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Existentialism
Rodents to Freedom
Matthew Coniam says that Groundhog Day explains existentialism more entertainingly than Sartre.
Groundhog Day (1993) was one of the most critically acclaimed and popular American film comedies of the nineteen-nineties, admired both for its warm-hearted romance and for the delightful comic absurdity of its central premise. In this article I aim to show that it is also something else, at least until its somewhat unsatisfying ending: one of the most cogent and intelligent extended dramatic metaphors for the central tenets of humanist existentialism ever presented on a cinema screen. (Of course, this is not to say that it was actually intended thus, but it is intriguing to note that its star, the comic actor Bill Murray, made the film shortly after a period in which he had taken a break from his film career to pursue other interests, including the study of philosophy…)
In the film Murray plays Phil Connors, a cynical, worldweary television weatherman making the annual trip to a rural Groundhog festival, whereby according to legend, the behaviour of a small rodent produced from a box indicates how soon winter will end and spring begin. The day is, as usual, a nightmare for him, but the real ordeal begins the following morning: Connors wakes to discover that for some inexplicable reason it is Groundhog Day again. Everything happens exactly as it did the day before but only he seems to realise the fact.
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