“You make choices and you live with them,” goodbye Harold Ramis
I never write these kinds of things. Death is life and all that. But Harold Ramis was a big part of my life since I was just a kid, even though he didn't know it. And it was probably the same for a lot of us, across a few generations now. That fabulous run of movies, which you're seeing everyone post again and again, didn't just make me laugh -- it was formative in molding my sense of humor and provided me with endless bonding moments with my dad growing up.
We watched Stripes and Animal House and Groundhog Day and Vacation and Ghostbusters (so much Ghostbusters) and so on and so forth so many times we wore the VHS tapes (often recorded off HBO so those awesome early intros for the channel would be on there too) out. Maybe I didn't get all the jokes then and maybe I had to cover my eyes when there were some more adult things happening but the movies were just too good. My dad wanted to watch them. He had a kid. Having a kid wasn't going to stop him from watching them again. When I have a kid that's not going to stop me from watching them either. My kid needs to see the movies Ramis had a hand in because he or she needs to see how Ramis had a hand in making me who I am today (and without speaking for him entirely, who my father is as well).
Ramis had a way of saying big, beautiful things in even the most ridiculously silly moments and situations. And he never really had to wax poetic to do it. It was always there just beneath the surface. The closest he ever really came to being outright philosophical was in Groundhog Day, easily one of my favorite movies.
In college I had a professor who steered me right into where I needed to be. I was lucky. I had him for English classes but we studied art and film and music and all kinds of media. He challenged us to push ourselves and think differently -- not just read, discuss, react, write about texts -- and I took him up on that. Sometimes it went well (an essay I wrote for his class from Charlottesville, Va. after a few too many PBRs at a diner while reading The Dharma Bums kind of influenced how I write today and it definitely wasn't a typical offering), other times I fell flat on my face, but failure wasn't failure, it was experience.
One of those dicey moments was an essay I wrote on Groundhog Day. We hadn't outright discussed the movie in class. But there were themes in some of the texts we had studied in past courses that kept popping up and I had to get it out. I felt compelled to write. And I turned it in. He emailed me after class one day and asked me, "What am I supposed to do with this? It discusses none of the texts we studied this semester. How am I supposed to grade this?" I responded, "I don't know. I don't care. I'm proud of it. If you think it's a C paper, give it a C. If you think it deserves an F, go for it."
He didn't send a reply. The paper got an A-. That's just how he was.
Forgive the formatting here, but I wanted to repost it. (Disclaimer: It was from college. I was a dumb teenager. Don't judge my writing now based on my writing then.)
Thanks for everything, Egon. Somebody cue up the Jackie Wilson.
An investigation into the Nietzschean themes in Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day
Authors have often explored the idea of allowing a character to relive a moment or get another chance at a mistake, but very rarely have they gravitated towards the idea of being forced to relive that moment or mistake. In his writings, Friedrich Nietzsche frequently brought up the idea of eternal recurrence, which essentially is the thought that a person’s life would be repeated endlessly. Nietzsche never explored the subject as much as he wanted to—he meant to write a book on it and never did— but the idea was dealt with in The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in his self-reflective Ecce Homo. Eternal return is ultimately coupled with Nietzsche’s belief in the ultimate affirmation of life, or amor fati as he called it. Nietzsche’s ubermensch is able to affirm everything in his life, both pain and pleasure, whether endlessly repeated or not. In director Harold Ramis’s 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors travels to Punxsutawney for the annual Groundhog Day festival, only to have that day repeated again and again for an indeterminate amount of time. Through his exploration of the characters he meets and is influenced by, Phil is forced to affirm everything about his life and come to grips with himself as a person before he is released from his destiny of eternal return.
At the beginning of Ramis’ film, Phil Connors is a smarmy, sardonic jerk who is so wrapped up in his egocentric mindset that he not only treats everyone around him poorly, but he takes absolutely no interest in their lives at all. It is not that Connors is entirely a horrible guy; he just hates his station in life. He loathes being a weatherman in Pittsburgh and craves being hired by a channel in a bigger market. Coupled with the fact that he has to travel to Punxsutawney for the fourth straight year to cover Groundhog Day, Phil is the furthest thing from having any sense of amor fati. The problem is that when he gets to Punxsutawney, he is destined to relive February 2nd an endless number of times. The city comes to resemble one of the cities from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, as “the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the same actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns,” (Invisible Cities, 65). When he realizes that he is reliving Groundhog Day again and again, Phil starts to question his life to everyone who will listen, including his producer Rita. Phil says to her, “Rita, I’m reliving the same day over and over. Groundhog Day, today. Really, this is the third time, it’s like yesterday never happened. What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was the exact same and nothing you did mattered?” (Ramis).
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera described the same scenario, writing, “The myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity and beauty mean nothing,” (Unbearable Lightness, 3). With nothing holding any meaning, Phil is forced to explore his relationships in that short 24-hour gap that he has, and he does so with no regard for his own well-being.
With the knowledge that he is trapped in an eternal return scenario, just as Ambrose was trapped in Barth’s funhouse, Phil starts to look to any way possible to find a way out, before realizing that there is no escape. He goes through a painstaking number of scenarios—bedding every remotely attractive girl in town, leading police on a car chase, robbing an armored car and showing no regard for himself whatsoever, choosing to binge eat, drink and smoke. The thing that Phil is unable to learn though is that even in his eternal return, although he returns at the end of the day unmarked, those experiences return to him over and over again. As Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, “What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust grain of dust!” (Gay Science, 341). Phil cannot come to grips with this and he starts to go insane for a period of time, choosing to kill himself in a number of different ways, from electrocution and car crashes to flinging himself off a bell tower. At each failed attempt, waking again at 6 AM to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” as he did the day before, he finds himself further from escape and closer to destruction. What he fails to realize though, is that even though he is miserable, he still has suffering, and he must accept this pain; he must say yes to life itself.
Nietzsche was driven by his idea of amor fati, the prospect of accepting everything in life, whether it is pleasure or pain-driven. As Nietzsche writes, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it,” (Ecce Homo, 258). He felt that the only way a person could come close to the ubermensch scenario was by affirming all that life presented. No matter how much pain a person suffered, that pain itself was not “considered an objection to life: ‘if you have no more happiness to give me, well then! You still have suffering” (Ecce Homo, 297). This was a problem that Phil had to overcome. He needed to escape from the mindset that he was being punished. His suffering was not a cry for death. All the times Phil tried to kill himself became payment for understanding the power that his eternal return held. As Nietzsche wrote, “One pays dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive” (Ecce Homo, 303).
Phil seemed to come to grips with the fact that he could not escape his endless cycle by trying to end his own life and he realized that the opposite was necessary: Phil absolutely must accept life and the fate that was bestowed on him. As he said to Rita in one of his many visits with her to the coffee shop, “I’m a god. I’m a god, I’m not the god, I don’t think. I didn’t just survive a wreck, I wasn’t just blown up yesterday. I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted and every day I wake up without a scratch on me, without a dent in the fender. I am an immortal.” By accepting that there was nothing he could do about where he was and by accepting that death was not going to come to him in his situation, Phil finally became more concerned with the world around him than to himself. He finally was able to understand the “unbearable responsibility [that] lies heavy on every move we make,” (Kundera, 5). Because of this, he started to notice every second of the day—where people would walk, what they would say, who they were with, what their stories were, what their motivations were. He became acutely aware of the intricacies of even this single solitary day that he was forced to relive. By escaping his death-drive, Phil was able to notice the beautiful in even the gray and Winter-doomed Punxsutawney.
Phil’s transformation was born out of the idea that nothing in the day could be removed, nothing was any less important than anything else. In this understanding, Phil could start to say yes to life and start to affirm everything around him. As Nietzsche writes, “This ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life represents not only the highest insight but also the deepest, that which is most strictly confirmed and born out by truth and science. Nothing in existence may be subtracted, nothing is dispensable,” (Ecce Homo, 272). Phil starts to positively impact the lives of all the residents of Punxsutawney; he helps a kid from falling out of a tree, saves a choking man and changes a flat tire for a group of elderly women. By becoming a part of the environment that he was stuck in, each of the moments he is reliving takes on a new importance. In understanding this, Phil says bluntly, “You make choices and you live with them,” (Ramis).
Even though he has what he believes to be the curse of his eternal return, Phil must make the most of it and he must understand that his eternal return is not a curse and it is not an objection to life. Nietzsche writes, “Zarathustra is a dancer—how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the ‘most abysmal idea,’ nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence—but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things,” (Ecce Homo, 306). By understanding what an opportunity this is for him, Phil starts to make extreme use of his time—learning ice sculpting, piano and reading up on French poetry. He is not doing these things to impress Rita, unlike the acts of memorizing her favorite foods and authors as he did earlier in the film; he is doing these things as an affirmation for life itself. His affirmation has a direct effect on his soul, which is becoming deeper and closer to the soul of an ubermensch. As Nietzsche writes, “The soul that has the longest ladder and reaches down deepest—the most comprehensive soul, which can run and stray and roam farthest within itself; the most necessary soul that plunges joyously into chance; the soul that, having being, dives into becoming; the soul that has, but wants to want and will; the soul that flees itself and catches up with itself in the widest circles; the wisest soul that folly exhorts most sweetly; the soul that loves itself most, in which all things have their sweep and countersweep and ebb and flood,” (Ecce Homo, 306). Phil’s life, despite being mired in one 24-hour period, still holds all kinds of value—between the pleasure of his company with Rita, to the pain of losing the homeless man he tried so desperately to help. All of his actions hold a heavy burden, but just as Kundera postulates in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, maybe heaviness is not such a bad thing to Phil.
In accepting his heaviness and affirming life itself, Phil starts to untangle himself from his trap. He says yes to every moment of the day in Punxsutawney and in doing so, he leads a day that is far different from any of the other repeats that he had lived before. By doing this, Phil is able to free his soul. As Nietzsche says, “The term ‘free spirit’ here is not to be understood in any other sense; it means a spirit that has become free, that has again taken possession of itself,” (Ecce Homo, 283). By taking possession of his own soul, Phil is able to fulfill the requirements of an ubermensch, ultimately saying Yes to everything about life and everything about his own self. Nietzsche believed that “nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows,” (Ecce Homo, 261). In this case, Phil already knew everything he needed to know, he just had to find a way to understand and process his knowledge.
In doing all of this, Phil passed the ultimate test of the myth of eternal recurrence and is able to say yes to the question Nietzsche posed in The Gay Science, the question of whether he would “want this again and again, times without number?” (Gay Science, 341). In this answer, Phil was not only able to get what he wanted, but was able to escape the Groundhog Day he relived so many times and turn the calendar to February 3rd. The key to escaping the destiny of eternal return is to understand that when confronted with the question of whether a person would be willing to relive every moment without end, the answer must be yes from the depths of the soul.
(Texts from Works Cited: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo; The Gay Science.)
