A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1993: Buddhism and Also the Murray Problem

GROUNDHOG DAY (dir. Harold Ramis)

TRACK 1: BUDDHISM, SORT OF

They say that as you get older, you think about religion more. And maybe that’s true, or at least sort of true. I’m definitely older (why, I’m two years older than the last time I posted to this project), and I know that as time goes on, my thoughts get more and more existential. Not religious, really, because I have a hard time with supernatural beliefs. But definitely with an eye on to the bigger picture of existence and where I (/we) fit in and what’s going to happen when I’m not here anymore (mostly, I want to make sure my musical gear goes to somewhere it’ll get plenty of use).

I was raised Catholic, more or less, but it didn’t take; part of that was that my parents’ hearts weren’t really in it (which is fine). I was pretty much done with it, and Christianity, by the time I was driving. But I had a weird childhood, and in a very real sense I was raised in two households. And that second household was heavily influenced by a professor of comparative religion with a particular interest in India who had an active if idiosyncratic personal religious practice that sort of mixed Buddhist thought and practice with American Midwestern Lutheran culture.

I guess what I’m saying is that, while I can’t at all claim to have raised as a Buddhist (or, to be clear, to have any real sense of what a personal Buddhist practice is like outside of some very unusual conditions), I was at least out on the right end of the bell curve in terms of exposure to Buddhist concepts among teens in rural Nebraska in 1993. Cycles of rebirth and improvement within them, sure, yeah, weren’t we talking about that at dinner the other night?

So, Groundhog Day landed pretty well in that second household of mine. Bill Murray’s asshole weatherman relives a day over and over and over, passing through waves of hedonism and nihilism until he improves himself and learns to accept his feelings in the moment, and is released from the cycle.* The resonance is right there out in the open (the lore about the script is a little muddled, with stories both crediting Harold Ramis for strengthening the Buddhist parallels, and faulting him for downplaying them, to the detriment of his relationship with Murray; in the end, it matters less how they got there than that they’re there).  

Continue reading A LIFE IN FILM #20 – GROUNDHOG DAY →