In most movies and television series about time travel, a temporal displacement system still under construction (usually at the cutting edge of research in theoretical physics) has gone haywire. In the TV series Time Tunnel (1966-67), the Pentagon is about to cut off financial support for a top-secret time travel project operating from an underground site in the New Mexico desert. Although the experimental system is not yet fully debugged, two of the bolder scientists enter the tunnel without authorization in a last-ditch effort to convince the visiting top brass auditors that the technology is useful and deserving of further financing. The machinery misfires, and the two scientists become lost in time, setting the stage for the viewers to follow the scientists’ misadventures from week to week, as they pop into and out of different historical scenes. In Quantum Leap (1989-93), Sam (Scott Bakula) also jumps into his time machine (the Accelerator) before it is ready, and malfunctions of the apparatus establish an even more complex series premise. Each week Sam inhabits the body of a target character in a particular historical space, and he has to resolve the existential or moral impasse of the borrowed body’s character (unravel the situational puzzle and return the character to his or her rightful path). Then Sam can leap to the next borrowed self and continue his quest to get back to (his technoscience laboratory in) the future.
Imperfections in time travel technology also play an essential role in the Back to the Future movie trilogy (1985-90), in Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), and in many television series about travel to alternate universes or dimensions.
In Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1993), time has gone berserk – but without any time machines, wormholes, theoretical physicists, or government funding of high-security clandestine research. Groundhog Day is fascinating because it is time travel without a single history book adventure, science fiction without a single technological device, and the triumphant reign of the computer program without a single computer. Groundhog Day tells us a great deal about the inevitable failure brought about by the projects of “mastering” reality through information and extending the self via its cloned “intelligent” agents, free as the film is of all the usual self-important lustrous signifiers of science fiction and digital technology. The groundhog (colloquial synonym for the woodchuck, a lowly burrowing animal) and Groundhog Day (the most trivial, even self-ironic, of all the holidays on the calendar) are signifiers of banality. The happy prognostications of prosthetic split selves by computer science luminaries are uncannily already realized in Groundhog Day – they have already come true in the non-intact quotidian reality of Bill Murray among the rodents.
Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is a television weatherperson for a station in Pittsburgh. At the beginning of the film, Phil is cynical and desperately unhappy both because he is fed up with his boring job (which he considers beneath him) and because he does not have a girlfriend. Weather prognostication is one of the few areas of practical knowledge where science has not yet succeeded in overwhelming nature with its informational mastery. What gets Phil in an even more dour mood is having to make the February 2nd schlep to Punxsutawney, PA to make his clichéd annual report on the groundhog’s forecasting of whether there will be a harsh second half of winter or an early spring. Phil’s moroseness expresses his resentment at practicing a vocation where he confronts a public that lends more credence and prestige to an ancient “superstition” than it grants to the profession’s regrettably still pre-scientific practitioners.
As an attractor of the opposite sex, Phil Connors is a total nerd. He is a failure who is even less socially presentable than his travel companion Larry the cameraman (Chris Elliot). Larry is completely worthless – he is rented for the evening to the highest bidder (an old lady) for twenty-five cents at the bachelor dating auction during the movie’s climactic party scene. Phil’s object of amorous desire or true love quickly becomes Rita Hanson (Andie MacDowell), the new producer of Phil’s weather segment on the nightly news, and Phil and Larry’s third travel companion on the planned overnight trip to Punxsutawney.
After the groundhog predicts six more weeks of winter, and the television crew’s work is completed, Phil, Larry and Rita load up their van for the drive back to Pittsburgh. After progressing only a few miles in a highway traffic jam, they are informed that a major snowstorm is about to descend in the geographic area. They are forced to return to a snowbound Punxsutawney to spend a second night in the diminutive weather forecasting capital. Phil spends a second night in the rustic family-owned bed‘n’breakfast from which he had checked out the previous morning. After his alarm clock goes off at exactly 6:00 AM on the second morning, it does not take him more than a few minutes to realize that something bizarre is happening. Looking outside his hotel room window, Phil sees that there is no snow on the ground – rather strange considering that a blizzard supposedly passed through during the night. The same Sonny and Cher I Got You, Babe song which played first thing yesterday morning greets him on the radio at 6:00 AM as the alarm goes off again. The radio announcers of the local station are talking in excited anticipation about Groundhog Day again. The same rotund gentleman (Brian Doyle-Murray) who greeted him at the top of the stairs after he left his room yesterday greets him with the same question (“going to see the groundhog this morning?”) again. The boarding house matron appears in the same spot as yesterday and asks Phil in the same tone if he would like a cup of coffee again. Phil leaves the guest house and heads for the public plaza near which the Groundhog Day festivities take place. Turning a corner, he passes the same elderly homeless beggar he passed yesterday (tragically not unusual!). He then encounters his obnoxious former high school classmate who tries to sell him insurance again. Everything unfolds precisely as it did on the first Groundhog Day. The next day, beginning at 6:00 AM, everything unfolds in precisely the same way again. And on and on each successive day.
The other people are all automata. Within the borders of the town of Punxsutawney, they all individually are in the same places and do the same things at the same times every day. Only Phil has any significant freedom – he can do whatever he wants at any given moment within the town borders. The actions and thoughts of others only change when Phil does something which influences their lives. They are objects of a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Yet even when their actions or thoughts change, they are still automata. They have no free will. They follow either the generalized programming of the day, or the specific modifications to the program implemented by Phil. In the initial conditions of Phil’s predicament, there are no real others at all. He has been inexplicably plunged into The Hell of the Same (Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil). But a turning can take place.
It is 6:00 AM, digital clock time. Cher is singing I Got You Babe once again. The Information Society. A total illumination of all moments. The groundhog sees his shadow and Phil has lost his shadow. Not only will there be six more weeks of winter, there will be an eternity of days of the same. Why did time go haywire? It was not due to scientific time travel researchers having to leap too soon because the funding rug was about to be pulled out from under them. Perhaps time was pushed over the edge by a set of conflicting historical forces which were already spinning in vertigo. What perhaps went haywire was the end of rituals and their replacement by the simulation of rituals, the two coming into conflict in this twisting of multi-dimensions. Perhaps what went out of kilter was the desired metamorphosis of the seasonal rite of Groundhog Day. A needed modernization that went awry.
Groundhog Day is descendent from Imbolog, an ancient pagan celebration. Imbolog occurred at the exact midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. It symbolized having made it through the first half of the difficult winter months. For an agricultural society, winter was a time of deprivation, and the vagaries of weather were of utmost importance. From Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life we know that sacredness is linked to the historical and traditional character of rituals.1 Imbolog, which celebrated the anticipation of the returning light of spring, was succeeded in early Christian times by Candlemas, a feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary. The Romans learned these traditional beliefs from the Scottish Celts, and brought them to the area that was to become Germany, where they became a part of the folk culture. But Candlemas, as practiced in Central Europe, retained the elements of festive and sacred celebration of the earlier holiday. There was an influx of German immigrant farmers who settled in western Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1886, the holiday was reinvented as a kind of W.C. Fields hucksterist-capitalist promotional holiday. A special hill was selected to be the sacred ground. This was a first step in a transformation from place to space, and from a ritual to a simulation of a ritual. Phil Connors, a man of super-modernity who lives in the non-place of television studios and satellite uplinks, is the next stage of this simulation. The initial act in 1881 of designating a sacred hill (Gobbler’s Knob) where the groundhog, the “seer of seers,” would emerge from and predict the weather, was an entrepreneurial designation of a hill as a “place” to be remembered, rather than a traditional place of memory. Thus a fetishized consumer model was established, to be repeated in series year after year.
Today, Groundhog Day is one of our longest-running series, and is reported on with four simultaneous satellite uplinks. The media swarms on this manufactured event like flies to a pile of shit. It is a redoubling of the simulation. As Marc Augé writes in his study of the supermodernity of non-places, the nowhere spaces of airports, shopping malls, skyscraper lobbies, etc. are simulations of places and memory.2 The history of Groundhog Day by now includes the movie Groundhog Day as one of its most significant highlights. Official websites and promotional literature of the town of Punxsutawney and the organizational committee feature the movie prominently as a major landmark in the holiday’s history.
Time travel is all about getting the girl – getting that radical other who does not need me (Baudrillard). This is captured brilliantly in Harold Ramis’ and Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Murray’s character is on a mission exactly like a computer programmer who needs to eliminate every single last bug from his code before being able to get to sleep. He has to re-live the same day over and over again. Every morning as his digital clock turns from 5:59 AM to 6:00 AM.
NOTES
1 – Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (originally published in French in 1912) (newly translated by Karen E. Fields) (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
2 – Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (originally published in French in 1992) (translated from the French by John Howe) (Blackwell Publishers, 1995).