...the universe will strip you of your free will, time, life, and sanity. At least, in Groundhog Day.
Luckily for Bill Murray's character, Phil, all it takes is some condensed town-wide selflessness and a pretty face to right the poor order of the world.
Ignoring the plot for a moment, it was interesting to go back to this film and observe it from a philosophical lens. Personally, compared to Leaving Los Vegas, I found this a much stronger exercise in free will and no consequences. Phil truly has no consequences. He can lie, cheat, steal, commit suicide, over eat, smoke, anything. And the world will reset, with no changes.
It's interesting, how the license to do anything can become the ultimate prison. Because in the end, he's exhausted all possibility, saved everyone, helped everyone, fostered these emotional connections and bonds with people who will never remember him. He has no loved ones, he drove them away with his awful early personality.
It's a cruel wakeup call for a selfish man. Luckily, this is a comedy, and he has the chance to redeem himself through a series of pure acts of selflessness. For all he knew, the day would reset and his efforts would go for naught. In finally opening himself up and sacrificing his own place in the world (the position/job/status) he frees himself from the bonds of his own past. From that point on, Phil is truly free to do as he wishes, because now he's living in a world that won't be continuously dampened or damaged by the force of his awful personality.
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ReplyDeleteSomething that I like to think about when watching movies like Groundhog's Day, A movie with such subtle philosophical, moral, and spiritual gravity, I like to think how different the movie would be, if there were a change in the setting or a change in character. Would the message and profundity of the movie be changed if it wasn't a sleepy little town, celebrating a very pointless holiday (Six weeks till spring, or 6 more weeks of winter, ooh the options!) if it wasn't an arrogant, antagonistic weather reporter. Would the movie's message change? The conclusion that I've come to is no.
ReplyDeleteIf the movie was set not in a provincial hub of America in the Late 80s, but for example, on the beaches of Normandy June 6 1944, and one guy was able to wake up everyday and repeat the events of that day over and over again, he would go insane from the horror of living through those events. He would try to hide in the little boats they'd float in on, or he would dodge all of the bullets, kill all of the germans, save all of the soldiers, or just break down and cry. In the Same way that Bill Murray went insane and tried to kill himself, and others over and over again. At some point, the hypothetical soldier would have to realize that the events of the day are out of his control, only his actions are truly under his control, and try to do as much good as he could before the end of the day, The same as Bill Murray. Which is why Groundhog Day is championed by Buddhists, because it reflects Buddhist cosmology, that your lives are being played out cyclically, the only way to progress is to break the cycle, which in both my hypothetical movie, and Groundhog Day was trying to express.
If Phil was not so antagonistic, and was kinder, would it defeat the point of the movie? No, because we would have still needed that kindness to raise everybody else up, to make the people around him a little better or a little whatever. He would have still needed to break that ego, that concept of self, and distinction of himself vs. the other, no matter who he was or how he acted. He would have still needed to see himself as part of the whole town, not just a citizen, no matter what it was he was doing. Because it doesn't matter who you are or how you act you're still a part of the world, and you're still a function of it, so whether you want to make the inside better, or the outside better, or worse there is still things to do. If this was expressed in terms of Sartre, This is the ultimate rejection of Bad Faith. He can no longer say he's doing these things because he's responsible for only himself, he's making himself responsible for everything, good or bad, that happens in the town. And What's more, he's freely choosing to expand his circle of responsibility from his own singular function, to a universal one. Which I feel, is one of the most profound and sober messages a piece of fiction can make.
If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise in the great things we do to glorify petty things. And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed. -GK Chesterton
While it may seem like a prison it is truly freeing. Unlike a person who decides something and must face the consequences. While this is discussed the truly extreme nature of this must be discussed. Without time as a limitation one can easily be whatever they want. They may grow in mental age but they are timeless. They can take time to learn whatever they want (in this case as a person). Without the limitations of age one could transcend the limits of mankind. It may be limited in resources as in what is in the town. But besides that one could learn everything within their power to know, especially if it was in modern times. The idea that we have an unlimited amount of time to practice anything and we could reach our ideal. The interpretation of the Groundhog Day metaphor is that if you don't move forward you might as well be in the same day. But if one could exploit the time loop, one could truly achieve ultimate freedom
ReplyDeleteIn a way, Phil does have free will because he can do whatever he wants with no consequences. However, the fact that his actions are erased everyday makes me question what “free will” really constitutes. It seems rather deterministic that he knows that his actions don’t really matter in the long run - his destiny has already been set for him. So depending on how you look at it, Phil either has free will, or he is trapped in a routine, which does not constitute freedom.
ReplyDeletePhil can knowingly determine the outcome of a single day in multiple ways. This is a surreal form of free will. Though there's no genuine outcome, he can do whatever he likes on this single day.
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