Groundhog Day

Mark wonders how many time loops he'd spend overanalysing Groundhog Day as he tries to figure out what makes the film such a touchstone, how the story exemplifies the reason for story structure, and what the hell Bill Murray has against blood sausage.

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Transcript

Hi everybody, and welcome to Mark Overanalyses Film. Today, for the final episode of Season 2, I’ll be overanalysing the structural masterpiece that is Groundhog Day.

Just a quick note here before we begin, I always struggle with being happy with each individual episode of this podcast. I always want them to be better, more precise, and more elegant in their structure and expression. But I am very proud of the two seasons I’ve done so far, and I really have learnt a tremendous amount from doing this. More importantly, I really believe that almost anyone would come away from an episode understanding the relevant film better than they did before. And so, I want to take the next step now, and start applying what I’ve learnt to help people more directly. If you or anyone you know have a story that you’d like — or that you need — to tell, and you like my approach, and you could do with some assistance or someone to talk to: you can now check out my website markoveranalysesstory.com. I started this podcast to help people understand stories better, and I really get a kick out of the idea that I might help some writers out there to tell their stories, and maybe even get some good movies made!

But anyways, we’re here to talk Groundhog Day, so let’s talk Groundhog Day.      

Groundhog Day was directed by Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the screenplay with story creator Danny Rubin.

Now, it’s February, and 30 years since its release, so why not overanalyse Groundhog Day? But really, the main reason I have been wanting to overanalyse this film and why I’d like to finish the season on it is the purity of its premise, and how and why that premise has become so useful and popular for telling a story. That premise is in fact so pure that it is never even explained, and you wouldn’t even notice really. There is no reason given in the film for why this happens, and no reason stated for why it ends. And this is a very commercial, light-hearted film. Not some Lynchian exploration of the subconscious. So, how does it get away with that?  

With all that in mind, first, I’ll look at the fundamental features of the protagonist, and then I’ll go through the main story beats by looking at the sequences of the film. Then, I’ll talk about the main things I learned along the way.

Ok, so, without further ado, let’s get into the 5 Questions about the protagonist. 

Q1: Whose story is it? 

Or, who is the protagonist? This is the story of Bill Murray. I mean, Phil Connors. Phil is a disgruntled weatherman around 40. He’s working for a small TV station. But most importantly, Bi…Phil is deeply unhappy and either thinks or acts that he’s too good for just about everything. 

Q2: What is his life dream?
Life dream here refers to what it is that the protagonist wants or is aiming to do when the film begins and the story has yet to properly start. When we first meet Phil, he’s talking up the idea of a major network looking at him. He wants a better job, more money, and more prestige for his own selfish ego.

Q3: What is his want?

Want here is what the character is trying to achieve in act II of the film, from the moment they really begin their journey until the moment they are at their most defeated. As such, it is a SMART goal, in that it is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound. Now, this is always where I find it starts getting interesting. It’s not totally clear that there’s one goal really driving Phil throughout, and it’s certainly not time bound. But broadly speaking, Phil really realises what’s happening to him and begins looking to escape Groundhog Day at the 25 minute mark. However you want to phrase it exactly, he appears to stop fighting it at minute 74. This is our 49 minute second act. So, broadly speaking, I’m going to say that Phil’s Want is to escape or at least find the limitations of this time loop he appears to be stuck in. 

Q4: What is his need?

Need is the human quality or piece of wisdom that the character lacks at the beginning of the story. Now, the simple answer here is that Phil needs to learn to live unselfishly. Or that he needs to become a good person. And you know, those are perfectly good answers really. But I can’t help but think about William Broyles Jr talking about his screenplay for Cast Away, another film about a man who feels entirely alone for what seems like an eternity. Broyles said that the film ends with the words “Thank you” because Tom Hanks’ character has somehow accepted that there is no rationale for what happens to us. But finally, there is gratitude. And that feels appropriate here. Phil Connors needs to learn to be truly grateful for his life. Even on its potentially worst day. This is of course also highly reminiscent of It’s A Wonderful Life, or curiously, A Christmas Carol, which Bill Murray had already made in his version Scrooged. 

Q5: Does he get what he wants and/or what he needs?
So, at the end of our second act, Phil is still stuck in his time loop, and it appears he will be forever. But eventually, he does indeed get what he wants by getting what he needs. In learning to be grateful for the beauty of everyday life and appreciate the moment, Phil appears to be released from whatever has been occurring to him.

Ok, now that I’ve attempted to answer the 5 key questions, let’s have a look at Groundhog Day’s sequences. 

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The Sequences

Traditionally, there are roughly 8 sequences, or stages, in a film. A sequence is a combination of scenes that are tied together by having a single overriding dramatic question or tension, and they tend to be between 10 and 15 minutes in length. A good way to think about it is that every 10-15 minutes, the audience should be on some level asking themselves a different dramatic question. There are definitely 8 stages to Groundhog Day, but I’m going to say there’s probably 10 sequences, as I’ll get into. I will also add one quick note here, as there’s nowhere else to really easily put it. Groundhog Day is just a beautifully structured film, and one of the signs of that is that if you were to take a 5 act, Shakespearean style approach to analysing it, there would be 2 sequences for every act, and the story is almost perfectly balanced, almost perfectly symmetrical. The first act is 25 minutes, the second is 18 minutes, the third is 13 minutes, the fourth is 17, and the fifth is 24. So, 25, 18, 13, 17, 24. But also the sequences are so snappy, and the transitions so smooth that you would never even realise all this is happening. Even at the end, it takes some time for the true resolution to reveal itself. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.  

Act I contains our first 2 sequences and the first of these is generally “life as it is”. Now, this is an interesting one to note. The original draft of the script has us meeting Phil very much already in the time loop, and we only learn what’s happening to him at the end of Act I in voice over narration. My immediate instinct is that the beginning they eventually went with is definitely the right choice. So, we spend the first 7-ish minutes of Groundhog Day seeing what a normal day for Phil looks like. And it would probably be a nice life, if he wasn’t an obnoxious jackass who takes a needless dunk on blood sausage. That’s how you really know Phil’s a bad guy. As a proud citizen of a leading purveyor of Black Pudding, I take offence to that slight. Anyways, first we see that Phil is a smart alec weatherman whose career seems to have stalled out a bit, and he’s about to visit Punxsutawney for Groundhog Day for the 4th time. But who’s counting? Phil, apparently. And also his news anchor, who enjoys how bitter he is about it. So, he meets his new peppy producer, Rita, and slightly dim cameraman Larry and heads for the now famous town. He makes a truly hateful, unforgivable crack about blood sausage, and then is dropped off at a very nice B&B on Cherry St. And then, 7 and a half minutes in, we enter Day 1. Phil wakes to “I Got You Babe” and some mindless radio chatter. He meets a chirpy neighbour outside, chats to the owner of the B&B, then heads to work. On the way, he passes a homeless man clearly in desperate need… and then runs into Ned! Ryerson! Arguably the most iconically annoying person ever committed to celluloid. He then heads to work and does a sarky report on the Groundhog appropriately predicting a winter that is unlikely to end soon. Now, we will visit the events up to this point repeatedly. After this though, the day will present a lot more variation. For the sake of comparison with his last day though, let’s discuss what else this Phil Connors does on Day 1. He tries desperately to get out of town, then tries to place a long distance phone call, then gets a drink and refuses to go to the party with Rita and Larry, has a cold shower, and goes to bed. So, it’s not a great day. And then, 18 minutes in, something strange happens to Phil, we get our first real tension, and so we enter sequence II.

Now, here’s one of the most fascinating things to my mind about Groundhog Day. Right here, between sequence I and sequence II, we would generally have what we call our inciting incident, or: the event without which our story as it is would not happen. Now, it doesn’t have to be here — just somewhere in our act I — but it is most normally here. But strangely, Groundhog Day doesn’t really have one. At least, not an obvious one. Rather, Phil Connors just wakes up the following morning… but it isn’t the following morning. Phil wakes up once again to “I Got You Babe” and the same mindless radio chatter. And he slowly realises that he is indeed experiencing the same day all over again: the neighbour, the owner, the homeless man, Needlenose Ned, Rita, Larry. Now, it’s worth pointing out here that we are not yet in act II, because Phil doesn’t know if this is some kind of bizarre one off. He tells the B&B owner that his chance of departure is maybe 75-80%. To end the day, he snaps a pencil in half and leaves it by the bed. And at an exemplary 25 minutes in, Phil wakes up for the 3rd time on Groundhog Day to find his pencil unsnapped. Both he and we realise that this is a problem now, and we wonder our big question that will drive the middle of our story: “Will Phil escape Groundhog Day?” And so we end Act I, and we enter Act II.

    
Act II begins with Sequence III, the first attempts to solve the problem, as we wonder some version of the sequence tension: “Will Phil figure out what’s causing this?”. Now, sequence III normally begins with a “What’s the plan?” scene, which really tells us what our act II is going to look like. So, Phil wakes up in a panic and rushes past a lot of the same stuff he has already rushed past. So, that’s one thing. But also notice what he’s doing here. He is rushing to speak to Rita. That is the plan for Act II. And interestingly, even though he’s already lived this day twice, it’s here at the beginning of act II where we first see arguably one of Groundhog Day’s most iconic locations: the Tip Top Diner. And you might notice how we keep returning to this diner with Rita more than anywhere in Act II to mark the big changes in Phil. As we’ll see, it’s something of a yardstick location. But for now, we have Phil’s first attempts to solve the problem. He gets an X-ray and a counselling session, but neither provides him with any answers whatsoever. There’s no rational, practical answer. And so Phil goes for another kind of answer: drinkin’. Now, it’s important to note that sequence III is also defined by what we term the “Refusal of the call” and then ends with an “acceptance of the call”. This acceptance of the call is also the character’s first unconscious move towards their need. And you could land on a couple of things here. You could say that Phil is first mean to, and then later bonds with, some locals. These are the two guys that he gets drunk with and then involves in a police chase. That does make sense, especially as these two guys are the first locals who Phil gets to know, so it really feels an unconscious move towards his need. But I’m more inclined to think that this sequence is all about Phil trying to escape Groundhog Day before eventually becoming excited by the possibilities that with no tomorrow, he can actually do whatever he wants. This is his real unconscious move. It’s not a real gratitude for everyday life yet, but it’s a small step in that direction. And so, Phil fails in his first attempts to escape Groundhog Day, gets arrested, and learns that he has unfettered freedom. He has not figured out what’s causing this, but he has figured out that he can have some fun with it. And so we enter Sequence IV: the greater attempts to solve the problem, as we wonder: “Will Phil tire of shallow fun?”.

Now, it took me a while to figure out what the tension of this short sequence was, cos it’s really just Phil screwing around for 9 minutes. In his contentiously straightforward screenwriting book “Save The Cat”, Blake Snyder describes this part of a film as the “fun and games” section, and few films match that description quite as well as Groundhog Day. So, here we see Phil knock Ned the Head right out with glorious abandon, eat whatever he wants in any quantity he wants (in the cafe with Rita it should be noted), bed the attractive local Nancy Taylor, steal from a money truck, and dress up to go see his favourite film with what I can only assume is a prostitute. You might also notice that this is where the film really accelerates. In the previous 34 minutes, we had 3 Groundhog Days, here it feels like we have at least that many in 9 minutes. But Phil does start to run out of his own ideas for shallow fun to have, and so at minute 43, something really begins to change. Phil turns his attention firmly to Rita, and we enter Sequence V as we wonder: “WIll Phil succeed in getting Rita to really like him?”.

You might recall that when Phil first sees Rita, he describes her as fun, but not ‘his’ kind of fun. And that’s important, because Rita is the personification of Phil’s Need. And so, when Phil begins pursuing her, he begins experimenting with that Need. Now at this point, he’s still fundamentally a creep, so we know he’s doing all this for less than ideal reasons, but at this stage that’s kinda the point. We see him experiment, and experiment, and experiment to manufacture the perfect day with Rita. Again, notice they have a scene in the cafe to show his change. 17 minutes ago he was begging for help. 9 minutes ago he was stuffing his face to her disgust. Now, he’s asking Rita about herself. For selfish reasons, yes, but he is changing. So, he eventually learns to drink to world peace, and not exclaim that 18th Century French Poetry is a waste of time. And then, something happens. In his novel Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be”. And so, Phil, in pretending to be a nice, interested person that Rita would be interested in, momentarily becomes a nice, interested person that Rita would be interested in. And this, at minute 50 into a 98 minute runtime, is Groundhog Day’s midpoint: or our protagonist’s first conscious move towards his need. 

At this point, Phil builds a snowman with Rita and again, notice that Phil describes this as “good, clean fun”, which is in this moment his kind of fun. But even more than that, Phil stops being ‘on’. He’s actually just being in the moment, and enjoying being in that moment with Rita. This midpoint then triggers a brief Honeymoon sequence, our 6th sequence here. This is where the protagonist, having made a conscious move towards their need, acts in accordance with it and things begin to go well for them. And so, Phil and Rita have a snowball fight with some kids, fall on the ground together laughing, and dance on a bandstand in the snow. Rita soon says that you can’t plan a day like this, while Phil argues that you can. But we are soon to see that Phil is actually wrong about that. He invites Rita up to his room, and he ceases to be in the moment with her. Rather, aware of the ticking clock now, he pushes too hard to get her to stay and to try to sleep with her. He shows his hand too much, Rita clocks that something is up, and for the second time she slaps him. And there are soon many, many more slaps, as it turns out you actually can’t plan a perfect day. Plans can get you so far, but perfection? That has to be spontaneous, and genuinely in the moment. If this honeymoon sequences’ tension was something like “Will Phil succeed in sleeping with Rita?”, we have an answer: absolutely not. Phil isn’t ready to learn the lesson of appreciating the moment, so, eventually, he gives up. The middle part of our story is over, and we move into Groundhog Day’s Sequence VII: away from the honeymoon and towards the low point.

Now, as I said earlier, Groundhog Day is impeccably structured. But it is slightly unusual in that what would appear to be Phil’s low point comes quite early. At minute 57, Phil becomes completely depressed. Rather than look for an escape via medicine like earlier, he now takes some altogether more desperate approaches, and so we wonder some version of the question “Will Phil succeed in ending the cycle by killing himself?”, or perhaps “Will Phil tire of attempting to end the cycle by killing himself?” Here, he blows right through the depressed day time TV phase, and begins attempting suicide. He drives himself and Punxsutawney Phil off a cliff, he takes a bath with a toaster, he steps out in front of a truck, and he jumps off a church tower. Nothing works. Phil will not be able to kill himself, and so after 9 minutes, at minute 66, we move into sequence VIII now, our last sequence of our grand Act II.

Now, again, this whole section of Groundhog Day is a bit unusual at first blush, because we’re moving towards what we would consider a low point in a typical Hollywood happy ending story, but things start to go pretty well for Phil here. Things once again slow down and he spends a really nice day with Rita while actually being genuine with her. But we feel this tension as some kind of final attempt of escape for Phil: genuinely trying to convince Rita of his predicament and sharing his experience with her. If this doesn’t work, what will? And so, I find myself wondering some version of the question: “Can Phil convince Rita of what’s happening to him, and will that make any difference?” Once again, you might notice, we find ourselves in the diner with Rita to tell us that a change has occurred. Phil now iconically tells Rita that he is a God, not ‘the’ God, but ‘a’ God. He tells Rita everything about everybody in the cafe, and then finally he does that romcom trope of telling the woman how much he knows about her / what he loves about her. Also, side note: I am convinced that if you want to get a movie star to be in your movie, you just need to write the scene where they know everything that’s going to happen. Not necessarily in a time loop way, but if you can have them literally say the line: “Let me tell you what’s going to happen”, you’re golden. Anyways, Phil and Rita spend the whole day together, and again we can see how much Phil has changed by now. He offers that he is “not that smart”. Also, I’ll come back to this point in a little bit, but Phil says he’s killed himself so many times that he doesn’t even exist any more. Finally, Rita tells Phil something really important that he seems to internalise quite shortly. She offers that maybe this isn’t a curse, that it depends on how you look at it. Now, the thing is that Phil has already been told this: at minute 30, by 2 drunk locals, right as he made his first unconscious move towards his Need. Of course, at that point, he was not ready to accept that point of view. But he very soon will be. And that is story structure! But then, we have our final moment of act II. Rita can’t stay awake any longer and Phil tells her how much he loves her, by telling her how much he admires her. Importantly, he says that he doesn’t deserve her, but if he could he would love her for the rest of his life. Phil finally truly appreciates Rita and what she represents, but he still feels like he could never deserve someone and/or something like that. And so, once again, like in so many great stories, we see here that at the low point, the protagonist no longer believes the counterargument, but the argument seems impossible. At that, Phil wakes up, once again, on Groundhog Day. We sense that he has truly given up trying to fight it or escape it now, and so we end Act II and with 24 minutes left, we enter Act III.

Act III contains a false resolution and a true resolution. And once again, this false resolution is a tad unusual, in that normally things really look bad here for the protagonist. But, with 2 notable exceptions, that’s not really the case here. The first exception is that it now looks like Phil will never escape Groundhog Day. But it no longer appears to bother him that much. In the last scene, Rita told him that maybe this is an opportunity, and he wondered if he could ever deserve her. Well, now, he appears to be taking the opportunity to become the best version of himself possible. But, crucially, now he is not doing it to win Rita, but rather for the innate benefits of true self-improvement. He starts being nice to people, he reads, he learns the piano, and to ice-sculpt. It should be noted that he told Rita in the previous sequence that when she stands in the snow, she looks like an angel. So when we see him ice-sculpting, he is notably making an ice-angel. But Phil actually began this sequence by giving a load of money to the homeless man he’s been passing by all this time, and as this sequence ends he turns his attention firmly to this man. And to his dismay, he discovers that no matter what he does, this old homeless man will die today. This is the second exception: the limitations of what Phil can accomplish. And so, curiously, the real nadir of this film about a man who can’t stop living the same day over and over again, is still coming face to face with death and its unavoidability. And it is only when Phil accepts that that he can escape Groundhog Day. Which only makes sense, because if you truly know that one day your life will end, then you really better start enjoying it. 

And so, at minute 82, we enter Groundhog Day’s true resolution. And like everything in the structure of Groundhog Day, the transition is elegant. We join Phil giving the speech of a lifetime, using Checkov to express a true gratitude for even the colder, darker days of life. He proceeds to ask for a raincheck for coffee with Rita, and runs around town doing good deeds. Rita then discovers Phil absolutely wailing on a piano in a jazz band at the Groundhog Day party — the one he refused to go to on Day 1. She buys him in a bachelor auction, and he makes a snow sculpture of her face. And crucially, she says she doesn’t know what to say, but Phil does: “No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now, because I love you.” At the start of our story, Phil talked about not having a future, he clung to the fact that a major network was looking at him. But now at the end of our story, Phil is truly grateful to live in the moment, and enjoy the people and the minutiae of his everyday life. He has truly transformed, and for this he is rewarded. Rita responds “I think I’m happy too,” and the two kiss in the falling snow.

Then, 6am strikes again, and “I got you Babe” plays, but this time an arm reaches across Phil. And just like that, we know that Phil Connors is now in bed with Rita, and therefore must have escaped Groundhog Day. He tells Rita they should live here together, the two kiss, and walk into Punxsutawney, and the future.   

Epilogue

As ever, there is so, so much that I want to talk about with Groundhog Day, but I will limit myself to two related aspects of what makes this film so damn good in my view. 

First, the screenwriter Danny Rubin was famously influenced by the 5 stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance when writing Groundhog Day. Now, I want to stress here that I am no expert in the works of Elisabeth Kubler Ross, but I think you can clearly see this. Phil initially refuses to believe this is happening to him in sequences 2 and 3. He then lashes out and does whatever he wants for the end of sequence 3 and sequence 4. Then, in the middle of the film, he begins to bargain with the potentially more significant benefits of this experience, and so gradually moves away from his flaw and towards his need. But, when his attempts to get what he wants rather than what he needs fails, he succumbs to depression in sequences 7 and 8. This is where he attempts suicide multiple times and pleads with Rita to believe him. Finally, in act III, sequences 9 and 10, Phil accepts his situation, and in so doing is released from the burden of it. Now, it’s worth pointing out as well that in his interview on the podcast Script Apart, Danny Rubin specifically states that the suicide attempts are representative of the death of the old Phil, which allows for the birth of the new Phil. It’s this idea that he must be fully broken down before he can be built back up again.

But, as far as I can see, that’s not Groundhog Day, that’s just about every film you can think of. That’s story structure. That’s kind of the ‘why’ of story structure, which is why I wanted to end this season on Groundhog Day. Sometimes the five stages of grieving within a film could be literal grieving over an actual death. But if every story is the story of change, then what is grieved in every story is the loss of the old self, before a final acceptance of the new self. You could also think of it as the protagonist’s loss of their once-but-no-longer functioning coping mechanism, or the death of their flaw. 

As I’ve covered on just about every podcast here, the first step of any act II is ‘refusal of the call’, a denial of the existence or reality of the situation or the need to change. This then generally leads to some kind of anger — often self-loathing — at what has befallen the main character. And of course, anger is not a denial of existence, but really some kind of attack or denial of legitimacy. And so, in Casablanca, Rick gets drunk and abuses Ilsa. In 2019’s Little Women, Jo recalls her worst fights with Amy. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke gets impatient and annoyed with Yoda. Now, this gives way to the middle of our film, where the bargaining takes place. If our midpoint is the protagonist’s first conscious move towards their Need, what is bargaining but the first conscious move towards acceptance? You can’t bargain with something you deny the existence or legitimacy of. In bargaining, you are coming to accept the reality of what is happening. Rick discovers why Ilsa left him. Jo begins to write about her own childhood as she faces up to just how sick her sister really is. And Luke realises the dangers of impulsiveness. But the old self cannot “bargain” with the real and total need for change required by story. And so in failing to bargain with change, the protagonist towards the low point falls into depression. Rick becomes cynical. Jo becomes despondent and terribly lonely at the passing of childhood. And Luke can’t accept not trying to save his friends. Then, eventually — in a happy ending at least — the protagonist truly accepts their Need in the true resolution, at which point they are truly, fundamentally changed. The old self has passed, and the new self is born. Our character arc, and therefore our story, is complete. And we have our reason for story shape. So, if Groundhog Day and Danny Rubin did not invent this, why is Groundhog Day such a touchstone for this?

Well, to my mind, it has everything to do with the unique, brilliant, and perfectly executed central concept of Groundhog Day. The time loop that defines the film captures brilliantly the relationship and tension between change and stasis. Everything is superficially the same for Phil, but he is different, and therefore everything deep down is also different. It makes for an incredibly pure form of storytelling. If everything else is exactly the same, we see every contour of every moment of change for Phil Connors. This is why the diner scenes are so pivotal. Every diner scene with Rita is at the same time in the same place with the same people, but one of them is different every time. The repetition highlights the change. Phil is scared, or gluttonous, or romantically interested, or despondent, depending on where he is on his journey. This, combined with the brilliant writing and performances, also helps Groundhog Day to be unusually character focused. Broadly speaking, a film has a plot and a story. The plot is the contrivances and the detail: This thing happened, so this thing happened, so this thing happened. But the story is really the emotional or human arc of the character: how and why the character changes. As I said earlier, it’s kinda weird that Groundhog Day doesn’t have a clear inciting incident. Danny Rubin toyed around with one. At some stage in the script, there was a wronged ex-lover who cursed Phil. But as Rubin has said, it was so superfluous to the actual story that he just decided to leave it out. And so, we don’t get a clear explanation for why this happens or why it stops. There’s no plot explanation, just a story of a man who needs to change and who does. And because we have this, and because it’s so clear, so well-written, and so satisfying, we really don’t get hung up on the lack of explanation. We don’t really need a rational, literal explanation because we have a sufficient emotional understanding of the story. One man lives the same day over and over and over again. And in so doing, he slowly learns to truly appreciate the beauty of life and those around him. It could not be clearer. Any story is really the story of change, and Groundhog Day is pure storytelling. That’s what makes it such a touchstone, that’s what makes it so brilliant. Well, it’s about 50% that, and 50% Bill Murray punching Ned Ryerson.

This has been Mark Overanalyses film on Groundhog Day. I’m afraid it’s time for another brief season break. I’ll be back in about a month for season 3! If you enjoyed this episode and/or this season, please like, rate, follow, recommend, and whatever else it is that’s good for this kind of thing! A special thanks to Mary Kate O’Flanagan who taught me everything I know about film, including these methods. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourselves, and see you soon.