Pop Culture Detective and Groundhog Day
BONUS VIIIIID
Comments (6)
The assumed antagonistic relationship with the text is similar to what academics describe as a “paranoid reading”. It’s an interesting concept to look into.
Cool that you and Jacob Geller both released Groundhogs Day videos this month. Fun little coincidence
Gotta push back on this, BJ, not because I think PCD's take is perfect but because I think you've glossed over an important point: Phil keeps pursuing Rita despite her repeated rejection. The movie and the audience know that they are meant to be together. The nature of the time loop means that Rita's rejection is wiped clean every day, her opinions matter in theory but if Phil just waits a few hours then they won't matter in practice. He will get the girl, one way or another. Yes, one message of the movie is that stalking is bad. But it just kind of shows that stalking is bad because the behaviours are creepy and off-putting, not because it's taking away Rita's agency and disregarding her choices. The time loop creates a scenario where stalking only seems a lot less bad because your victim can't remember being victimised. And plus, this point is raised in the larger "Stalking for Love" video, which has lots of other examples. In the broader trend of "the stalker always gets the girl no matter what she says because they're meant to be together", GD is just kind of sanitised by the time loop memory wipe. But it has the same message.
I think it is interesting that Phil form of agency is taken for granted in the Stalking for Love take. That is Phil only has superficial agency exactly because of the nature of the time loop. He must learn to behave the exact correct way in order to escape the hell hole of the repeated day. Not just performatively but essentially. Taken from another perspective Phil's awareness of the repetition is his own, everyone else lives in fact in a totaly different reality. This begs the question: what is agency? Is it the ability to know all possible outcomes in order to control your environment? The film says no. No matter what he does, even attempted suicidem, he can only live in the events that took place during the day. In the end he is force to give up agency to regain it. His goal wasn't to fall in love, or care about the community he was visiting. He had to accept that. In other words, because his actions had no consequences he lost true agency. I think one has to consider this when trying to apply the Stalking for Love trope. In other texts, in which male desire of an unrequited love is looked, at the common resolution seems to be, in order to achieve agency you must take agency away from someone else. For example a common trope is the "beta male" winning the affection of the girlfriend of the "alpha male". The character development is first the glow up, by become more confident, and mostly more dominant, and then resolves when the "alpha male" somehow proves to be an asshole, the newly developed character uses this situation to show his worthiness as a partner. Often times the conflict of Stalking for Love stories is driven by a rejection because the protagonist oversteps a boundary of their "object of attraction". All is then forgiven when the protagonist make one final gesture of love, excusing their past behavior as part of genuine love. But this doesn't really describe Groundhog Day's narrative as I see it. Phil must attone, not excuse. He learns to love, and not to lustfully yearn (this is also usually not distiguished in such films, as lustful obsession is either equivicated or at the very least considered an undebatable part of love). We are shown a Phil whose change isn't oriented around the goal of getting the girl, but a change that happened because he recognized and accepted the boundaries of others.
I enjoy you ever so thoroughly
I have been working on a script for a video essay for quite a while now where I watched every movie in Wikipedia's list of Groundhog's Day Style Time Loop movies, I also refer to this same clip from Pop Culture Detective!