By Angela Zito

Groundhog Day is upon us again. Having once discussed the film with Alex Kusczynski of the NYT, back in 2003, I am approached yearly by journalists who find this first interviw online for my “take” on the film starring Bill Murray. I just spent half an hour talking with writer Cliff Kuang and, not to upstage whatever he means to make of that conversation, I thought I’d write down some of the things I talked through with him.

Back in 2003 Groundhog Day—the film—was not much in the news. Kusczynski’s own story was prompted by the MOMA film series “Faith on Film.” 2003 also happened to be the year we founded the Center for Religion and Media at NYU (The Revealer‘s publisher). Even before the key explanation for the motivations behind the attacks of September 11 was taken to be “bad Islam,” religion was moving fast into pop cultural concern—that series at MOMA was a recognition that people were curious about how and why religious life still moved themselves and so many others. So in Kusczynski’s piece, we had a rabbi, a priest, a minister and a professor presenting interpretive angles. Deliberately repeating myself, I’m going back to the film once again. Something is made visible to us, mediated to us in the adventures of Phil (Murray), and that, far beyond any overt religious content, is what makes the film increasingly interesting the more we see it.

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For the lonely reader who has been living on a Pacific atoll with no satellite service, the bare plot of Groundhog Day is: nasty weatherman Phil Connors leaves the big city to cover the GH’s yearly appearance, stays in small B&B, and keeps waking up, stuck in that same day forever until he finally manages to do the right things and finds time moves forward again, carrying him along, a changed and better man.

Since 1999, I have ended my undergrad Introduction to Buddhism course with the film. My students, most of whom have seen it, immediately get why. There’s Phil, doomed to repeat the same mistakes until he figures out that he has got to change: here we are, reincarnating in “samsara”—the endless round of suffering and rebirth—until we discover the dharma teachings of the Buddha, implement them and achieve enlightenment. Or to be more precise, achieve bodhisattvahood. A bodhisattva is a being in the Mahayana, or Great Vehicle tradition of East Asia (including Zen and Tibetan Buddhism) who, with every possibility of maxing out and getting to nirvana herself instead chooses deliberately to return to the vale of tears and save other beings. (The Dalai Lama himself is thought to be a very famous bodhisattva, Avalokitisvera, known as Kuanyin in China, or Kannon in Japan). That’s why they call it “Greater Vehicle”: in Mahayana, no one attains enlightenment until we all do—we are bound together in the quest. So, Phil’s return to everyday life, changed and ready for life, is really a Mahayana Buddhist story. If it had been told in the original Buddhist tradition of Theravada (the Way of the Elders), he would have died an enlightened, happy man in his world of February 2 and not emerged with Allie Macdowell’s character on his arm to seize a new day and a new neighborhood.

This year, as I am forced to think about the film yet again by interviewing journalists, I am fittingly struck by its use of repetition. Thinking deeper about the Buddhist path—if we wish to read the film that way—the first time Phil wakes up to that now-famous clock-radio rendition of “I Got You Babe” and realizes he is repeating, he is already on “the path,” already ahead of most of us. If we take the analogy seriously, we are all just repeating—the world changes for sure, but we cannot see it because we repeat in our own heads, over and over, our ways of thinking and obsessing. Even if we accidentally do something out of the ordinary, we may not necessarily even notice. No one else around Phil realizes it is the same day all over again—only he can see. So—first he notices there is repetition.

Secondly, he starts to do things and slowly realizes that what he does can change his little 24 hour world—but only to a point. Yes, he can even commit suicide, assiduously and inventively, but he still wakes up again, same bed, same time, same Sonny and Cher tune. He despairs because a terrible thing has occurred: he thinks he truly knows the future. He thinks he will never die, and the prospect is awful.

Two things to note: what we do actually makes a difference in our worlds, but not all actions are equally effective. We are actors in our lives—not accidents waiting to happen. The self is a material presence and force in the world; it co-creates it, and whether or not it can actually take note of this phenomenon consciously is beside the point. Phil is given by the script the gift of being able to see—we are given the privilege of watching him. But most of what he does maddeningly makes little difference in the end. The suspense builds. We not only long for resolution, we are genuinely puzzled, robbed of the Big Finale—death—as a plot possibility. I think this is key to the movie’s power. With death out of the way, what lies ahead?

In his “Observations on the long take,” director Pier Paolo Pasolini writes that “It is… absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning… death performs a lightening-quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, converting our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain thus linguistically describable past. It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive.” Pasolini says that death performs on life what montage performs on cinema—turns it into a film.

We know that in the end Phil learns to play the piano, endears himself to the people he is given to meet, and even finally gets the girl. He does this through dint of repetition and paying attention. Maddeningly simple. A little like the way the film itself has made it into the National Film Registry, into the canon through dint of repeated and extended viewing. Roger Ebert first reviewed it nicely but dismissively when it came out in 1993. In 2005 he revisited it, one assumes through some repeat viewing of his own, abjuring his earlier review where he “enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation.”

My family calls me Professor Groundhog—I swore I would never discuss the film in public again—but this year I’m invited for a post-screening chat with its write Danny Rubin. I cannot wait to ask him some of the same questions I’m sure he’s heard 1000 times since 1993. Maybe if we listen hard enough, we’ll hear something different.

Angela Zito is co-director of the Center for Religion and Media and director of NYU’s Religious Studies Program.