If you want to find the town in America with the most people familiar with one movie made over ten years ago (that isn’t “Star Wars”), then Woodstock and “Groundhog Day” is probably your best bet. Plenty of small towns and most large cities have had a starring role in at least one major film, but maybe because Harold Ramis’ 1993 drama-comedy takes place on a holiday – and at a time of year when people are looking for any reason to get out of the house – we’ve had the excuse to make the biggest deal about our own.
But even if “Groundhog Day” the film is received nowhere else the way it is in Woodstock, it’s harder than you think to find people anywhere – even on the other side of the planet – who aren’t familiar with its seemingly-unique premise.
How common could it be, right? The plot device of a character trapped in a loop of time, reliving the same day, week, or hour over and over again until they can master a goal and break the cycle, seems so uniquely tied to Woodstock’s cinematic œuvre that crowdsourced film analysis site tvtropes.org has named it the “’Groundhog Day’ Loop.”
And yet in the live-action film category alone, the site lists thirty other examples of movies with the same plot – in the horror (“Happy Death Day” has a sequel coming out this February, creepily enough on this writer’s own birthday), thriller (the “24”-esque “Sorce Code” curiously reprises the filming location as well, taking place in the Chicago suburbs on a Metra train), superhero (“Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain” – ironically, “Doctor Strange” was rained out before it could be shown at last summer’s “Wizarding World”), and of course, sci-fi genres (if Bill Murray had learned how to sculpt alien invaders with a chainsaw instead of ice blocks, you’d have the plot to “Edge Of Tomorrow”).
And it’s not just an American phenomenon either – after live-action film, another 31 entries can be found in the category of anime and manga, aka Japanese animation and comic books. “Edge Of Tomorrow” was itself based on a Japanese manga, and other fan-famous examples of “Groundhog Day” in anime include the climactic episodes of “Madoka Magica,” the superpower-ability “Bites The Dust” in “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,” the infamous “Endless Eight” in “Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” (where both the cast and the viewing audience had to endure eight consecutive, nearly-identical episodes of the title character’s wish for an “endless summer”), and “Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer,” possibly the first film to feature a single-day “Groundhog” loop, almost a decade before “Groundhog Day” itself was released.
So what is it about endlessly-repeating time that makes for such a universal story arc? One simple answer is that Hollywood wrote the “Groundhog Day” plot from the moment it started to make movies: actors and directors spent countless hours playing the same scenes over and over again, working through every missed line and misplaced gesture until reaching their ideal, final cut. In “Groundhog Day,” we’re just watching Bill Murray and Harold Ramis turn their everyday work into the plot of an actual movie. And if the relationship between the two figures famously broke down on set, it’s easy to understand why: take the standard actor/director frustration of doing a dozen takes of the same scene, and then multiply that by another twelve.
But there might be an even more universal reason for the “Groundhog Day” Loop’s popularity – perhaps we’re living in “Groundhog Day” right now? Theories of an endlessly recurring universe, considered by some to be a certainty if time is infinite, have surfaced since the time of Pythagoras in ancient Greece. Nietzsche had a rather dark view that one’s own life was everything one would have for eternity, but others have connected “eternal recurrence” theory to real-world evidence of reincarnation, and suggest that any human’s destiny might be to live the lives of all other humans who have ever existed – or indeed, of any thing capable of life that will ever exist.
It at least makes a nice theory for the movie: Bill Murray isn’t manifesting some kind of superpower or curse, he’s just “blacking out” for a few trillion years until he gets back to his part in the cycle. And technically, he never “escaped” Groundhog Day – he just won the ability to not know about it.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 