day provides a very a good illustration, because we see someone finally managing to improve their life while everything around them stays exactly the same.

When we first see tv weather man, Phil Connors, on his way to the small Pennsylvanian town of Punxsutawney with producer Rita and cameraman Larry to report on the Groundhog Day ceremony, he’s arrogant and discontented. He hates his job; Groundhog Day is stupid and Punxsutawney is an awful place. This is reflected in the sarcastic report he gives next day. ‘This is one time,’ he sneers, ‘that tv fails to capture the excitement of a rat predicting the weather.’

That evening Rita asks if he’s coming to the Groundhog Day party. No, he’s not.

‘The people here are just hicks,’ he tells her. He just wants to go to bed and get out of Punxsutawney first thing tomorrow. But when he wakes up, it’s February 2nd, Groundhog Day, again. And again. And again. He’s condemned to an ever-repeating day. The film is about how he deals with it.

Phil’s first reaction is denial, this isn’t happening. Then when he realises that if there’s no tomorrow, there are no consequences, he does what he likes. He steals, eats and drinks as much as he wants, and seduces as many women as he can.

But when he tries it on with Rita, it doesn’t work. She doesn’t do one-night stands and he’s only got the one night. Defeated, Phil subsides into bitter self-pity. Why has this happened to him?

Denial, hedonistic escape, and self-pity are, of course, common and understandable responses to difficult life circumstances. But all are guaranteed to keep us trapped in a repeating day. ‘I wake up every morning and it’s always Groundhog Day,’ Phil tells Rita. ‘And there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘I don’t know maybe it’s not a curse,’ she says, ‘just depends how you look at it.’  It’s a throwaway line but the seed is sown, an embryo of change conceived. With no-where else to go, Phil finally has to start looking inside himself and comes to realise that there is something he can do. There’s the option, open to all of us in situations we can neither change nor escape from, to control our response.  As Eckhart Tolle, author of the best-selling The Power of Now and another fan of Groundhog Day puts it, ‘We can choose to work with the day or against it, make it an ally or an enemy.’

Phil starts to work with the day, becoming a participant in Punxsutawney life rather than an angry spectator looking on from the terraces. He begins to find a sense of purpose and a feeling of shared identity, much as Covid-19 initially brought smiles from passers-by, help-yourself gifts on front lawns and 750,000 people volunteering to help the NHS. Of all the factors that promote a sense of well-being the most important, positive psychologists have found, is an altruistic commitment to others arising from a shared sense of identity. We see Phil helping people, from feeding the frail old beggar on a street corner to making sure he’s always there to catch the boy who falls from a tree. His sarcastic report on the Groundhog Day ceremony has been replaced by a beautiful piece to camera contrasting Chekhov’s ‘long winter bereft of hope’ with the warmth he’s found in Punxsutawney.  

What makes this transition so believable is that Phil’s character hasn’t been changed just to fit the story. He’s still centre stage. The sarcasm’s still there. When an elderly woman thanks him for changing her punctured tyre, he tells her it was no trouble, he happened to have a spare wheel with him. He’s still Phil and he’s still in Punxsutawney on February 2nd, but he’s lost the arrogant superiority that condemned him to a recurring day of disappointment with everyone and everything. He’s changed what was in his power to change and he’s finally living in the day.

‘No matter what happens tomorrow, I’m happy now.’ he tells Rita.

‘Groundhog Day doesn’t tell you anything,’ says Eckhart Tolle, ‘But it shows you a lot and it’s up to you what you want to do with it.’ What I think it shows us is that whatever our circumstances, we have the power to make the day we’ve been given that bit happier or sadder, duller or more interesting, more or less meaningful.  We can choose to inject it with appreciation for what we have or venom for what we don’t have.  We can live in the day or stand outside it looking in. It’s our choice.  Every time I watch Groundhog Day, I see some new take on this fundamental and potentially liberating truth. By the end, I’m always smiling and quietly resolving to try to be that little bit better in one way or another. 

So why not give it a go? Or another go? You may find something there to help or inspire you too. But even if you don’t, it’s still 101 minutes of joyful entertainment. 

What have you got to lose?

I hope you found this blog post helpful in some way and I’m always keen to hear your thoughts - let me know over on Twitter @RachelKellyNet

about the author

Thanks to guest blogger Steve Taylor for today’s post!