The 1993 film starring Bill Murray offers a powerful metaphor for pursuing our telos as God's creation.
As a high school theology teacher, I stress to my students how the big question of God is constantly upon us as we wonder about things like ultimate purpose, the nature of truth, meaning, beauty … why we are, and what’s beyond. Because of this, I tell them, theology permeates everything. Even in things that don’t directly confront those questions, God crashes in. And as he is unavoidable, so too does theological reflection emerge constantly in the themes we are bombarded with in our music, literature, films, art, etc.
A striking example I recently realized while surfing the channels earlier this month is the movie Groundhog Day. This is the 1993 tale starring Bill Murray as a self-absorbed TV weatherman who got stuck living the same cold and gray February 2 (Groundhog Day) over and over until he got it right. The themes within the film serve as quite the theological “sketch” for the central question of what it means to live a Christian life. While there is very little overtly religious content in the movie, theological illustrations are abundantly delivered by the story as a singular concept and from specific thematic examples within.
What follows is a development of that idea in two main parts. The first explains broadly how Groundhog Day is an illustration of the Christian life, sketched in the strokes of Catholic moral teaching. The second part colors that idea in with four specific metaphors that highlight themes of the Christian life emerging in the film: (1) Phil’s shadow as a metaphor for Original Sin; (2) Punxsutawney as a metaphor for the Church; (3) being trapped in Groundhog Day as metaphor for purgatory; and (4) Telos as incarnation instead of eschatology.
Part One: Being stuck in Groundhog Day as a broad sketch for Catholic morality and the Christian life
The arc of the storyline follows the journey of Pittsburgh News 9 personality Phil Connor, who is immediately introduced as an arrogant, self-consumed, dismissive, and wholly uncharitable figure with an overinflated view of his importance. Thinking only of himself and his convenience, Phil travels to Punxsutawney, PA, to cover the town’s annual Groundhog Day festivities in the company of station cameraman Larry (Chris Elliot) and producer Rita (Andie MacDowell). After their on-scene report, the trio is unable leave town (much to the inconvenience of Phil) due to blizzard conditions preventing them from traveling back to Pittsburgh. The next morning, Phil is confronted with Groundhog Day all over again. The movie’s plot unfolds as Phil lives the same day over, potentially hundreds or thousands of times. The cycle is finally broken, and Phil realizes the hope of a long-awaited tomorrow once he lives out a perfect and genuinely selfless day.
In terms of a broad illustration, Groundhog Day sketches a pattern for life that most honest Christians can identify with on some level. Especially when we consider who we are, presently, the women or men we once were, and the individuals we know we should be and one day strive to become. In a way, we can see a bit of Phil Connor in us as he faces the challenges of life’s cycles in a manner that reflects our patterns. In him, often comically portrayed, we see the tapestry of our immaturity, despair, uncertain or even unsavory motivations, hopes, longings, failures, achievements, maturation, and growth. And as we look to Jesus, we, like Phil, are often clouded by our sense of being trapped in the “same old same old.” We wonder, “Will I ever get this right? Will I ever become the person of God I know I should be and prayerfully hope one day to be?”
As a sketch for Christian life, the great hope of Groundhog Day is explained beautifully in Phil’s final day trapped in the cycle, which had been established earlier as his purgatory. That day reflects his complete surrender to all that lies beyond himself and represents his complete offering of self to everyone who stands before him. For it was that day in which he applied himself, in every way and every opportunity, to be an agent for something transcendent to what he may gain—the greater good. And in that, even having given up the hope of finally escaping into his tomorrow, Phil finds greater joy, more real satisfaction, and meaning beyond what he could have imagined. For Phil, being saved from something (another February 2) consumed less and less of this focus. Living with his full potential and moving towards his ultimate moral purpose on the day he was again given became his goal.
This message poignantly reminds Christians that what it means to actively live a moral Christian life is far more about the present purpose of the Greatest Commandment than personal affirmations of correct belief for the sole intent of securing a safe afterlife.
Part Two: Synthesis of a Groundhog Day sketch to more specific themes of moral Christian life
This film has several thematic aspects (blatant and latent) that attentive Christians will recognize as engaging various theological strands of conversation. This section touches upon four of them.
Original Sin and the Nature of Our Inclination Toward Self: Josef Pieper emphasized in his work The Concept of Sin that humanity exists as part of a created order with preexistent norms and boundaries. Sin stands opposed to this and draws us out of alignment with our personal and collective created purpose, misaligning us toward ultimate goals and ends. That telos, as it were, is not the self-serving, self-glorifying tendency exhibited by Phil in the early portion of the film. As it becomes more apparent in each scene, Phil can never be aligned with his ultimate purpose as long as he fixates on the self.
Thus, his character’s disposition offers an excellent illustration for both an understanding of Original Sin as a condition of human nature (as opposed to the ontological reality of that nature) and the essence of sin itself. The condition of Original Sin explains how early Phil’s attention is continually turned toward what he perceives to be good. Still, that “good” is only the stuff of fleeting self-gratification. The self is Phil’s shadow, which he sees repeatedly daily through giving himself to acts that service his wants. As a metaphor, this draws to mind how the condition of Original Sin amounts to a propensity to live in the shadow of a lie. Pieper reminds us that in sin, the freedom we understand as our will to possess is bondage to disordered desires wherein we simultaneously play the role of prisoner and jailer (Pieper, 90).
This paradox is the ground of Original Sin in my estimation. And as best I can explain the concept succinctly: We, who bear the image and likeness of our God, suffer from a condition that renders us unaware of our true identity. This theme is excellently sketched by Phil’s self-entrapment within his recurring day, a captivity leading him in a series of unsuccessful “jailbreaks” (via suicide) that eventually prompts his profound acknowledgement, “I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore.” So it is with sin—the slow slaughter of me to the point where contact with who I truly am is obliviated.
Punxsutawney as a Metaphor for the Church and Catholic Communio: The portrait of Phil’s moral awakening reflects how his sense of self continues to impede his ability to truly “get it.” Even as he begins to grasp that his journey through this repeated day is a genuine gift, an opportunity to be an agent of real change toward the greater good, Phil persists in approaching it all on individualistic terms. He tries to force the good through a solo effort. While his motivations are depicted as evolving, his efforts amount to a forced crusade that never genuinely reaches the positive outcomes he mistakenly thinks he should be working toward. Similarly, Phil fails to recognize that despite his faith in a transcendent end, the means of his redemptive purposes are still focused, ultimately, on what he desires. Most likely unintended by the writers of Groundhog Day, there is a powerful statement for contemporary American Christianity in that.
One of the most evident transformations observed in Phil’s journey from self-to-other prioritization is his journey from dismissing and despising the people of Punxsutawney to embracing and cherishing them. In that, he realizes “getting it right” is not a personal ascent he can claim or accomplish apart from them. His “salvation” (tomorrow) necessarily involves the town’s residents. His only way to the glorious hereafter of that tomorrow is in, with, and through the community.
From this perspective, Punxsutawney is a metaphor for the Catholic Church and what Pope Benedict observed as the social dimension of hope found in communion with it. The Ancient Church, the one Body of Christ, invites us to leave behind the confines of individualistic faith and its often self-styled demands. For Benedict, this meant challenging the notion that an individualistically centered eschatological hope, focused solely on the end of personal salvation, is the proper outlook for authentic Christianity. He stressed how salvation was always considered among the earliest believers to be a ‘social’ reality—something communal (Spe Salvi, 14). This punctuated his claim that “for each individual [salvation] can only be attained within this ‘we,’ as it presupposes an escape from the prison of our ‘I’, because only in the openness of this universal perspective does our gaze open out to the source of joy, to love itself—to God” (Spe Salvi, 14). While almost surely inadvertent, this truth is remarkably opened upon in those scenes that highlight Phil’s selfless giving into communion with the town.
Groundhog Day as a Metaphor for the Purgatorial Cycle of Redemption: Reminiscent of Dante’s Purgatorio, Phil, in a way, faces his mountain of purgatory through the repetition of a town’s local tradition. The successions are similar to the ascending circuits of Dante’s trail up around the mountain of purgation, where each loop brings the travelers back around toward the proximity of divine glory. So it is with Phil, who faces each repeating day as another ascending lap toward the hope of a tomorrow.
The journey of Phil’s ascent, however, begins in the pit of pride and narcissism. There, in the depths of his baser urges, he pours his efforts toward serving his lust, gluttony, and greed. Yet, the dissatisfaction he comes to know leads to a profound deformation, which is, ultimately, a step into the purification process. It is a process through which Phil comes to loathe the fleeting pleasures he previously cherished as “the good.”
At first, like the actual groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, Connor can only see things through his own “shadow,” and because of it, everything else is dim and distorted. The shadow, he hopelessly realizes, is the thing he will never outrun. Upon accepting this, he arrives at rock bottom and is forced to confront the fact that his condition is a sensus plenior of a rodent seeing its shadow as a predictor for a prolonged winter. It is the lowest point on the dark side of the mountain path before him, where he ominously predicts that winter “[Is] gonna be cold. It’s gonna be gray. And it’s gonna last you the rest of your life.” Through a sequence of failed escape attempts, Phil sees no shortcut around the long path toward purgation, and in the end will come to “get” how that is the real point, and like purgatory, is not about punishment but progression.
The Telos of Tomorrow: Salvation as Process: Progression toward the highest outcome, or ultimate end, is the meta-sketch of the entire storyline of Groundhog Day. In Phil’s one-day world, tomorrow represents a sort of ascension to the highest order of purpose. Phil's moral maturation is a metaphor for the sacramental life and the grace Christ offers us for our nourishment, reformation, and reorientation toward recognizing our intended identity in him. Once Phil is free of his self-shadow, he finally finds the free will with which to participate most fully in humanity.
This is vital for contemplating the Christian life offered in this film's sketch. It begs us to consider the point at which Phil is “saved.” Or, more importantly, to ask what Phil is saved for. To say that the eventual tomorrow is his salvation is to overlook the salvific prize in which Phil enjoys participating across his final todays. It makes the Christian viewer wonder whether Phil’s atonement to real purpose was to “get out of Dodge” and pass on to tomorrow, or was it something of a more present ecological intention?
Here, it is difficult to overlook how the film points the Christian mind toward reflecting upon the nature of the Christian life as a process of divinization (theosis) and the transforming effect of redemptive grace toward bringing humanity to its “tomorrow”—or telos—by sharing in divine union with God the Father through Christ our Lord. Yet, as meaningful as that is, the film seems to ask us if fixating on what lies beyond inhibits our telos from being met in a more just and charitable participation with today.
That question measures telos as something incarnational against it being something solely eschatological. Even as we consider the Incarnation, we may rightly ask, is the Christian life Jesus showed us how to live about getting out of Dodge (this world), out of hell, and into the glorious hereafter of “tomorrow” as soon as possible. Or is it about how to indeed be human in relation to the world around us, in the moments we have? In other words, is telos something for tomorrow or something for today?
It seems Christ’s emphasis in the gospel accounts is the latter. And I would argue that the sketch offered by Groundhog Day, curiously enough, can help us see that rather plainly.
SOURCES:
Pieper, Josef. The Concept of Sin. Translated by Edward T. Oakes. St. Augustine Press, 2001.
Pope Benedict XVI. Spe Salvi. Encyclical Letter. Vatican Press, November 30, 2007.