Groundhog Day is one particular rare films that has been completely embraced as a cultural artifact by American culture. Roger Ebert says; ". . . there are a few films, which is one of them, that burrow into our thoughts and become guide points. When you find yourself needing the word 'this is similar to Groundhog Day' to explain how you feel, a movie has completed something. "
As a term it's been absorbed into popular conversation, as seen by Ryan Gilbey;
"It's all over - in travel writing, rock and roll journalism, advice columns, horoscopes. Tony Blair identifies it in a conversation about the Northern Ireland calmness process, and it crops up in the Archbishop of Canterbury's Richard Dimbleby Lecture in 2002. It creates its way into the headline of an restaurant review (a culinary 'groundhog day'), a cricket article (Groundhog Day for the Western Indies), and an editorial on the search for weaponry of mass destruction in Iraq (No "smoking guns", no huge breakthroughs, simply a hint that Groundhog Day may be over) while a kidnap victim uses the phrase to describe his captivity in the Colombian jungle. "
It was even unofficially followed into the American armed forces jingo with regards to their conflict in Somalia at around the time that the film arrived on VHS, and officially adopted into the United States Film Directory as being culturally, historically, or visually significant in 2006.
It was screened in the New York Museum of Modern Skill in a season entitled 'The Hidden God: Film and Trust' along with functions by Bergman and Rossellini, and the occasion was seen as a chance for religious teams to vocalise their suppositions as to its pertinence with their individual faiths. The best vocal were the Buddhists, with a favorite urban legend regarding the film proclaiming that in an early on draft Phil was caught in Punxatawny for 10, 000 years, a substantial quantity in Buddhist teachings. Danny Rubin, the film's screenwiter, denounces this as untrue:
"Harold [Ramis, the director of the film] desires that allusion, and it's really best for the story of the film due to Buddhist interconnection. However, that wasn't on my mind. "
Some interpretations were that the film was intrinsically Jewish, ("the movie explains to us, as Judaism will, that the work doesn't end before world has been perfected") or Religious ("clearly the resurrected Christ"). The film in addition has apparently been used in teachings by the Chinese spiritual activity Falun Dafa.
If Nietzsche have been at that screening, however, I feel that he'd have revelled in it as intrinsically Nihilistic (in the positive sense), or (if the word been around when he were alive) "Nietzschean".
I will always be intimidated by Nietzsche, and indeed by Philosophy in general. I have always found the topic bewildering. I'd notice outlandish rates like "God is dead", or around philosophical leanings like utilitarianism, empiricism or relativism, and become frustrated by their opacity, or at least by my failure to decipher what they are.
But I also found it exciting, at least from a distance. My shoot for this thesis is to examine Groundhog Day - a film Personally, i have a great love for - using the parlance of the philosopher which most intrigued me, so as to better understand the work in the framework of something I have an afinity for.
Nietzsche's writings and musings got a huge effect on Populist view in the twentieth century, which is my contention that this can be observed obviously in Groundhog Day.
Chapter One examines Nietzsche's notion of Eternal Recurrence, and exactly how it seems in the film. Eternal recurrence is the theory that we have lived the exact life we live leading now thousands of times before and will accomplish that an infinite number of times in the foreseeable future. If we've relished an especially righteous or enjoyable life, this might sound like the best of outcomes. If not, eternal recurrence may attack us as a curse.
Our misery, far from being over whenever we perish, is destined to be repeated on us, eternal retribution for our faults. This is very certainly manifested in Groundhog Day.
Chapter Two then will study Phil seeking and attaining what Nietzsche refers to as the Ubermensch, or Overman. Nietzsche coined the word Ubermensch in his publication Thus Spake Zarathustra;
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that will be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings up to now have created something beyond themselves; and would you like to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than get over man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful shame. And man shall be that to overman: a laughing stock or unpleasant embarrassment.
The idea of the overman was misappropriated by Country wide Socialism in the early part of the twentieth century. After Nietzsche's loss of life, his house was run by his sister Elizabeth, a staunch nationalist and rampant anti-semite, two things which Nietzsche himself found unpalatable. She re-edited and reinterpreted Nietzsche's work so that he became the representative philosopher for the Nazis, heading as far as to print a booklet called The Will to Vitality posthumously, that was made up of records and musings which he had no goal of posting. This became something of any bible for Country wide Socialism leading to Nietzsche being worshipped by the Nazis, a graphic which Nietzsche only overcame in the last mentioned part of the Twentieth century. As you can imagine, the idea of the Ubermensch became a standard for the Nazis and their theories on eugenics and cultural cleansing.
But this was not Nietzsche's objective. Regarding to documentarian Simon Chu,
"Nietzsche proposes a great of self applied overcoming, an excellent he calls the overman, not by having recourse to a metaphysical realm beyond the individual, but within the possibilities of the human being how can we as humans transcend ourselves?
The idea of the overman originated from Nietzsche's own struggle for personal mastery. Humans generally, he argued, had a duty to rise above their own condition. Nietzsche himself was quite limited literally credited to perpetual condition, and socially credited to self-imposed isolation, and Phil Connor is likewise tied to his own nature: he creates a bitter faade which, through the span of the film, is divided through his own endeavours at self-improvement.
Ubermensch actually means overcoming, buying a new path devoid of God.
Chapter Three will package with that notion: the relationship between Phil Connor's self-betterment and the Nihilistic idea which must be embraced by the Ubermensch. Nihilism, as Nietzsche saw it, was not just a point of view that nothing in life has any interpretation: Nietzsche proposed that we must look within ourselves to find a strong moral compass, alternatively than be corralled by the external ideals purported by faith. This sort of moral thoughts and opinions is negative; only from looking within ourselves can we find a genuine moral standpoint. When kept to his own devices for an eternity of recurrence, Phil makes the choices which make him an improved man for himself, not for anyone or other things, "Maybe the real God uses tricks. Maybe he's not omnipotent, he's just been around such a long time he is aware of everything. "
Eternal Recurrence
Phil: What might you do if you were jammed in a single place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you does mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me.
Phil: I have already been stabbed, shot, poisoned, freezing, hung, electrocuted, and burned.
Rita: Oh, really?
Phil:. . . and each morning I wake up without a scrape on me, not a dent in the fender. . . I am an immortal.
Groundhog Day concerns itself intensely with the notion of Eternal Recurrence, or Eternal Return, to the scope of illuminating some conflicting interpretations of this key Nietzschean thought. In Nietzsche's book The Gay Research, he first hits upon the thought of Eternal Come back:
"What if some day or night time a demon were to take after you into the loneliest loneliness and tell you, `This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will need to live once again and many times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your daily life must return to you, all in the same succession and series - even this spider which moon-light between your trees and shrubs, and even this minute and I myself. The eternal hourglass of lifetime is turned upside down over and over, therefore you with it, speck of dust!' Will you not toss yourself down and gnash your pearly whites and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or perhaps you have once experienced a significant moment when you would have responded to him, `You are a god rather than have I listened to any other thing more divine!'"
This affirmation makes the idea that Eternal Return, though at first glance a hellish endeavour, is in fact a positive occurrence, if the individual that he is referring to in the quotation is actually happy to replicate their lives.
The notion rears its mind in earnest in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The semi-autobiographical words sees a imaginary interpretation of the prophet of the Zoroaster people make his way down from his hill retreat to pass on the word of Nihilism to the people listed below. He happens during his voyage to a upright road leading remote in distant guidelines under a gateway entitled "Moment". His dwarf travel associate makes this point:
"Everything is straight is situated, ". . . "All truth is crooked; time itself is a group. "
Zarathustra cannot reconcile with the idea of eternal recurrence quite as easily as his friend, largely because he'd have to recognize that the mundanity of mankind that he so deplores will never be fully overcome, but instead will be repeated again and again. This seems contradictory of what goes on in Groundhog Day: Phil activities Feb 2nd every day in the same small town, but every day he will different things, thus negating Eternal Recurrence as Nietzsche perceives it.
According to Deleuze's interpretation, Nietzsche had not been in simple fact promoting the thought of the return of the identical but rather the return of the different. Each return chooses the life-enhancing while rejecting the life-degrading, leading to each iteration being better than the last. As Deleuze says,
"We can thus see how the eternal come back is linked, never to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It's the instant or the eternity of becoming which eliminates everything resists it. It emits, indeed it generates, the purely dynamic and natural affirmation. "
Groundhog Day contradicts both defined hypotheses. In Phil Connor's world, there is no Nietzschean return of exactly the same - the guy can act differently each and every time and cause different happenings to happen. No repetition is more affirmative than the last - Groundhog Day presents an even more individual version of eternal recurrence. Phil usually muddles his way through the problem, sometimes winding up less affirmative, sometimes more. Motivated by his love for Rita, he does finally reach a state of metamorphosis and at that point he is extricated from eternal recurrence.
Luce Irigaray could very well be the right philosopher for guiding us to unlocking the Nietzschean fact of Groundhog Day. Irigaray will abide by the conventional view that eternal recurrence concerns the come back of the same. She objects to it on the lands that it is a sterile thought that excludes any notion of the other, of outer influence. She writes of eternal recurrence as only the will to "recapitulate all assignments within yourself. " In other words, it is self-perpetuating and self-referential. We may think of it as a type of parthenogenesis - it offers men having the ability to give delivery to themselves over and over again, thus denying the role of the feminine.
Irigaray wishes to market the worthiness of the other, which she essentially conceives in feminine terms, in opposition to the original philosophical subject matter that she considers steadfastly men and masculine. She says "For, in the other, you are altered. Become other, and without recurrence. " In Groundhog Day, it's Phil Connors love for his feminine colleague Rita that shows decisive. By immersing himself in otherness, by learning everything which makes Rita tick, he works a kind of metamorphosis, a rebirth in a way rather than go back. He sheds his old, sexist form and emerges as an even more rounded human being, in touch with his feminine side (his interior other). As soon as he has fully achieved this, he's released from eternal recurrence. As argued by Irigaray, in any case.
In Nietzsche's conception of eternal recurrence, the average person has no recollection of his earlier lives. In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors certainly does. But he's the only one. All of the others with whom he stocks his eternal recurrence are perhaps in the basic Nietzschean position of having no recollection of these earlier existences. However, if indeed they specifically interact (or even not specifically or individually) with Phil then their destiny every time is no longer fixed, although they have no memory of the various paths Phil technicians for them. Phil's circumstance is at this sense a lot more horrific than theirs. He's not coping with eternal recurrence as a fascinating hypothesis; he is a conscious participator and victim of it, completely out of his control. Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is, of course, logically difficult because if a person's life is a repeat of past lives then he'd appear to haven't any free choice, yet Nietzsche appears to want us to alter our attitude to life when confronted with the realisation of the harsh truth of eternal recurrence.
If we agree to his circumstance in its strictest sense then our response to the idea of eternal recurrence is nothing over which we can have any control and our response, whatever it might be, is totally futile, one we have exhibited an infinite number of that time period before and can do so thousands of times in the future.
For Phil, this objection is removed. He can transform; he has complete free choice. It's up to him to choose his attitude towards his metaphysical and existential predicament. At first, understandably, he encounters complete impact, before enjoying a short feeling of omnipotence and omniscience. Then suicidal depression kicks in at the utter futility of everything he does indeed. Of course, he is not capable of dying, so there is absolutely no way out. Then has few options within the confines of Punxatawney.
After much duress, Phil chooses to make the most of the globe he now inhabits. He educates himself in many new areas and becomes achieved as a scholar, artist, linguist and musician. He also evolves as a person and achieves self-awareness, rather than the self damage that he pursued previously. Through this enlightenment, he at last secures the love of the girl he has pursued from the beginning. In Jungian terms, Rita represents the Self that we all strive to find during our life's voyage. By earning her, Phil has completed Jung's arduous procedure for individuation, and be Nietzsche's monument of self-improvement. This is so momentous that Phil actually escapes from eternal recurrence and re-enters causality, however now he's a transformed individual, completely reborn out of the hardships that he has experienced, given that chance to view the earth through totally new eye.
This then is the main element to Eternal Recurrence: it's not designed to be interpreted actually, but as an aphorism to guide people to whom Nihilism was becoming an increasingly attractive potential customer when Nietzsche published about any of it in 19th Century Germany. In a very meta-physical sense, it's like an Aesop's Fable, with an easily discernible moral. It isn't to be analyzed and dissected medically to ascertain its veracity: as said in The Simpson;
"Lisa: When a tree falls in the woods, can it make a sound?
Bart: Sure it can. Neeeeer-crash. "
To argue (as Nietzsche himself do), that there is a methodical grounding in the theory is missing the idea, I feel. The point is that the average person must shoot for self-improvement, to try to achieve the Ubermensch, as I feel Phil performed in Groundhog Day.
The Ubermensch
"I educate you on the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to defeat him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of the great overflow, and even go back to the beasts rather than conquer man? What's ape to man? A laughing stock or agonizing shame. And man will be that to overman: a laughing stock or agonizing embarrassment.
Larry: Prima Donnas.
As said in Simon Chu's documentary Individual, All too Human being,
"Nietzsche proposes a great of personal overcoming, a perfect he message or calls the overman, not insurance firms recourse to a metaphysical realm beyond the people, but within the possibilities of the real human how do we as humans transcend ourselves?"
The idea of the overman originated from Nietzsche's own challenge for self mastery. Human beings generally, he argued, had a duty to go up above their own condition.
Nietzsche (early on) was what was referred to as a "Schopenhauerian", as with he became a disciple of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer after reading The World as Will and Idea. Schoppenhauer was an enormous impact on Nietzsche, and discusses the "will".
Schoppenhauer's "will" is akin to Freud's id, an
"unconscious, striving, prolonged force, it may appear that the intellect drives the will, but it is actually the other way around. "
In a Darwinian sense, every individual is striving up against the will of others in a do it yourself interested way. Schoppenhauer observed the will as essentially wicked, and the only way out of the suffering and bad is the denial of the will, a refusal to take part in the egotistical competition for domination of others.
It's interesting to have a look at Phil Connors with Schoppenhauer's 'will' at heart, since he was such an enormous affect on Nietzsche. Early on in the film, even before the time loop makes effect, Phil strives persistently to impose his higher status onto individuals around him, usually by belittling them. Within the first 3 minutes, almost every lines out of his mouth is vitriolic, from getting in touch with his fellow anchor "hairdo", to diminishing Rita's power through impersonating her, to fussing over the fact he won't stay static in the hotel that Rita is residing in, to insulting how Larry eats, the list goes on.
After the loop models in and the realization of "we can do whatever we [want]", he models about dominating the complete town, to becoming the Ruler of Punxatawney. The loop and the activities that Phil needed eventually resulted in what Schoppenhauer known as "the extinction of the self".
This can all be interpreted as similar or influential on Nietzsche's notion of the Ubermensch.
Nihilism
God is inactive. God remains useless. And we've killed him.
Phil: I'm a god.
Rita: You're God?
Phil: I'm a god. I'm not *the* God. . . I don't think.
Nietzsche does not deny the lifestyle of values, but the denial of value is in a few sense what he means by 'nihilism'. Michael Tanner says,
"What he portrays, in publication after reserve, is the gradual but accelerating drop of Western man into circumstances where no principles any longer win over him, or where he mouthes them nonetheless they mean nothing to him any more. Tanner, p 32.
If obligated to label Nietzsche as a specific sort of philosopher, one would label him as a moral philosopher. But unlike moral philosophers that had come previously, Nietzsche does not provide the audience with a set moral code. His goal is to stimulate the reader to create their own moral code, one which originates from within.
Morality is usually examined philosophically from two different perspectives: normative ethics and meta ethics. Normative ethics can be involved with what is good and what is bad, and providing a perspective for moral decision making. Meta-ethics can be involved using what we mean when we use the word "good" or "bad", and where our explanation of these words come from, ie where our morals come from. Whenever we think of the term "good", we are most likely not experiencing some universal tank of "goodness", rather our definition probably comes from the world we inhabit.
Nietzsche is mainly worried about meta-ethical issues. Nietzsche is not so much concerned with the fact that our values are false, but rather the opinion about those values. Why should we contain the beliefs that people do?
When Nietzsche first declared that "God is dead" inside the Gay Knowledge, he means that contemporary society no longer has a use for God, that the notion will not help the survival of the varieties, rather it hinders it. The honest implications of this are essential, for with the loss of life of God comes the loss of life of religious morality, a morality that has underpinned Traditional western culture for more than 100 years. Morality as it is still used derives from the Hebraic-Christian tradition, its origins to be found in the dictates of the god of a little middle Eastern tribe, and this its contents continue to be quite definitely what these were.
This brings us back again to Phil Connors in his Punxatawney time-warp. Observing Phil superficially, we can surmise that he was probably raised in a Christian moral system, and would have been brought up with the ubiquitous Traditional western moral code.
But as soon as he trusts in the actual fact that there will be no repercussions for his actions in the form of punishment from an exterior authority body (a staple of the Christan moral code), he could restarted 'his' morals easily, "Phil: It's the same thing all of your life: "Clean up your room. Operate straight. Pick up your toes. Take it like a man. Be nice to your sister. Don't mix beer and wine, ever. " Oh yeah: "Don't drive on the railroad keep track of. " Gus: Well, Phil, that's one I eventually agree with. " This implies that they were not his, simply the morals modern culture put on him. He then embarks on a spree of honest naturalism.
Ethical naturalism is the view that our morality can be based on our nature. For instance, in a utilitarian sense,
"Our moral beliefs did not show up from heaven and neither are they qualifications we can display like a badge to determine our moral probity" - p30, Tanner
"And morality, indicating the variety of attitudes that people find officially espoused inside our population? It ministers to our welfare, in its basic form, so that at least we feel safe when our backs are fired up other people" Tanner, p31
"If he sometimes believes of himself as the prophet of nihilism, it isn't in the sense that he's proclaiming entrance as something to be celebrated, but in the sense that Jeremiah was the prophet of the damage of Jerusalem. " Tanner, p32.
"What he portrays, in booklet after e book, is the continuous but accelerating drop of Traditional western man into a state where no ideals any longer win over him, or where he mouthes them but they mean nothing at all to him any more. Tanner, p 32.
"Christianity has always been in a state of moral personal information turmoil. That, though a large element in the moral bewilderment of the Western, is a marginal issue for Nietzsche, whose main interest is within the nature of morality's sanctions generally. " Tanner, p 33.
It's interesting to note the moral compass of the film itself. As (regardless of the philosophical ramification of the premise) a light-hearted access into the intimate comedy genre, it was unlikely to go to an especially "dark" place with the idea. What this means for the character is that Phil signifies the morals of the progenitors of the piece: these were unwilling, morally, to allow Phil to be involved with any particularly unsavoury serves or offences. The repeated suicides were a solid submit the film (unusual in its genre), but Phil never acts after his presumed darkest impulses to commit forceful intimacy acts or even to murder. I'm happy we need not watch a field where a deranged Phil takes a beef cleaver to Ned, or brutally sexually assaults Rita, but I think it is worthwhile to note the morally handling influence of creator and audience. Visualize Gaper Noe's Groundhog Day.
Could it be said that this was, in reality, Phil's consequence?
