On Groundhog Day, Bill Murray, and Soothsaying Varmints

There's something magical about February 2nd and Groundhog's Day.

No there isn't. It's a silly folk-holiday cooked up by apparent sufferers of Seasonal Affect Disorder. I don't know how the groundhog got dragged into it, but last year Alaska gave the groundhog the boot and replaced it with a marmot. That's right, last year Sarah Palin made Feb 2nd Marmot Day. Wow.

Anyways. While Groundhog Day isn't so much magical as it is silly, there is something magical about Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray, the single only notable story concerning this holiday which glorifies a prognosticating rodent. In fact, not just magical, but profound, heartening, deconstructive, humane, hilarious, and poignant, among many other adjectives. I dare say, it is one of the greatest stories ever told.

Odysseus from Homer's Odyssey is often considered the greatest character of fiction because he experiences every aspect of the human condition. Throughout his 17-year journey home he loses everything. He goes from a king and champion of the Greeks, to an old and lowly beggar disguised amongst his own. He is picked upon by every force imaginable, from gods, to witches, to sirens, to his crewmen, to his own son. He hits Rock Bottom, and then heroically climbs his way back to the top. And he learns his lesson in the process: he is but a man.

In Groundhog Day Bill Murray, as Phil Connors, takes a similar journey. All in one single day. His life becomes February 2nd, Groundhog Day in Punxutawnney, Pennslyvania. The world exists in infinite loop around him while only he is conscious of this abrupt shift in reality. No matter what he does he always wakes up at 6am on February 2nd. And while he experiences perhaps a countless lifetime of February 2nd's he exposes every facet of humanity because he too loses everything he once was in one single infinite day and transforms himself to become but a man.

I was 8-years-old when I first saw this movie. Disguisedly simple enough for a child to understand, I enjoyed it. What kid doesn't like Bill Murray? And I remember asking my dad why the day repeated over and over again, and he told me, "Because he had to get that one day right."*

Every year when I inevitably see Groundhog Day on Feb 2nd I think about that. And in more recent years as I've gotten older I've thought, "Man, my dad is lame."

Yet, there is a merit of truth to that thought, because whether or not he gets that day right, he lives it an uncountable number of ways. Perhaps, Bill Murray only finally wakes up on February 3rd because he has exhausted every possible imaginable and unimaginable way to live February 2nd. Perhaps, like Odysseus, he journeys his humanity entire.

We see him go from prideful but restless, to egotistical, to megalomanic, to chauvinistic, to con man, to obsessive stalker, to hopelessly depressed, to enraged, to crazed fanatic, to suicidal, to an utterly defeated and desperate and lonely shell of a human being listing at Rock Bottom. And then, because he has no where else to go, he climbs up. And on the day when he is the Every-Man every man wants to be, when he has run out of every trick and swindle, when he's seen perhaps every single outcome that can come from a single day, when he is simply but a man: He wakes up the next day.

Humanity is obsessed with transformation. That's what The Odyssey is about, that's what Groundhog Day is about, that's what some of the most championed stories are about: transformation.

Because in the gloomy winters of our discontented day-to-day lives we often feel trapped on all sides, devoid of purpose, utterly demoralized, and doomed. It happens. To quote a few hilarious and poignant exchanges from the film:

BILL MURRAY: What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

DRUNK: ... About sums it up for me.

And:

BILL MURRAY: There's no way that this winter is ever going to end as long as this groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any way out. He's got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.

And:

BILL MURRAY: What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today!

But despite these common experiences of modern existence we want to become something else. We want to transform into beings self-actualized, rising above, defining a new chapter in humanity, desperately yearning to be something we're not.

Which is why we love superhero origin stories, why we love Kafka, why we love it when the goddamn seasons change. And that's what Groundhog Day, the actually holiday, signifies! It's this stupid pointless holiday that puts a fucking rodent on pedestal all because we go loopy in the long stretch of winter and desperately need/want spring to burst open in blooming greens and yellows and purples upon us, to remind us that things change, that we change.

That's why when the illustrious Bill Murray wills himself in to and out of Rock Bottom over an infinitude of February 2nds, and then finally wakes up on February 3rd to exclaim, "Today is tomorrow!" it is possible to believe in the transformative ability of humanity. That despite who we are, what we are, and the forces that surround us, we can become something more.

But then I remember I've been fooled by Bill Murray before. For example, up until I was six I thought it was absolutely necessary to wear my Ghostbuster's proton pack everywhere I went. Not anymore though. I don't believe in no ghosts.

Still, a great story.

*I later found out my dad got that line from the trailer, as displayed above. And to think for years I thought he was insightful.