Groundhog Day recap (thank you Bill)

Phil’s Shadow
Michael P. Foley on the Lessons of Groundhog Day


Last December the New York Times ran an intriguing article about a Museum of Modern Art movie series on
film and faith. What attracted the Times to the series was not its pageant of grave Swedish cinema but its
opening feature, the 1993 romantic comedy Groundhog Day. The curators, polling “critics in the literary,
religious and film worlds,” found that the movie “came up so many times that there was actually a squabble
over who would write about it in the retrospective’s catalog.”

The movie, the article went on to observe, “has become
a curious favorite of religious leaders of many
faiths, who all see in Groundhog Day a reflection of
their own spiritual messages.” A professor at NYU
shows it in her classes to illustrate the doctrine of
samsara (the endless cycle of rebirth Buddhists seek
to escape), while a rabbi in Greenwich Village sees
the film as hinging on mitvahs (good deeds). Wiccans
like it because February 2nd is one of the year’s four
“great sabbats,” while the Falun Dafa sect uses the
movie as a lesson in spiritual advancement.

Deciphering which, if any, of these interpretations is
correct is no easy task, especially since the director
and co-writer of the film, Harold Ramis, has ambiguous
religious beliefs (he is an agnostic raised Jewish and
married to a Buddhist). The commentators also seem
wedded to a single hermeneutical lens, forcing them to
ignore contradictory data.

A more fruitful approach, I suggest, would involve
following all of the clues, clues that lead not only
to religion but also to the great conversation of
philosophy. Once we do so, Groundhog Day may be seen
for what it is: a stunning allegory of moral,
intellectual, and even religious excellence in the
face of postmodern decay, a sort of
Christian-Aristotelian Pilgrim’s Progress for those
lost in the contemporary cosmos.


Typical Modern

Article

Orig. NYT article on G'hog Day