Subjective dispossession and objet a

Groundhog Day

In 1993 the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a television reporter named Phil who gets caught in a temporal loop or a 24 hour time warp. The movie begins just as he arrives in the town of Punxsutawney PA with his television crew, including his producer Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, to cover a national event, Groundhog Day. They cover the event as a straight forward cultural info piece for the morning news, and are prepared to return back to the head office in Pittsburgh. However a winter storm prevents Phil and the crew from leaving that day, and so they remain stranded in the community and must spend the night. Phil gets up the next day only to slowly realize that it is Groundhog Day all over again. He awakens to the same Sonny and Cher song on the radio and the identical radio script from the morning announcer that he heard the day before. He meets the same man outside his hotel room who repeats the exact same greeting, and another man who tries to sell him insurance.

Phil is caught in this repetition of the same day. At first Phil seeks out medical attention from the town doctor and then a psychiatrist. Eventually, in total despair, he tries to end his own life up to and including driving off the edge of a steep cliff, jumping out of a tall building, leaping into a bathtub with a clock radio, yet all of these instances end where they begin, the next morning he wakes up at 6:00 am to the same Sonny and Cher song on the radio, and the exact same radio morning script.

Phil then starts to exploit the repetition for his own purposes. He engages in a game of seduction with his co-worker Rita by gradually building up knowledge of her likes/dislikes through conversations with her during each repetition of Groundhog Day, until he has built up an archive of knowledge about her: favourite vacations, favourite drink, poets etc. For example, in one early conversation he mistakenly comments that Rita’s college degree in French poetry is a “waste of time,” which upsets her. Phil corrects his mistake the next day when, under the same circumstances, instead of uttering the miscue, he chooses to recite a romantic poem en français. Of course, Rita is duly impressed and the romance blossoms; however, the constraint is that Phil must seduce Rita within the 24 hour time frame before everything ‘resets’ and Groundhog Day begins anew. Rita resists Phil’s desperate attempts to ‘speed things up’ which she interprets as just a cheap ploy and walks out on him.

There are two interesting things to note about this film. The first is the way Phil’s seduction scenario exploits the temporal loop. He slowly builds up an archive of knowledge through the continual reiteration of the intersubjective scene, and finishes by authoring what he deems to be the perfect “Rita dating algorithm” that he imagines will finally bring a harmonious conclusion to his night, or so he thought. What essentially is wrong about this scenario? Alain Badiou’s, In Praise of Love makes it clear, the mistake is that people want love without the risk, the uncertainty and unknowingness that comes with any attempt at establishing a relation to the Other. It is the wish for intersubjectivity without, in Butler's words, being undone by the other, that combination of terror/repulsion/attraction/uncertainty/desire. Thus Phil wants to “fall in love” minus the “falling” part.⁶⁴ His mistake is precisely the fallacy of believing that intersubjectivity culminates in a transparency of knowing the Other in all of his or her richness and complexity, without the risk, the exposed vulnerability, chance and uncertainty. However this inexorable intractable part of relationality, precedes individuation. Butler insists that

when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the “you” whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this “I” makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego ... the “I” becomes undone in its ethical relation to the “you”... (2011c)

The crux of the issue is what this subjective deconstitution means? One should avoid going down the path here of interpreting Butler as if she is emphasizing the finitude of the human animal, of its limitation and weakness and vulnerability along with the suggestion that one can only heed a politics of limitation and incremental change. On the contrary, what if the void of the subject, its undoneness, is not a sign of the subject’s particularity, but the opposite, its universality?

But in order to gesture towards a universality of the subject, stripped of its contingent particularistic traits, we need first to trace the trials and tribulations of Phil, who embodies the hegemony of the egological “I” in his attempts to not only seduce Rita, but to break the spell of Groundhog Day. Phil believes that through a persistent iteration he will a) become a subject that Rita will become attracted to, and b) that he, using his expert knowledge of Rita’s intimate personal being, will be able to position himself in Rita’s fantasy framework as a mate who “truly” knows her. Phil believes that in the accumulation of knowledge and experience Rita will become a fully transparent Other to him. Phil believes he can reduce his intersubjective relationship with Rita to an algorithim that he refines during each repetition of Groundhog Day. Doing this he adopts the position of the pervert, in that he believes he truly knows Rita’s intimate desire and he knows what pleases her even better than Rita herself. The conventions of Hollywood dictate that love between them will happen, and the spell of Groundhog Day will eventually be broken, but it doesn’t happen with Phil in the position of the pervert, but rather in the position of the analyst.⁶⁵

How does Phil finally break out of Groundhog Day, the eternal repetition of the same?⁶⁶ In order to break out of Groundhog Day Phil undertakes an act that changes the symbolic coordinates of his situation, and initiates a subjective transformation. In other words Phil, a simple middle-class utilitarian, pragmatic liberal individual enduring a typical social existence, a repetition of the same day in and day out, breaks out of this reiteration and becomes a subject. But how does this occur? In the past Žižek would have accused Butler of not being able to think an escape from “Groundhog Day.” That her reiteration of the self-same only allows for margins of difference, and does not do enough to break with the prevailing symbolic coordinates of the situation.