The Bill Murray guide to Buddhism

Rating: Null/10 (17 January 2011)

Perhaps the closest thing to a modern Frank Capra movie, Harold Ramis' "Groundhog Day" sees actor Bill Murray playing Phil Connors, an egocentric Pittsburgh TV weatherman who finds himself trapped in the small town of Punxsutawney, repeating the same day over and over again.
Why Connors is forced to relive the same day isn't explained, but it is made clear that Connors was trapped in a cycle of repetition even before his never-ending day began. Projecting nothing but facile sarcasm, ironic self-awareness and aloof detachment, Connors is a thoroughly postmodern man, his life long filled with what he perceives to be pointless and mindless routine. But Connors is not a pessimist or self-centred, so much as he is super-aware, perpetually dejected and world-weary. For Connors, every day offers only what philosopher Francois Cusset called the "dead end of postmodernity". Enchantment is thoroughly dead and everything that will happen has already happened.
When Connors wakes up to find that today is, and always will be, yesterday, he is forced into violently confronting the fact that postmodernism conceives of contemporary life as a spectacle before which the individual always sits powerless, and within which questions of the real are always problematized. To the postmodern subject, there is nowhere else, no other time or place, the subject a ghost-viewer in a movie that plays regardless of his volition.
At first Connors uses this opportunity to engage in pranks, hedonism and deceit, concocting schemes to amass money and bed a beautiful woman, played by Andie McDowell, but gradually these games start to lose their appeal. After learning that all the material and sexual gratifications in the world are not spiritually sustaining, Connors grows suicidal. He takes his life several times, but still the curse continues.
From here on the plot becomes a mixture of the myth of Sisyphus and Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" (Bill Murray is essentially Ebenezer Scrooge), with a little Camus and Nietczhe thrown in. The film's existential avenues are best hinted at by a poem (The Lay of the Last Minstrel) by Sir Walter Scott, an excerpt of which Andie McDowell recites to Connors in a diner: "Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentrated all in self, Living shall forfeit fair renown, And doubly dying, shall go down, To the vile dust from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung."
And so gradually Connors relinquishes the Self. Of course contemporary neuroscience has now thoroughly undermined the notion of a Sovereign Self, but director Harold Ramis is a Buddhist, and Buddhism has long denied the existence of a metaphysical self. Buddhist's call this "Anatta", or "not self", in which it is taught that all things perceived by the senses are not really "I" or "mine", and in which a line is drawn from the problem of personal identity to moral responsibility.
A thoroughly changed man, Connors thus now begins to live each day to the fullest. No longer obsessed with "moving on" or possessing Andie McDowell, he instead helps everyone, acts selflessly, without ego (paradoxically an egotistical, if not impossible act) and uses whatever spare time he has to engage in various artistic and intellectual refinements (piano, ice sculpting, poetry etc). To his co-workers, Connors now seems like a radically different person. He seems reborn. Unsurprisingly, at this moment of transformation, the temporal curse is broken and tomorrow finally comes, though Connors now refuses to move on and instead opts to stay in Punxsutawney.
"Connors's transformation (which resembles the Buddhist Samsara cycle) goes against almost everything postmodernity teaches," author Jonah Goldberg says. Connors doesn't find paradise or liberation by becoming more "authentic" or "individual", but by doing exactly the opposite. "He learns to appreciate the crowd," Goldberg says, "the community, even the bourgeois hicks and their values[]and most of all by shedding his ironic detachment from the world." Unsurprisingly radical economists view the film in different lights - man trapped in an sociocultural dead end unless he relinquishes greed, profit and egomania - but such readings are byproducts, rather than intended.
The film is regarded as a family classic in the US, Canada and UK, and is routinely played around Christmas time, embraced by middle-class folk the same way Frank Capra's sentimental morality tales gradually became inextricable from the whole codified "spirit of Christmas" and "national image and values". The film has a spiritual resonance, all denominations able to read what they wish into it, but its actor Bill Murray's trademark humour – aloof, sarcastic and detached – that really sells things. Audiences today don't buy the aww shucks performances of Capra's everyman (often Jimmy Stewart) heroes. Bill Murray's meta-detachment, however, they relate to in spades.
8.9/10 – While some may have liked a darker, creepier take on the story (Ramis and Murray had a falling out because the star wanted to take the story into darker territory - think about it, what would you get up to if there were no consequences to your actions?), "Groundhog Day" is nevertheless a charming family film, and there aren't many of those.