Back Around the Day Again

Is Phil Connors a god? That might seem like a silly question; certainly the film Groundhog Day has its lead character ask the question while he’s pondering his seemingly immortal existence, but it also drops the question very quickly because, within the context of the film, the answer would obviously be no, right? Phil is a mortal man. He might be reliving the day over and over again, always back in the same bedroom, waking up at the same time, forced to live the same events in Punxsutawney, PA, over and over again, but if he dies over the course of the day he wakes right back up in the bedroom the next day, having missed all the rest of the events that played out after.

He’s not the catalyst, we assume, since even after he dies some days we get to see further events after. He ends up on a slab in the morgue, his coworkers forced to identify him. The day moves on and only resets at 6:00 AM each day when whatever magical power that keeps Phil locked in loops the day again. We assume the day is all about him because he’s the only person that has any memory of what goes on, day after same day in this loop, so that must be what it’s all about. But does that actually make him a god?

Groundhog Day, originally released in 1993 (over 30 years ago at this point) is a time loop story. It wasn’t the first time loop story (Strange Life of Ivan Osokin from 1915 is commonly accepted as one of the first loop stories ever), but it certainly was the one that hit the mainstream and made everyone start thinking about these kinds of tales. The story of a man who goes through a bit of a day and then wakes up the next day in the same spot, at the same time, experiencing the exact same day all over again. Only he knows it and only he can do anything about it, and life goes on, over and over, until he finds the solution.

In the case of Phil Conners, we commonly accept that what “fixes” the day and lets him out of the loop (which might have been going on for upwards of tens of thousands of “years” by his experience) is that Phil becomes a better person. He picks up a bunch of skills (like ice carving and playing the piano). He learns about all the people in the town, a town he used to hate but because he couldn’t escape he now loves. He gets the girl he’s fallen for and, seemingly in just a few hours from her perspective, he’s won her heart. He’s the best version of himself he can be. The universe, or whatever force that was controlling the loop and keeping him stuck there, finally lets him go because he became that best person. That was what he had to do.

Except, maybe it wasn’t the universe that did it. Maybe, in reality, it was Phil and he didn’t even realize he was doing it to himself. It could be that he really was a god and we didn’t know simply because the film never thought to explore that avenue. Certainly there’s a lot left on the table that isn’t explored at all, the key question being what exactly caused the loop to happen in the first place. This is something the film never addresses and never even hints at because it doesn’t fall within the realm of the film’s storytelling. It focuses the loop on Phil, the “what” and “who” of the story, but it never stops to say, “why?”

This is something most other time loop films and shows (and novels, and short stories, et al) tend to address. Someone gets stuck in a loop and, normally, it’s for a reason. It’s a sci-fi conceit and whether it’s Star Trek or Legends of Tomorrow or Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Vampire, there’s always a root cause of the loop. Someone or something has caused the character to get stuck in this repeating story and the goal is for the person to get out. They find what causes it, they fix it, and that’s that. It’s not about someone learning a lesson because there’s always an external cause to the issue that can be addressed.

That’s not the case here in Groundhog Day. There’s no external cause for the loop that we can see. No villain causing it, no sci-fi experiment gone wrong. Instead, the loop focuses on Phil and then it ends when Phil reaches his state of nirvana. He learns his skills, he finds peace, and he achieves the goal he wanted: he gets Rita, the object of his affection. The second all of that happens, the loop ends and he gets to wake up on February 3rd to live the rest of his life as normal (we assume since there’s never an official film sequel).

Certainly Phil isn’t a good enough or bad enough person that he really deserves to learn a lesson in an infinite time loop. Yes, he’s kind of a jerk, certainly a prima donna, and no one at his job likes him, but he’s also not, like, a puppy-kicker or an arsonist, he’s racist or otherwise bigoted that we can see (well, except for he really hates Punxsutawney, PA, for a time). He’s certainly not a Nazi. There are worse things he could be than kind of a jerk to coworkers. So why is it that Phil gets singled out to suffer the endless loop and not anyone else (that we know of)?

I think the answer is really that Phil does it to himself. He doesn’t make a wish or say something magical that activates the spell. I think it’s something deeper. Phil is desperately unhappy in a way I don’t think he even realizes. He’s a weatherman, and arguably only a moderately popular one. He’s out of a decently sized market, Pittsburgh, but he’s not super famous in the way national newscasters would be. He’s a minor celeb at best, and he seems to hate his job. He certainly hates having to do the Groundhog Day festival every year, and we have to assume that if he could get out of it (such as by getting a better job elsewhere) he would. So he’s stuck, in a rut, in a job he dislikes and without love in his life.

By the end of the film, once he’s gone through his time loop trial, though, he loves his life and his woman and everything around him. He got stuck in a situation that taught him to appreciate who he was and what he had. And considering it only affected him we have to assume he did it to himself so that he could better his life. He’s the only active agent in the day, he’s the only one that remembers what happens each time, and he’s the only one that learns and grows and changes to get better while the loop happens. It’s his world, his loop, because he causes it.

Consider the fact that the day continues each time whether he lives or dies, only resetting at 6:00 AM. If the loop were caused by a force to teach Phil a lesson (because it’s not something that just happened that Phil can fix externally, this is entirely on him to learn from) then once he dies the day should just reset from there (as it often does to protagonists in other time loop stories). But the day continues because it’s locked into Phil’s world. An external force didn’t cause it, Phil did, and he set it for one day to go on around him whatever happens each time.

Phil made this day so that he can be happier. Nothing else explains why it happened as neatly as that. And if Phil caused it to happen then that must mean, at a certain level, he has the power to cause his day to loop. Now, certainly, it seems like a power he doesn’t know he can control, but it also means that if he gets miserable enough again that the power needs to activate, he’ll once more get stuck in a loop until he figures out how to move on from it. In other words, he better hope Rita doesn’t break up with him or another few thousand years could be on his head.

Phil, the time loop god. When you really think about it, isn’t it the only thing that makes sense?