Spirituality of the 'Hog

Bloggers lined up last year to worship at the idol of Groundhog Day. Many were quick to draw parallels to the film’s return-until-reconciliation theme:

Bill wuz here. [Oliver Hammond / Flickr]

The basic fantasy set-up– somebody is condemned to experience the same period of time over and over, either as a spur to solve a puzzle or learn a lesson, or as a simple eternal sentence– had been used many times before (including a Monty Python sketch, a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, an Urusei Yatsura movie, and a couple of old Twilight Zones), but never with such cultural resonance.

Matt McIrvin, in a comment to Slacktivist, I Got You Babe

I like the way it illustrates Aristotle’s idea of virtue. Bill Murray’s Phil does not become a good person and then start doing good things, he becomes a good person because he starts doing good things.

Phil doesn’t even seem to want to be a better person. It’s really only just a scam at first. He’s just pretending to be a good person in the hopes of bedding Andie McDowell. His good-guy act doesn’t really fool her, and he certainly doesn’t fool himself. But gradually, with practice, pretending turns into becoming.

…

The sacred cliche that AA/NA people have for this is “fake it ’til you make it.”

Fred, Slacktivist, I Got You Babe

“Fake it ’till you make it” isn’t just an Al-Anon thing. There’s a series of Jewish rabbinical lessons about how it’s not important to be a religiously-compliant person — you just need to act, in all ways and all times, as one. And sooner or later it will be habit. And sometime after that, it will be integral to your life.

DF in WA, in a comment to Slacktivist, I Got You Babe

We watched “Groundhog Day” in our 3rd Grade Sunday School Class. My teacher had a rather unorthodox approach to teaching Reform Judaism to say the least. On this particular day, I think she was using a Bill Murray comedy as a vehicle to discuss Judeo-Christian concepts of the Categorical Imperative, though I Kant be to sure. I was less than 10 years old and I was just happy that we got to watch a movie instead of gluing blue-macaroni on construction paper in the shape of the star of David.

Mark Pike, Cam Jansen’s Protege, Groundhog Day

The central premise of “Groundhog Day??? is also the central premise of Buddhism: we are in an endless cycle of suffering, brought about by our own meanness and narrow-mindedness. In Buddhism, we die, and are reincarnated, but this pattern also manifests in the way many of us make the same mistakes over and over again and not learning from it. Bill Murray getting stuck in the same day is merely bringing forth a universal truth.

7-8, Seksi Matashutyrmouf, Groundhog Day

But as Fred said, who instigated the whole thread over at Slacktivist in the first place, the act of drawing out these parallels, the act of claiming some unadulterable meaning for the film dulls our attraction to it:

Because it is a parable none of those folks attempting to summarize its meaning or its purported spiritual message are quite convincing. That’s the thing about parables, they’re irreducible — the meaning of the story can’t be separated from the story itself. Whenever you hear the preacher say, “What this parable means is …” you know he’s got it wrong, or at least incomplete. They’re not fables that can be summed up in a tidy, didactic “moral of the story.”

Fred, Slacktivist, I Got You Babe