‘What would you do if you were stuck in one place and everything was exactly the same and nothing you did mattered?’
Oh, admit it, you’ve had that thought so many times you’ve lost count, but it’s better when Bill Murray says it. Anything is.
You'll just have to imagine the Sonny & Cher
It took me a long time to watch Groundhog Day all the way through. I am not a forgiving viewer and it doesn’t get really good till about an hour in — let’s face it, the form is strictly rom-com, with a little time loop thrown in, what was I really waiting for? — but waiting for things to get good is, ironically, exactly the point of the movie. (Well, one point, the Wikipedia entry includes a persuasive analysis of the film as a Buddhist parable.)
'Is this what you do with eternity? Sometimes I wish I had a thousand lifetimes...'
When the movie gets good, it hits you where it hurts. No, not the soup (although if that doesn’t hit you where it hurts you’re a robot). It’s when Bill Murray finally gives up on getting laid as the way out of his personal hell — then takes piano lessons. And reads poetry. And learns French. No responsibilities, no worries about money, just time to study.
(That’s what we thought professoring would be like, no? I think of lot scholarly types would absolutely love to be stuck in a time loop, or at least left quietly in a library after an apocalypse like that Twilight Zone episode. The time factor is, of course, why university book-learning has been in the hands of the leisure class for the last thousand years, and I think we haven’t quite solved how to combine it with any sort of real life.)
There was much speculation about how long the Groundhog Day time loop lasted, but Ramis, the co-writer/director recently spoke out on the issue, estimating that Phil Connors needs 30-40 years to reach his full potential because ‘it takes 10 years to get good at anything.’
THANK YOU, Harold Ramis, for understanding that. And for getting that learning does not happen in a single, test-driven moment.
Among other things, I’ve taken Spanish, Latin; Russian; Greek; German; French; Italian; Sanskrit, which led to some Hindi and one glorious semester of Urdu (such a beautiful alphabet, how could I resist?); then there were flirtations with Old Church Slavonic and and Old Norse and Hittite (that was an Indo-European phase).
But I make no mistake in thinking I’ve learned all of those languages. I can sound out Cyrillic and Hindi but nothing more; I learned Italian as a spoken language so I can kind of communicate, and the Latin means I can guestimate most Romance languages in written form but not speak them (don’t even get me started on what French has done to Latin pronunciation). Even my Latin, which is the one thing I’d call myself an expert in — language, literature, culture — has gotten rusty after the 9 months of not reading it. I just can’t remember the words as easily as I could before. The Greek is there, whether I like it or not, but the rest have left almost no traces in my brain.
'Nineteenth-century French poetry? What a waste of time!'
Not that I wouldn’t like to pursue all these languages further. But unless I get stuck in a time loop (in which case I will also learn a tonal Asian language just to see what it feels like in my brain), it’s not going to happen. Which is why, whenever I hear the Rosetta Stone ads for language learning, which claim you can do it without memorization, I laugh. You’ve gotta slog through the memorization. You’ve gotta look stuff up in a dictionary. Or struggle through the first few weeks of immersion. You’ve got to wait, maybe for ten years, for it to get good. And even then, you’ll have to practice to keep it up. And the demands of real life mean you’ll be fighting for time.
But maybe you have to be Phil Connors (who is, not coincidentally, well over the usual college age) to get that.
Hey readers what would you do with your Punxsutawney time loop?