Groundhog Revelations

Published on December 8, 2003

God may have gone missing (or not), but there’s no doubting the mighty omnipresence of religion — it’s on our money and in our courts and in our classrooms, a part of every story we tell, whether we like it or not. Alex Kuzcynski‘s puff piece on the pre-Lost in Translation Bill Murray gem Groundhog Day offers a perfect illustration […]

God may have gone missing (or not), but there’s no doubting the mighty omnipresence of religion — it’s on our money and in our courts and in our classrooms, a part of every story we tell, whether we like it or not. Alex Kuzcynski‘s puff piece on the pre-Lost in Translation Bill Murray gem Groundhog Day offers a perfect illustration of this fundamental truth — Kuzcynski reports that the movie, which features Murray as a cynical weatherman trapped in a permanent repeat of the eponymous holiday in a small Pennsylvania town, is kicking off the Museum of Modern Art’s new series, “The Hidden God: Film and Faith.” The movie, apparently, is all things to all people — picture a priest, a rabbi, and a Wiccan priestess sharing a tub of popcorn and nodding along as Bill Murray searches for redemption, or struggles toward tikkun, or stumbles into some kind of pagan salvation. Kuzcynski quotes The Revealer’s own Angela Zito, who teaches the film to her New York University students as a pop culture illustration of samsara. Read the article, meet those who call Bill Murray God, study the world’s only Journal of Religion and Film. Then go to the movies — there’s more than one story about God in Hollywood.

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