Eternal Recurrence and Groundhog Day (3/4)

This is Part 3 in a series examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence through film and literature. Expect spoilers.

Edge of Tomorrow was a good movie, but I felt like its charm began to wear off during the final act. A movie whose charm never wears off is the romantic comedy Groundhog Day (1993), in which Bill Murray’s character Phil finds himself repeating the same day over and over until he wins the love of Rita, played by Andie McDowell.

 

Much like Major Cage in Edge of Tomorrow, Phil learns to be a better person--not tougher, but kinder and happier. In his old, bitter life, he was a cynic, a life-denier, a negater of the hustle and bustle around him. In Freudian terms, he had a strong death drive urging him toward destructive and self-destructive behavior. This reaches its most morbid point when he repeatedly attempts suicide.

Again, Nietzsche’s ideas clump, for eternal recurrence is closely related to his concept of amor fati. This phrase literally means the love of fate, but it is also the love of all (previous post). For Nietzsche, everything is “anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), so that to want the good in life, you must also want the bad. Once you can do that, you have something akin to what John Coltrane called a love supreme, only no god necessary.

Then you are an affirmer of life, as indeed Nietzsche tried to be. In The Gay Science, he states his New Year’s resolution:

 

Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation! And, all in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer!

Reviewing Nietzsche recently, I was surprised at how many selections by translator R. J. Hollingdale in A Nietzsche Reader focus on joy. One of my favorites, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is fine enough in English but must be even better in the original German:

All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants dregs, wants intoxicated midnight, wants graves, wants the consolation of graveside tears, wants gilded sunsets, what does joy not want!

In Groundhog Day, joy is precisely what Phil finds. After dreading what promises to be a dull eternity in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, he begins to help people, make friends, and have a little fun. He learns to play a mean piano, masters 19th-Century French poetry, and perfects the art of ice sculpture. After finally winning Rita’s heart, Phil’s recurrence proves--like Ebenezer Scrooge’s similar experience in A Christmas Carol--to have been temporary but life-changing, and he finally moves from February 2 to February 3, a gayer spirit with a new lust for life.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)
Eternal Recurrence and Edge of Tomorrow (2/4)

Eternal Recurrence and Edge of Tomorrow (2/4)

This is Part 2 in a series examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence through film and literature. Expect spoilers.

“Live. Die. Repeat.” –Edge of Tomorrow tagline

The recent science fiction movie Edge of Tomorrow (2014) provides an excellent example of recurrence as a plot device. The film, based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt as soldiers fighting an invasion by aliens called gitai, and it has more Nietzsche in it than just eternal recurrence.

 

The device of repeating the same day over and over functions similarly to Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence. We see how Cruise’s character, Major Cage, changes when faced with repeating the same events, many of them horrifying, on endless repeat. He’s scared witless at first but then embraces his situation and uses it to improve himself. This from the novel (translation mine):

 

I can take something with me. I will take the best of this world with me to the next day. I’ll narrowly dodge enemy bullets and kill gitai with one blow. Rita Vrataski gained overwhelming combat skill, and I will use infinite time to do the same. That's all I can do.

Cage, known as Keiji in the novel, begins improving himself as a soldier and eventually masters the large blade that hitherto was Rita Vrataski’s signature weapon. She too was once stuck in time and used the successive loops to polish her combat skills. Eventually, she became the hero and legend known as the Full Metal Bitch. Both Cage/Keiji and Rita turn a life of suffering and death into an occasion to shed their old selves in favor of new ones.

Nietzsche may not have been a systematic philosopher, but his ideas have a way of grouping up. With Edge of Tomorrow as a lens for viewing his philosophy, the close relationship between eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, or Overman (previous post), comes into focus.

The Overman has often been portrayed as a concept elevating some individuals over others--indeed Nazi intellectuals mined Nietzsche for quotes to justify their idea of a master race, and works by Nietzsche tend to show up in the libraries of America’s mass shooters, whose psychoses seek an authority elevating them above others--but Nietzsche only meant something akin to what in today’s common parlance we would call self-realization or personal growth. The Overman is master at overcoming his or her own individual limitations so that yesterday’s horizons give way to new ones. The person who needs to lord it over others would--like Brandon and Phillip in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, which explicitly refers to Nietzsche--be a poor example of the Übermensch indeed.

Eternal recurrence as formulated by Nietzsche would not allow for any such overcoming from one cycle to the next, for everything repeats in exactly the same way, but the thought in this cycle that you will live the same wretched existence in the next cycle could--as it does for Cage in Edge of Tomorrow--inspire reform this time around:

 

Live. Overcome. Live better.

Previous posts in this series:

Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)