My brother texted me a pic of him wearing our father’s black leather driving gloves and, all of a sudden, it’s Groundhog Day all over again.
I’m 7 years old, sitting in the garage with my brother, peering over the wheel of our father’s ’58 Jag. We weren’t allowed to be there, but we’d sneak in anyway. I never saw the big deal; the engine didn’t even run. But we could make believe it roared. It had a burled mahogany dashboard and grey leather bucket seats that enveloped us like a hug. I would sink into that leather smell, pretending to smoke with the white golf tees my father had left in the glove compartment.
A sight. A scent. A memory that jars you back into a random moment you’ve lived over and over again. Even more than that single moment, I wonder what it would be like to have a whole day to live again and again, just like in the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day.”
In the film, Bill Murray plays an arrogant weatherman named Phil Connors. He’s sent to a small town in western Pennsylvania to cover another Phil: the iconic rodent-prognosticator himself, Punxsutawney Phil emerging from hibernation.
In the process, human Phil inexplicably finds himself waking up the next morning to the exact same day — Groundhog Day. The clock radio clicks on just as it did the day before, and we hear the very same song, Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” as the deejay cheerfully announces the same admonishment, “OK, campers, rise and shine and don’t forget your booties ’cause it’s cold out there!” From there, the entire day passes exactly as it did the day before, again and again, with no end in sight.
At first, the situation nearly drives him over the edge. Confused, angry, disbelieving and eventually despairing, Phil even tries to electrocute himself in his bathtub with a toaster. But the next day, he wakes up yet again — to the same old day.
Phil soon realizes he has agency over his existential crisis. He can do whatever he wants — lie, cheat, steal — with absolutely no consequence. Eventually, he sees a path beyond his own selfishness as he realizes he can have a positive impact on the world around him. He learns that by helping others, he helps himself become a better person.
University of Essex philosophy researcher Matt Bennett observed that the film envisioned life as cyclical rather than linear.
“What if we are condemned to live our lives again and again, to eternity,” Bennett mused. “‘Groundhog Day’ presents this possibility as a challenge but also an opportunity: to imagine what the best versions of ourselves could be, even if the world around us remained the same.”
Author and researcher Paul Hannam also sees wonder in the wisdom of “Groundhog Day.” “Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, learns how to be incredibly resourceful as he turns a miserable day into a great day through consistent practice — until he masters the art of living his one day to the full.” Hannam believes we can all be transformed by the principles at the heart of the movie.
The first of these is to ask ourselves what we can think or say or do differently. “Instead of living on autopilot, replaying the same patterns,” he said we can create new ones.
The second principle, according to Hannam, is to work on the quality of your inner life. In the film, Phil can’t change his place or time, so he focuses instead on changing himself.
Hannam said the third principle is “to appreciate that you have everything that you need to be happy now.” Phil’s Groundhog Day hell eventually becomes heaven as he allows himself to love and be loved.
In one of the movie’s final scenes, Phil evokes the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. In a speech to the townspeople on Groundhog Day, Phil says “When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”
There are no groundhogs in Park City, where most of us dream of at least six more weeks of winter. Because even on the darkest, gloomiest, stormiest of days, we can still find the greatest joy in the greatest snow on Earth. With apologies to Phil Connors, Chekhov also said, “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.”
Putting on my leather ski gloves, I close my eyes, breathe in the smell and find myself right here, where I am, in this moment.