Category: Movies

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What is the Hidden Message of Groundhog Day?

What is the hidden message of Groundhog Day? I would never have thought there was something in Groundhog Day that I didn’t know. I thought I knew the movie by heart. Apparently, I didn’t. To memorize something means to commit it to memory; to learn something by heart means to commit it to the heart.

As my wife and I watched the first few minutes of the movie last night, she suddenly asked, “Why is the groundhog’s name Phil — just like Phil Connors?” Her question sent me reeling. How could I have missed it? Yes! Phil Connors is Punxsutawney Phil. He is the groundhog of the story.

According to Pennsylvania Dutch legend, if a groundhog emerges from its burrow on February 2 and sees its shadow, it retreats into its den and winter lasts six more weeks. If it does not see its shadow, spring arrives early.

Phil Connors is a weatherman—but he is under the weather. He’s fed up with people. He is under his own shadow, though he is unaware of it. His skies are overcast 24/7. Rita and Larry try to pull him out of his shadow, but he always retreats into his den. People drive him nuts — and into his “den.”

When you are under the weather, people always drive you nuts. You want to retreat, withdraw, and languish quietly under the weather of your own exclusivity. Your shadow grows large and frightening. You want to hide. Everyone with a big shadow has a den to hide in — from himself and from others. The shadow is a scary thing.

How do you get out of it?

Spiritually speaking, my shadow is always there until I become aware of it. It remains until I realize its presence. The moment I see it, it is gone. When I become aware of my own shadow, I look behind me and do not see it. My spring has come.”

Phil’s shadow is enormous. He hates his job, he hates his circumstances, he hates people. And like Punxsutawney Phil, he retreats into his “den” to get away from it all. He is not yet aware of his own shadow even though he lives under it 24/7.

So he hides from himself and from others. His “den” is his Groundhog Day. He is trapped in his den — in his own shadow — locked in a vicious circle. How do you escape your own shadow?

All vicious circles are broken the moment we die. All shadows are trampled down by death to self. The Paschal hymn —“Christ trampled down death by His own death”—carries profound spiritual wisdom. It foreshadows the death of the shadow.

Phil remains stuck in his “den” — February 2 — until he becomes aware of his shadow and agrees to die to himself. He passes through the vicious cycles of his own Inferno and Purgatory until, One Day, he finally lets go. The next morning he wakes up — and there is no shadow. It is gone! His spring has come.

Phil Connors is a “weatherman under the weather” who is unaware of his own shadow. That shadow binds him in a vicious cycle of misery until he recognizes it and… releases it.

The moment we die to ourselves, we are freed from the shadow. A new day dawns. And it is February 3. Spring is coming.

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What is Asymmetrical Ethics? Emmanuel Levinas and Beauty and the Beast

What is asymmetrical ethics? The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who spent four years as a POW in German camps and whose family was killed by the Nazi in Lithuania, wrote in his book Totality and Infinity (1961):

“The face of the Other comes toward me with its infinite vulnerability, its destitution, its defenseless eyes. It calls me into question and orders me: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

Reflecting on his experience, Levinas’s central question was: “How is ethical responsibility possible after the Holocaust?” How can one regard their torturer as human when he treats them as less than human — in fact, worse than an animal?

An experience like that “calls me into question.” Who am I? For Levinas, the answer lies in what he calls ethical asymmetry. True ethics is never based on mutuality or reciprocity; it does not depend on others treating you in a certain way. Ethics, in its purest form, is always asymmetrical — you are ethical simply because you recognize the face of the Other.

“The face is what forbids me to kill.” Ethics and Infinity (1982)

For Levinas, the main challenge was to continue seeing the face of the one who consistently and radically negates the face of others. But what is the source of ethical asymmetry? How can one keep seeing the human in someone who continually dehumanizes others?

For Levinas, ethical responsibility is not a contract; it is a response — a response to seeing a face. Our capacity to see the Other’s face, regardless of their actions, depends on whether we ourselves have experienced ethical asymmetry. To love, we must have someone who has seen our Face.

I can only treat others as human if I have experienced being treated asymmetrically — loved without condition, regardless of what I do. It is this experience of ethical asymmetry that forbids me to dehumanize others. That is why Beauty and the Beast remains one of the most powerful mythical archetypes of all time.

As G.K. Chesterton puts it,

“There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.’”

The 1977 Soviet romantic comedy Office Romance is one of the most beloved films of the Soviet era. A shy, divorced statistician, Anatoly Novoseltsev, unexpectedly falls in love with his stern, irritable, and lonely boss, Ludmila Kalugina. Wounded by a past betrayal, Ludmila has closed herself off from love and prefers to be seen as “an old maid.”

But the moment she realizes she is loved despite all her harshness, something within her breaks. The next day, she arrives at work transformed — the old maid is gone, and everyone in the office is stunned by the beautiful woman they had never truly seen before.

A thing must be loved before it is lovable. No wonder the Hebrew word rachamim (רָחַם), used in Exodus 34:6–7 and usually translated as “compassion” or “mercy,” literally means “womb.” According to the Torah, we exist in the womb of God — we are “en-wombed” in a loving Presence.

When we become aware of that Presence, we are changed. Someone has seen our Face, and we begin to seek the faces of others. It’s our response to being seen. Love is not something we manufacture; it springs from a heart that has been touched by ethical asymmetry.

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What is the Homo Ludens Theory?

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What is the Homo Ludens theory? In The Sounds of Music, when Fraulein Maria arrives at the von Trapp house and speaks with the housekeeper, Frau Schmidt, about the children, Frau Schmidt says:

“The von Trapp children don’t play; they march.”

Captain von Trapp, who had lost his wife, lost his ability to play. He was running away from himself. Grief turned him into a detached disciplinarian. Ironically, this was happening in the 1930s when Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, was writing his Homo Ludens (Man the Player).

Observing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he felt that the spirit of play and spontaneity was slowly replaced by marching. The country was forgetting how to play. Play is spontaneous by definition. No one can be made to play. You can make people march but not play.

Play comes over you when you have no cares in the world. When you care, you can’t play. When you don’t care, you can’t help playing. Huizinga wrote,

“Play is free, is in fact freedom. Play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.”

Captain von Trapp was too overwhelmed to play or allow his children to play. He needed Fraulein Maria to burst into his ‘real’ world and reawaken him to the spirit of play. Maria was a God-sent. She saved Captain not only from his self-imposed shell of a man — she saved him from the spirit of marching that was overtaking Germany.

For Maria, play was as natural as breathing. She turned everything into a piece of cake. She turned drapes into children’s clothes, boredom into song, and enemies into friends. That’s what the von Trapp children lacked the most; that’s what they resented their father mostly for — for his refusal to play.

Maria may not have been an “asset to the abbey” because she “waltzes on her way to Mass and whistles on the stairs,” but this was exactly what was lacking in the von Trapp’s household. Captain von Trapp’s soul was dead. He marched to the tune of grief, despair, and apathy and made his kids do the same.

And yet, there was an edelweiss still alive deep down in his soul. Maria’s natural playfulness reawakened the spirit of play in his heart, and the flower bloomed again. She gave him a gift of himself.

“In play there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” Homo Ludens

What did Maria’s play mean? It meant that there was something transcending the immediate needs of life — something beyond the world of care. Captain felt that “something” knocking back into his life. A Life from beyond life. He let down his guard and allowed the spirit of play in.

Why did he refuse to serve in the Royal Navy of the Third Reich? Because of his strong moral and ethical principles? Maybe. But it seems more likely that he didn’t want to march anymore. There was too much play in his soul to march to the Nazi’s tune. The time of seriousness was gone. He was full of life, song, and poetry again.

“[Play] lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child’s soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man’s wisdom for the child’s.” Homo Ludens