It's tempting to talk about love, but it's difficult. It's often a traumatic experience, and people start to think they've already understood everything about love... But in reality, they remain within their own limitations, generalizing it to "everything"... When two people meet and interact, their limitations can create, in each of them, mistaken interpretations of the other's intentions, creating conditions for new unpleasant experiences..."Groundhog Day" is not just about love, but as they show us, it is primarily and most importantly about love.
The idea of a thought experiment where the same day repeats itself over and over is ingenious. Once, when I was very young, I watched this film and thought I understood everything in it. But today I know for sure that no one can "understand everything." Each person understands only as much as their personal context allows, because the brain works as a contextual processor.
This is where the effect comes from when you reread a book or rewatch a movie and suddenly notice something new. But the movie hasn't changed. The book hasn't changed.
Then, what has changed? The internal context. It is sometimes called a "matrix," in the sense that it is a kind of individual set of prisms through which a person looks at the world and constructs their own picture of the world. And this matrix changes, slowly, but it changes, often imperceptibly to its owner.
"Groundhog Day" provides an opportunity to talk about love as if from the outside, without referring to personal experience, but looking at the transformation of the main character's personal matrix. And it's not the groundhog Phil. Let's refer to the main character by name - Phil, it's easier. By the way, it's an interesting question whether it's a coincidence that the groundhog and the main character have the same name. Just as the question of choosing the main character's name, in connection with its consonance with the word "feel," is no less interesting.
The film is undoubtedly both a mystery and a concentrate of wisdom. I suspect that I will watch it again more than once, with pleasure, and I will supplement my review of this film.
With such a convenient introduction, I can stop right now without sinning against the reader, and inviting the reader to look into this text sometimes - suddenly something has changed? And at the same time, inviting to look into this movie again. Perhaps something has changed? I'm smiling. An internal smile. And even with my liver - I smile, in response to the smile of the character named Ketut from another movie called "Eat Pray Love".
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To begin, I will talk about the most important and most complex thing: complex stimuli. Erich Fromm already spoke about them. And following him, now many are ringing all the bells about the necessity of sufficiently complex intellectual objects. For survival, no more and no less.
As we can see, the protagonist, Phil, when he realizes that he will remain unpunished no matter what he does, falls into euphoria and takes the easy path. He steals money, seduces easily seduced girls, buys himself entertainment, indulging some of his matrix-driven dreams instilled from the outside ("call me Bronco").
But it's not quite right, and it quickly becomes boring. Why is it boring? Probably because it doesn't evoke a deep response and isn't interesting or complex enough to avoid rejection in the form of mortal boredom.
This is where the subject of boredom, raised by good old Fromm, comes to the fore.
Then the pendulum swings in the other direction, and Phil wants to end it all, beginning a series of suicides, but that's not the solution either. Even though he's unpunished and free from external penalties, he still wakes up again and again alive and well in his bed at 6 AM. And the broken alarm clock rings again.
In that case, is Phil really that free? After all, he remembers everything. This is both his advantage and his curse, depending on what he does with it.
We can draw an analogy with a child when they learn everything for the first time, and it's very difficult for them. But it's still easier for a child, since the brain is very flexible in the early years of life. Phil no longer has such plasticity; he's in a shell (by analogy with Wilhelm Reich's body armor, Reich theorized that individuals lacking orgastic potency developed a psychosomatic "armor" that blocked the experience of pleasure).
And yet, we are shown that there is a way to adapt to the situation that Phil has found himself in. Perhaps this is the most correct version of how to interprete the famous biblical "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"? This interpretation is not obvious, and, however, it is possible to see it in the radical change that Phil is going through. Little children learn all the time, going through their radical changes. I can assume that the movie, in a way, is about learning, and about love to learn.
Here, it's appropriate to recall that the essence of the matrix (as defined above) also lies in the fact that the "inhabitant" of the matrix hardly notices the surrounding world. More precisely, they perceive it very distortedly, individually, due to the nature of their personal matrix.
Phil doesn't want to know anything about the place he's ended up in. Moreover, this unwillingness to know was a predisposition even before arriving. Phil lives in a world of his own ideas, which blind him to the actual state of affairs. And this, it seems, is what's killing Phil.
There is a perceptive concept that is revealed in the context of the above, and here is its formulation: "the future is a much bigger problem than the past." It's about a person's own predispositions that block their view of what's happening around them. Phil lives in his thoughts about the future, not noticing the present. Being stuck in one repeating day simply served as a catalyst that could even show Phil the absurdity of this state of affairs.
And Phil is forced to adapt. Yes, exactly. If you want to live, adapt. There is no other way.
So, Phil begins to take an interest in the person he had not been interested in before. But he is still going the old way. He tries to create a production, taking advantage of his position, learning personal information, and then using it, or, more precisely, abusing it. And when this fails, he falls into despair, and only after that finds the right path.
He no longer tries to manipulate. Instead, he does what he thinks is right, and whatever happens. It's a kind of faith, a kind of religion. Phil no longer tries to be a manipulator.
What does Phil do? Is there a formula for what he does? They say that Roosevelt, at one time, said something like this: do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Perhaps Phil began to do just that, didn't he? He no longer had a desire to manipulate. He did what he thought was right. And he did it, even for himself, but - serving others. We see a clear emphasis on this. As in the movie "Peaceful Warrior", the emphasis is on serving others.
The rest "the Universe" will do itself, for you, as they say. Phil gets what he wanted to achieve through manipulation, when he no longer hoped, and was preoccupied with his own affairs, which he managed to find for himself, exactly the ones he chose himself, through the path with heart, as Castaneda says.
If we now return to Fromm, then Phil managed to defeat the most terrible enemy - boredom, finding for himself such complex stimuli that cannot get bored. His love is original, unpredictable, authentic, and therefore - complex and does not get bored. Here it is important to highlight a subtle difference. What we love does not get boring, but, nevertheless, what does not get boring does not yet mean what we love. I'm smiling again.
Let's say that Phil no longer plays, he does not arrange fixes and productions, he lives spontaneously, obeying a sense of duty, he is, as they say, being true to himself and does not pretend to be someone who he is not, and he loves his heroine as she is, and this is exactly valuable. Not to get a "prize" in the form of sex with an attractive sexual object, but the very being together with her - is value and a complex stimulus. As the heroine of the film "Paris Can Wait" says, when a man achieves her closeness with the words "we must not miss such an opportunity" (meaning sex) - we are not missing anything, everything has already happened, everything best and important has already happened (meaning how and with what feelings they spent the time together). So it is here. The point is not in the prize, not in the result, the point is in the process, and the quality of the process is the result. Phil understood this.
I think that Phil's transition from superficial interest in his companion to genuine interest is not obvious. Phil is more likely to be interested in her out of inertia. But when Phil's internal attitudes change from egocentric to attitudes of a different kind, then he begins to see what he had not noticed before in the heroine, and falls in love for real.
Phil also understood, even calculated the following, and (!) not necessarily in the words that I will use next. One could say that not Phil himself, but his subconscious calculated the following.
There is an inner world, in it there are phantoms-ghosts that are more alive than all the living. Phil did not communicate with people, he communicated with predispositions, with phantoms, as any person does. This is how the human brain works, building models consisting of intellectual objects.
The question is to what extent a person is aware that information exchange inevitably passes through the "filter"-"prism" of phantoms.
The perception of consciousness deals as if with photographs of reality. These photos are seamlessly connected into a kind of picture of the world, which is perceived by consciousness as reality. However, a lot of amendments, distortions, beliefs, judgments, assumptions, and so on, have been brought there, into this picture of the world. All this, if in the terms of ancient Buddhism, constitutes the so-called "limitation of man."
The effects of limitation are diverse, and hardly known to the end. In the context of the film "Groundhog Day" we see how Phil tries to manipulate reality, and how this reality "does not accept" him, something goes wrong. Phil's inquisitive mind is hurt, all of Phil is hurt, and Phil is looking for a solution.
Phil finds a solution in helping people. What is behind this? Why does it work, unlike previous manipulations? And because manipulations are built on the knowledge of their phantoms, in full confidence that phantoms are reality. But no, phantoms-ghosts-images are Phil's inner reality, but by no means reality as it is (in some sense, to understand reality as it is is to understand God). Phil is dealing with his models, clearly not of the best quality, as it turns out, and these models let him down, plunging him into torment. They let you down by the presence of frozen, ossified predispositions. In simple words, the world is not spinning around Phil only. If one wants to know the reality as it is, one has to learn the others, too, not only oneself.
At some point, it dawns on Phil that he needs to open up, and he needs to study people further, abandoning his predispositions, because it is they, first of all, that block the way to understanding reality as it is.
He also discovers pleasure, joy, and even, it seems, happiness, in giving those people whom he has managed to get to know better what they really need, helping them. After all, in a sense, Phil is Superman.
Thus, Phil came out of the "vicious circle" into a kind of "spiral of development" - as if he lives there, the same world, but the quality of life has changed fundamentally.
Simply put, Phil discovered the right path in the art of living, a difficult path, a path that an ordinary person fears and avoids, for perfectly natural reasons - laziness, traumatization, fright, the tendency to look for easy ways, etc. But, as today's science already shows, interaction with others constitutes the main essence of humanity, and "love your neighbor as yourself" - is what leads Phil to exit the vicious circle, to joy and harmony with the world around him. Leads to the reconstruction of actual reality, instead of his own early ideas about it. After all, it is a scientific and medical fact today: our personality does not truly belong to us, (and might be not even existing as an entity at all, no matter how hard it is to think about this subject), because our personality is a social product and is never possible to develop by itself.
Repeating what has already been said, predispositions prevent you from seeing the world in all its diversity. Predispositions of an egocentric nature give rise to the problems that we are shown on the example of Phil. Without predispositions, it is generally impossible to have a picture of life, and the art of living is in the development and management of these predispositions. If you replace egocentric predispositions with a desire to hear and understand others, with a genuine reconstruction of their personalities, life changes dramatically. Boredom arises from over focusing on yourself only, and if you upgrade it with openness to the world around you, boredom is no longer possible. Perhaps someone will see here an association with the main biblical commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself"?
However, this approach has a kind of Achilles' heel. When you open up and become sincere, you can mistakenly see the same openness in your neighbor. This is how the cognitive distortion called "the curse of knowledge" works. Having reached your level of knowledge and feeling of being, you begin to think that others understand what you have understood. Life itself puts everything in its place: those to whom you show your genuine friendliness, may not respond and begin to be burdened by it. At first, they can play this as entertainment, but then they get bored and start to close, or they do not believe you and get suspicious, and so on. Not everyone can withstand genuine intimacy (in a good sense of frienship and souls’ closeness). You shouldn't blame them. Moreover, they should even be indulged in this. If a person is not ready, there is nothing you can do, and it is impossible, and not worth it, to expect that your friendliness will be appreciated as you expect it to be, otherwise you manipulate your own self by indulging your manipulator’s tendencies. Phil helps not as a manipulator, Phil helps as a genuine friend, even if this friendship is a one-way process.
A thoughtful viewer is only one step away from understanding that every person lives in a kind of Groundhog Day, only more complex, we were shown a simplified version, for clarity.
If you carefully observe your life through the prism of the theses above, through the prism of the message from the "Groundhog Day" movie, you can identify a number of recurring events, recurring feelings, recurring attitudes, beliefs, judgments, which "work" almost "automatically."
And you can see a direct connection between recurring events in life and these beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, judgments, beliefs, and so on.
The totality of such "things" constitutes an internal matrix in a person, through the prism of which he looks and evaluates what is happening, and also - tunes in to the future and sees it in a certain way. (In a way, we do not look through the prisms, and we ourselves are being those prisms).
In the film "Groundhog Day" we see how Phil's entire matrix was reformatted in the face of inevitability. However, inevitability itself did not do this. Phil, however, retained an inquisitive mind, which at first sought easy ways, but then abandoned it and turned to another path.
Taking Phil's path as a ready-made example and copying it will not work. Taking and simply doing as Phil decided to do - will not work. The general message about what and how Phil did - is interesting, but there is a subtlety there.
The subtlety is to break through your matrix with your personal efforts of your inquisitive mind, reformatting yourself and finding in your "here and now" your answers to questions about the art of living.
PS There is a mindfulness practice concerning fulfilled desires. I first learned about it from Sadhguru's lectures. It requires imagining that any and all of your desires have been fulfilled, whatever they may be, everything. What then? Sadhguru asks this question during his talks, when speaking with students. This question stumps the students. Perhaps the answer to this question is hinted at in the movie 'Groundhog Day'?