Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in “Groundhog Day.”
Sony
When weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) travels to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the Groundhog Day festivities, he is assured the incoming blizzard will miss the town. The blizzard does not miss the town, burying the community in snow and halting all outward bound travel.
Connors goes to bed that night, and awakens the next morning trapped in a pesky time loop. Over and over he lives out the same day — binge eating, causing chaos and getting to know his charming producer Rita Hanson, played by Andie MacDowell. When the cynical, mean, tired, egotistical Connors learns how to love (and play piano), he is released from the time vortex to live his life a changed man. According to one blogger, Connors is stuck in this cycle for 33 years and 350 days, or 12,395 repeats.
You might think Harold Ramis’ 1993 American fantasy comedy film was the first occurrence of the Groundhog Day time loop. You may think Hollywood got it right, and love is the answer. Believe this at your own peril.
The history of time loops
Before Plato, Ovid and Homer, likely long before the sixth century B.C., the mythic king of Corinth became the original Phil Connors. Though there are multiple versions of the myth, the common story holds that Sisyphus cheated death twice and was punished by Hades — forced to push a boulder up a hill and watch it roll down again for eternity. He was imagined to be the sun itself, rising and setting, only to rise again.
Clive Wearing was an accomplished musician and musicologist at the height of his career. He formed critically acclaimed choirs, and was put in charge of BBC radio’s musical content during the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.
Then in March 1985, he contracted a virus that attacked regions of his brain, causing a unique and profound form of amnesia. He was able to play complex piano scores, yet his episodic memory lasted 7 to 30 seconds. In short, he was stuck in a strange and maddening time loop.
In popular culture, the time loop has been used and reused with stunning frequency. Video games such as “Outer Wilds” and “Deathloop,” novels such as to Yasutaka Tsutsui’s “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” and Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s “All You Need is Kill” which was turned into a Tom Cruise thriller flick “Edge of Tomorrow.” The movies are endless: “Mirror for a Hero,” “About Time,” “Source Code,” “Palm Springs” and of course “Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas.”
Why do we have some many stories about time loops?
What is so enticing about the time loop?
Maybe a day repeated a thousand times would give us enough time to do all the things we’ve been putting off. Having the conversations we want to have, learning the languages and musical instruments we always dreamed of.
Maybe it would give a mere mortal the chance to feel like a god, an omnipotent presence among the one-way time travelers. In every trope, characters experiment with the good and evil of knowing the future.
But at its core, the time vortex addresses the deepest fears in all of us. Fears of leaving things unsaid and undone, of ending up alone, of making irrevocable mistakes and choosing the wrong paths through the endless labyrinth of life.
How to escape a time loop
Unless you are punished by a Greek god, or have a medical condition, escaping the time loop requires us to confront the parts of our humanity that are easy to cover up with busy schedules and distractions.
Ask the scary questions, about the ecclesiastical nature of life. Stare into the face of the monotonous, unavoidable moments in every day — the drive to work, the dishes, dressing the kids, organizing spreadsheets and brushing teeth.
Days are the same and different with every rising and setting of the sun. But we are alive, and can make the decision to sink into the fabric of living. It’s beautiful because we have second and third and fourth chances to wake up, and make the most of each cycle in this most precious gift — the days and years of your life, ahead and behind, folding and stacking and changing and staying the same.
To escape the time loop we must realize that we are all stuck in a time loop and there is no escape.
And thats what Bill Murray meant when he said “Winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”