Groundhog Day Review & Synopsis: Feeling Stuck

Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, a good reflection of ruminations of mine today.

Hi Everybody,

Well, I promised you that my next post would be on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but I got the inspiration to post on a different topic. When inspiration strikes, sometimes you just have to change your plans, and clear your schedule to follow your inspiration. However, my next post will be on Extremely Loud, I promise you.

I realized that today is "Groundhog Day." This reminded me of that Bill Murray movie that came out in 1993, about that same seasonal landmark. It's a pretty funny movie. I wouldn't call it a great movie, or rank it up there with Casablanca or Citizen Cane, but I liked it overall. It did what it set out to do, with some fun in between.

If you haven't seen it, I recommend that you do, but I will give you the premise here, and relate back to my overall mood today. Anyway, Bill Murray plays Phil, this local TV anchor from Pittsburgh, who gets sent to Punxsutawney, PA, to do a story on the annual Punxsutawney Phil festival, which is to predict if winter will continue or not. To him, the assignment is tedious, pointless, and beneath him, so he uses the time to be generally douchy to his assistants, including one woman who is his producer.

Anyway, he sees this as the worst day of his life, and tries desperately to get back to Pittsburgh. A blizzard has snowed them in, though, and he must return to town. Phil wakes up the next day to discover that it is-February 2 again. He goes through his day, avoiding old friends and people in town that he meets. As the day repeats again, and again, and again, Phil grows increasingly desperate, chewing people out, and later going on a reckless driving spree and baiting the cops.

As Phil keeps waking up, and it keeps being February 2, Phil is in utter despair. He attempts to kill himself, along with Punxsutawney Phil, in a car accident. Then he tries several suicide attempts, but they are in vain, because the next morning, he keeps waking up to February 2, and the alarm clock plays "I Got You, Babe." Failing that, Phil then turns to generosity, as per his producer's request. He goes around each day, saving the townspeople from various hazards, getting to know everyone in town, even learning new skills. It is only after all of these works of philanthropy that Phil is able to wake up on February 3, and resume his life with his producer.

This is what brings me to the kind of funk I was in today. I realized today that my problem is that I am feeling "stuck." I had heard that term used as a way of feeling before, but I never knew what it really meant.
Loosely defined, it refers to feeling like you can't move forward, for whatever reason. You feel like you can't do anything, whatever you do will fail, and you can't count on anybody to help you out. So you just can't go forward. You can't make any advancement in your job or career, you can't experience the life you truly want to, whatever relationships you may have flounder, and starting new ones is impossible to you.

You could also throw in the term "discouraged." The two feelings actually reinforce each other. You get stuck, and you can't make any progress on things you want. They just seem to pass you by. After a number of things you want pass you by, your discouragement mounts. You just think "Why the hell bother, man? I'm just gonna get the same shit I always get."

Now, today, when I was reviewing a wonderful book I found about this feeling of being "stuck," it mentioned that there are many aspects to being stuck. As I read, I recognized that I shared some of them, but not all. It seems like there are parts of me that aren't stuck, but there are parts that are. Sometimes I feel like my life is just fine, others, it's like I can never get the life I want.

What prompted this little funk of mine? Yesterday, in my theater class, I was working with this group, there were a few girls there, and they mentioned that Valentine's Day is coming up. They mentioned things about the relationships they were in, or were not in. One of them said she'd never been in a relationship during Valentine's Day. I wanted to point out to them that I had never been in a relationship, period. I might as well tell you about this now, because this is something that has been on my mind a lot. I have never been in any sort of romantic relationship, ever.

It isn't that I haven't tried to be before. I tried once, years ago. There was this one girl, a short, blonde girl, in the seventh grade. I remember she had this wonderful smile. Every time she'd smile, her face seemed to light up. Anyway, I had a huge crush on her. I didn't really know what I was doing. I proclaimed that I was madly smitten with her. She tried to tell me she just wanted to be friends, but I wanted her to be mine. I was crestfallen, because I was thirteen; I didn't know any better. Later that year, I tried to get in with two other girls, with very little success. I just tried the same old goofy conversational stuff I used to do back then.

I can still remember the last day I tried to talk to that last girl I had a serious crush on. It was a bright sunny day in early June. I was fourteen, and I just gently walked up, trying to start a conversation, and I got the infamous "talk to the hand" gesture, while she looked dismissively away. It was the worst day of my life. I was totally humiliated. I only realized later what a gesture of personal, biting rejection that had been to me. I haven't had the nerve to make an overture to a girl since.

Now, I don't want to tell you all this to have a pity party for myself. I just, really and truly, want to share with you that has been keeping me stuck, in a big and small way, for all these years. When I see everybody else having such ease getting into relationships, I experience this feeling of being left out, cast aside, and, in the more extreme moments of frustration, damned. In the last couple of years, every time I have seen a girl who looks or seems likeable, she always ends up having a boyfriend. It seems like 80-90% of the girls I meet or know already have boyfriends.

This is why I got discouraged today, because this happened yet again. You know what the most frustrating part of all this is? That I just haven't been able to work up enough courage to make overtures to a girl. I just worry about being rejected, and then what would happen if I did get into a relationship? What do people do in relationships to make them work? I'd worry about making the relationship work right. I don't know if I could handle rejection or being dumped again. I'm the kind of guy that wouldn't be able to leave the house for two weeks after a breakup.

What I realized today, and the whole reason I brought all this up, is that I have a lot of fault in this. I feel like I can only blame myself for the predicament I'm in. I've been too afraid of rejection, of accidentally pursuing a girl with a boyfriend, of being the unwanted one. This has thoroughly stunted my initiative. From all the things I've heard girls talk about what they want in guys, none of it sounds like me. They say they want guys with jobs, money, and a guy who parties at the club every weekend. I've had a few jobs and internships, all of which have lasted only a few months, I still live with my parents at age 21, and I only have a small group of friends, I rarely hang out with them at college-style parties.

So, never having had a romantic or sexual relationship at age 21, I feel really, seriously stuck in my life. There is this sense of desperation when I look at the people around me. There is a blend of angry, resentful, sad and hurt emotions that I do not want to feel. It feels to me like nobody else has the type of problem I have, this type of severe relational handicap. It isn't even that I dislike people. I really do like people, but I want to be able to relate on my own terms. Many times, it feels like I can't do that. It feels like I have to acquiesce on what I really think is important in life.

I realized today, when I remembered that movie, Groundhog Day, that I feel stuck in what seems to be an interminable cycle, at least in respect to relating to other people. The good news is, that like I said, I found this really insightful book on what to do, spiritually and physically, when you feel stuck. It talks about behavior strategies many people have for avoiding facing things in their lives. I have some inklings of things that I used to do everything I could not to face, and I have begun facing those head-on. It feels like it is such an immense, uphill battle, lo these many months (I have been doing this for nearly a year, now). I have an idea of what the traps are, mentally, yet I still fall into them. I know I should be more confident and take more initiative in these things, yet there is something inside me that blocks me from doing so.

The good news is, I feel much less stuck now than I did two or three or four years ago. Back then, I used to have this low-level burned-out, anxious, angry, depressed feeling, and I didn't know why. I hoped things would get better in the future, yet the things in life whose idea made me feel warm, alive continued to elude me. Now, I at least know some of what is going on inside me that drives my feeling of life. I feel less stuck now than I used to. I hope I can continue, and with some time, I will feel confident enough in myself to take that step. God willing, there will be some girl who is attracted to men who strive to be intelligent, conscientious, truthful, just, and an all-around enjoyable person. God, how I hope such a girl can be available. However, now I am getting close to being at peace. Because, really, that is more durable than anything.

See ya, and keep wondering, Folks!

Get Low: Movie Synopsis & Response

Hi there everybody,

I've decided to branch out again today. I will be taking a look at a movie, in this case, what I liked about it. I wanted to bring up this film because it "grabbed" me early on, and it is about coming to grips with a life ending. The movie I would like to talk about today is Get Low. This sounds like the name of a Lil' John song, but it is a reference to being buried, to getting low in the ground. It came out a year and a half ago, in mid-2010. It stars Robert Duvall as Felix, a misunderstood recluse, Bill Murray as Frank, a funeral director from out of town, Lucas Black as his associate, Buddy, and Sissy Spacek as Mattie, a former girlfriend of Felix.

This film comes from an incident that happened in rural Tennessee, back in 1938. The movie is set in an unnamed town in the backwoods of Tennessee, around the same time (though a specific year is never mentioned). In the opening scene, a gang of kids is wandering around on Felix's property, and flee in terror when a shotgun sounds. This is Felix Bush's life. He lives exclusively on his backwoods property, rarely visiting the local town. Everyone tells stories about him, since no one knows what his story really is. He knows that he doesn't have much time left on Earth, and there is something he needs to share before his time is up

So he entertains the idea of holding a pre-death funeral for himself, as in Tuesdays With Morrie. This, however, is decidedly a less cheery affair. This is where Frank Quinn comes in. Frank is a local funeral director who has moved into town from Chicago. He isn't behind this idea at first, but Felix pushes him to help him plan it. The point of this is to hear the stories everyone in town is telling about him, and get his own story out while he can. Pretty soon, people from all over begin agreeing to attend the "living funeral."

Soon, Felix beings getting cold feet, when Mattie emerges. He insists that Frank contact a nearby minister and ask him to attend. However, the minister refuses, unless Felix "tells the truth." This is where we realize there is some deep dark secret, something so awful the minister refuses to face Felix again. Now, I will have to give away some of the surprise of Felix's secret, here. I don't want to, because I'd rather you see it, but I will tell you here, in a way that won't give the whole thing away.

At the end, people end up turning out, en masse, for Felix's "funeral party." The minister had been coaxed into attending, after all, by Frank. Mattie also turned out to see the spectacle. Now the time had come for Felix's big revelation. He took the stage, and told the reason that he had been on his property for decades. He revealed that he had an affair with Mattie's sister. He had planned to run away with her, but one night, 40 years earlier (around 1900), he got in an altercation with her and her husband, a fire got started in her house, and he escaped the burning house, while the woman and her husband burned to death.

Felix had felt to blame all that time. He had exiled himself because he was afraid to face that. What strikes me is that this is actually a very common story. People hide from their flaws or past wrongs all the time. We hide in all sorts of ways. We cut ourselves off from people, we are not truthful, we present false images to others. Felix had this thing weighing on his conscience, and he had had no way of addressing the wrong. He was going to die, so now he had to do it. This was the challenge of this movie. People like to see struggles in movies, and this one was a profound spiritual struggle.

Now, onto some of the parts of the movie that I liked. As I said at the top, it "grabbed" me from the beginning. What got me about it was the people in it. I believed in the characters I saw. There was something about this place and these people that seemed unforced, like it came easily. Now, Robert Duvall has a presence in his roles. It seems to me that it takes about 20 to 25 years for an actor on screen to obtain this presence. His chemistry with Bill Murray and the others made the tension really work. You knew there was this crazy hermit element to him, but he also showed enough of his

A technical aspect of the production that worked was the dialect everybody in this film used. That might seem bizarre, but having learned the distinctions between the dialects of various sub-regions, it caught my attention here. They didn't ham the typical "Southern" accents. The characters used just as much of the Tennessee dialect (since dialect varies in different areas of the South. I will explain these distinctions in a later post) as someone living there would.

Robert Duvall and Bill Murray in Get Low. Note the surrounding details of the period setting.

Aside from how they communicated, the period aspect was done just enough. The volume of old items and materials used was, to me, just the right amount. What I mean by this is that some movies really put forward the exact dates, which sometimes helps, but it also pins the story down as applying more to that time and place. They took the right amount of care to include rooms, recording equipment, cars, etc., from that late 30's-early 40's era, but they included few, if any, references to the time, the way many other movies do. In this way, the movie became a more universal test of coming to terms with a life ending.


The pacing of the story was both good and bad. At the beginning, the interactions between Duvall and the others grabbed my attention, and I never got disengaged from it. Toward the middle of it, the details, and the purposes for the scenes got more obscure. For a while in the middle of the movie, I was worried that I was going to get disengaged.


However, I wanted the movie to work by that point. You know that disengaged feeling, where your mind drifts to "What am I gonna do later?" That's what I am referring to here. Since I believe in the characters and the setting, I was willing to cut it some slack. By the end, it ended up paying off.


Then there was the meaning, that I referred to earlier. Fundamentally, this is a story about fixing a big problem, righting a wrong. Not just a wrong, the wrong. This was the big one, the one that speaks to what people avoid. We live our whole lives trying to avoid facing our shames, our wrongs, our defeats. When Felix decided to hold this funeral for himself, hear the stories people were telling about him, then say what his "big secret" was, that was an act of raw courage.


Having faced this, Felix's life was at peace. A life at peace is a good that people, from people with their whole lives in front of them to those on their deathbeds, seek, but is closer than they think. The reason my Grandmother's passing wasn't as sad for me was because I knew she had had a full and complete life. She had had about as good a life as anyone could ask for. With regards to Fuzz, the jury is still out on whether she could have had "more" in her life. I do know, however, that she lived with no regrets, no shame, no lasting pain that made her hide from the world. Looking back now, that was what made this story stand out.

Well, thanks for reading this "review." I don't know whether this should be called a review, or a synopsis, or what have you. I'll probably figure out a good name for it soon. This is the first of my posts on movies and plays I have encountered that I want to share, and frame, and discuss with you. I look forward to doing more of that.

See ya, and keep wondering, Folks!