Do moral rules change when there is no tomorrow? “Groundhog Day” proposes an ingenious answer – ABC Religion & Ethics

You can listen to Hugh Breakey discuss the ethics and philosophy of “Groundhog Day” with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on The Minefield.

It would have been easy for an innocent audience member in 1993, as the curtains opened on Groundhog Day, to not have the faintest idea what they were about to witness. Starring comedic genius Bill Murray, and directed by fellow Ghostbuster Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day presented as an amusing, if light, comedy.

The film even had a delightfully wacky premise. Murray’s character, the cynical and self-involved Phil Connors, is destined to relive again and again a single day of his life — a day that, as a TV weatherman, he spends in a rural Pennsylvanian town, covering “Punxsutawney Phil”, the local groundhog reputed to foretell the end of winter. The wholesome town is buzzing with the excitement of its annual ritual, but the misanthropic Phil is decidedly not swept up in the enthusiasm.

Surely, as they say, hijinks will ensue.

And ensue they do. With a colourful cast of bit characters, and Murray’s sardonic charm, Groundhog Day delivers more than a few laugh-out-loud moments.

But the film delivered something else as well. For beneath its comedic trappings lay a film of remarkable depth and profundity. There had been other (minor) attempts at time-loop movies before, and there would be many thrilling films to come in its wake. Yet Groundhog Day remains the quintessential time-loop film, to the point where its name is now synonymous with the genre.

For in some ways, Groundhog Day is unique within its genre.

No explanation, no task — no meaning?

The genius of Groundhog Day lies in its willingness to plunge headfirst into a space into which subsequent time loop adventures would only dare dip their feet. For in almost all the later films and television series, there is a reason why the time loop is occurring, or some task that must be achieved. In the most satisfying of these works, the reason and the task are ingeniously tethered together. Think Source Code (2011), where a fallen soldier’s brain is kept on life support to technologically empower his mind to repeatedly go back in time until he stops a terrorist attack. Or Edge of Tomorrow (2014), where the extraordinary time-reversal capabilities of alien invaders can be temporarily wielded by humans, and turned back against the aliens to save the world.

In these cases, to succeed in the task is to stop the loop, and the protagonist knows and rapidly becomes motivated to fulfil the task. In Groundhog Day, there is none of this. There is not even a fleeting attempt to explain why this extraordinary event is (re)occurring, and there is no vital life-saving task that Phil is directed to perform.

In terms of story-telling craft, this should prove an unmitigated disaster. The story’s lack of meaning and purpose strips stakes from the action, and prevents the audience quickly identifying with a protagonist desperately trying to save lives (the “save the cat” screen-writing hook). Worse, as film-making Python Terry Jones once acutely observed, Groundhog Day wilfully violates the entrenched wisdom that you cannot repeat with effect.

Yet this is the singular achievement of Groundhog Day. By emptying the field of any ulterior meaning or task, the time loop itself — in its remorseless, relentless, inscrutable working — moves centre stage. Here, the time loop is not a device the protagonist uses to achieve their goal. Rather, the time loop is itself the object of the protagonist’s focus, the condition of their existence, with which they must somehow come to terms.

And this is what gives Groundhog Day its enduring philosophical heft. The audience, like Phil, is called upon to somehow salvage a purpose or meaning from an existence seemingly robbed of any such potential. For in a way, Phil’s condition, where everything he does is ultimately stripped of consequence, brings front and centre an existential challenge that lurks for every one of us — that, in the end, nothing matters. Every person will eventually die, every person they know will eventually die, our planet will die, and — in the end — humanity itself must die. In the final analysis, there is no consequence. There is no lasting legacy.

How can anyone find meaning and purpose under these conditions? This is the philosophical question thrust upon the most unlikely of characters.

Phil Connors: The perfectly imperfect protagonist

Groundhog Day’s drama and profundity are not created merely by its meaningless time loop, but by the very particular character lying at the loop’s centre. Crucially, Phil Connors is a jerk. He is self-interested, narcissistic, sexist, and mean.

Worse still, the time loop initially empowers the worst in him. In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon famously imagines how even a good person would behave if they possessed a ring that allowed them to become invisible at will. He invokes a story of a shepherd, Gyges, who uses the ring to seduce the queen, slay the king, and take the kingdom.

Plato is less than specific about how exactly a ring of invisibility is supposed to help in matters of seduction. Unfortunately, the power gifted to Phil presents no such mystery. As well as cleverly stealing money and callously terrifying innocent locals, Phil uses his powers of consequence-less action and intimate knowledge to manipulatively and dishonestly seduce a pretty young woman, Nancy Taylor.

Yet as ugly as Phil’s character defects are, they are the right sort of flaws to possess in the world of Groundhog Day. Crucially, in his narcissism, Phil cares what others think of him. He wants to be admired, especially by people that he admires — and he admires Rita Hanson, his wholesome, good-hearted producer, played brilliantly by Andie MacDowell. When Rita quotes Walter Scott at Phil’s hubris, invoking the wretch who shall “forfeit fair renown”, her words perfectly target the chink in Phil’s armour. Moreover, Rita will not fall for Phil’s increasingly clumsy manipulations, and he is on the receiving end of a much-needed series of slaps that eventually prompt him into taking a different direction.

More subtly, Phil is also easily bored, impatient, and thrill-seeking. Despite the suggestions of his drinking buddies, he spends very little time in the hedonic pursuit of pleasure. While we do see him occasionally drinking alcohol, pursuing sex, eating terrible food, and smoking, he never wallows in these vices, and he even gets bored with his own manipulations — rushing too impatiently through his carefully rehearsed dialogue. As such, the possibility that Phil could spend his infinite future in blissful pleasure is never a serious option. A victim of his own restless vices, Phil is condemned to seek something more.

All time loop stories wrestle with the intriguing question of how much the moral rules change when there is no tomorrow. The popular moral theory of utilitarianism, which conceives ethical action entirely in its capacity to create happy outcomes, loses much of its intuitive heft when actions have no lasting consequences. But even duties of honesty and care can seem pointless when the world rewinds.

Initially, wallowing in the power of his Ring of Gyges, Phil casts off the shackles of morality. “I’m not gonna live by their rules anymore!”, he enthuses.

But in Rita, Phil is confronted with something that — despite the never-ending resetting of his world — remains worthwhile and valuable in itself. Phil recognises that Rita matters, and Phil’s relationship with her, and treatment of her, comes to matter too. In a manner reminiscent of another of Plato’s works — the Symposium’s “Ladder of Love” — Phil grows from his initial, perhaps superficial, attraction to Rita to see something more in her, and from there to transform the way he sees the world.

In the end, ethics turns out to be his salvation. Once, Phil viewed rules an obstacle to getting what he wanted. But in a world without consequences, “wants” become increasingly meaningless. Yet morality endures, with its unrelenting insistence that even in this strange universe, it matters how you treat people. Ethics becomes not an obstacle but a lifeline. At last Phil has landed on something that helps him see that this moment matters, despite or even because of its ephemeral fragility.

In that realisation, Phil escapes the trap, because the realisation makes the time loop no longer a trap at all. It becomes an opportunity to make every moment matter, for everyone in his orbit. In Phil’s new way of being, ethics ultimately shades into aesthetics. He shows us a world of moral beauty, where his omniscience about this town, and this one day, combined with his own painstakingly honed perfections — from piano-playing and ice-sculpting to life-saving — show the completion of the misanthropic narcissist into someone inspiring the best in every life he touches.

Hugh Breakey is Senior Research Fellow in Moral Philosophy at Griffith University’s Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law. He is also the author of a novel, The Beautiful Fall.