groundhog day and the truman show
two 1990s capitalist horror movies
If I think of comfort movies from the ‘90s, I think almost inevitably of Groundhog Day and The Truman Show. They’re iconic, and both have that warm nostalgic glow of a lot of films I’ve watched a bunch with my family. I think I’m not particularly rare in this, but in case you’ve somehow missed them both, here’s a quick summary of each (there are spoilers, though the plots are never particularly unpredictable). In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a weatherman who visits a remote town called Punxsutawney to report on the meteorological groundhog (also called Phil), but gets trapped in an endless cycle in which he relives the same day — groundhog day — over and over again. Eventually, as you will have guessed if you have consumed any media ever, he breaks out of the cycle by becoming a genuinely good person, he semi-problematically convinces a beautiful woman to fall in love with him, and so on. The Truman Show centres around Truman, an insurance salesman played by Jim Carrey, who is unknowingly the star of the biggest television show on earth, and has been since birth; everyone he has ever met, with the exception of a few successful trespassers, has been an actor. By the end, as you will no doubt have assumed, he works out that his world isn’t the real one, and manages to escape (he may or may not also get the girl; to be honest I like to imagine he doesn’t).
Beyond their shared genre and decade, these films have quite a lot in common. Jim Carrey and Bill Murray give extraordinarily good central performances which both films entirely depend on (indeed, the director of Groundhog Day designed the lead for Murray). Both roles are also quite similar, performing this tightrope act of hyperactivity and depression, and it’s so easy to imagine another actor in either role going too far either way and tipping the films into being unbearably annoying or just sad. This is crucial, because while both films are generally held up as fun quirky family movies, they’re really kinda existentially horrifying. I mean, Truman was legally adopted by a corporation so he could, with neither knowledge nor consent, star in a TV show, and everybody he has ever met (including his parents and wife) has actively lied to him about the nature of their relationship. The tragic death of his father at sea was staged in front of him when he was a young child with the active intent of traumatising him so he never tried to leave the island he grew up on. Groundhog Day isn’t an ethical horror show in the same way, but the idea of living the same day thousands of times, the only one able to remember anything that previously happened, doesn’t bear thinking about. No wonder part of the movie is just a succession of different ways Phil tries killing himself.Â
The concepts behind the films are obviously quite different — in fact, in many respects they're the inverse of each other. In Groundhog Day, Phil is the only one who knows the nature of his world, but Truman is the only one who doesn’t in his. However, if you look a little deeper, the settings have a lot in common. Just as the horror of Groundhog Day is in the repetition, one of the things which makes Truman suspect something’s up is how everything seems the same. What prompts the closest he gets to the self-destructive behaviour Phil demonstrates is when he notices that the same people and cars keep going past their house on a loop.Â
There’s also a lot in both about scripting and surfaces, although in slightly contrasting ways — though obviously the postmodern, late-capitalist resonance of these concepts is very much in play. Phil begins to script essentially every aspect of his life, and when he finally escapes it’s after a day which has clearly been planned to the very second. The most distressing scene for me is when Phil tries to script the perfect date with Rita — it keeps failing, but the level of planning is genuinely disturbing. Meanwhile, The Truman Show (the TV show) is entirely scripted. Two of the most uncomfortable moments are when we’re shown all the extras in their starting positions for the day — standing stock still as they await a cue — and when the actor playing Truman’s best friend attempts to convince him that everything is real and he shouldn’t want to leave the island. ‘If everyone was in on it,’ says Marlon, ‘I’d have to be in on it, too,’ but we’re shown that this apparently heartfelt speech is being fed to him by the director, Christof. In terms of surfaces, meanwhile, we get a similar picture: it sometimes feels like Phil is all surface, and although he works out how to do some seemingly good things early in the movie, the message is always that he has to get to a point of doing them genuinely to become a good person. He has to develop depth. Meanwhile, we keep being shown that Truman’s world is only surface-deep, like when he goes into a building he wouldn’t normally step foot in and discovers that one of the elevators doesn’t actually have a back.
While the films use these motifs in different ways — in Groundhog Day, they’re tools wielded by the protagonist to manipulate the world around him and eventually escape, while in The Truman Show they’re central parts of the trap he’s trying to get out of — we should note that there are points in common. While Phil does use scripts to his advantage, he’s only able to do so because he learns that his entire reality is itself scripted. He has a unique ability to mess with these scripts, of course, but it’s not that he’s inventing them — he’s just reshaping them. Furthermore, a lot of the drama is Phil realising that he’s trapped by the superficiality which appears to define him, and learning to have actual depth and reality.Â
Similarly, Truman is extremely comfortable manipulating the scripts laid out for him, even if to start with it’s unconscious. At the beginning of the film, he’s every bit the perfect sitcom character husband — the wide Jim Carrey grin, the catchphrase (‘Good morning! And in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight’) — and quite clearly knows exactly how to do what’s expected of him. This isn’t, if you think about it, all that surprising, because he’s been surrounded by actors his entire life; if he seems a little false and scripted, it’s only because everyone around him does, too. As the film progresses, he goes off the rails — he even starts not answering the questions he’s asked by the radio show he listens to every morning and which is made exclusively for him — before suddenly he seems to be right back to normal, back in the script. It’s not, though, that he’s decided to go back to his life as it was before: it’s that he’s trying to escape, but because he now realises the scripted nature of his reality, he knows how to disguise his intentions and play his role. That his last line is repeating his catchphrase — but this time as a rebuke of the show’s creator and to make his final departure — shows that he’s learned the rules of his reality just as Phil did, and this is what’s allowed him to escape.
Within all this, it’s obvious that both films are trying, to at least some degree, Say Something About Art — they’re very straightforward in commenting on films like these operate, not to mention the types of media they contain, whether weather reporting or reality shows. They’re talking about how art can be superficial and scripted and it’s all very meta and postmodern and clever, but I’m not particularly interested in it. What I am interested in is the extent to which these films function as horror movies about capitalism, in a way which has a lot in common with more modern pieces about class, capitalism, and/or race like Sorry to Bother You, Get Out, Parasite, or Snowpiercer (this last one has some downright uncanny resemblances with The Truman Show, right down to the main antagonist being played by the same person). It’s really striking that many aspects of both Groundhog Day and The Truman Show, perhaps especially in the latter, play almost identically with horror movies, and there’s a creeping existential dread and despair to them which sometimes feels like it recalls something like The Shining. I really can’t sufficiently express how horrifying these films become if you only start looking for it.Â
The targets of this despair are always capitalist in origin, both with things like Truman’s legal adoption by a TV network and the general sense of alienation both characters have from the world around them. Truman (and the viewer) is driven to distraction by people around him incessantly promoting products (the only way the show earns money, we’re told). Everything is commodified; everything is alienating. Insofar as the lives of the protagonists are nightmares because they’re constantly forced to do essentially the same thing over and over again, isn’t this just what we have to do already? It’s no accident that they’re both set in small towns of the type which win awards for being ‘the best place to live in America’. Each movie is, to a certain extent, about alienation from this exact kind of fetishised, capitalist Americana, where everything is folksy but nothing is real.Â
What these films both do, then, is show us a hyperreal version of our own world, where the challenge for the protagonists is how to escape not just the specific confines they find themselves within but from the kind of capitalist despair we all experience. In both films, the solution is to appropriate much of what is horrifying about the settings and use it to break free — to learn not just how to speak in the language of capitalism but how to use it for your own ends. I’m interested, though, in how far this is ever actually successful. For Truman, I can’t imagine that the rest of his life will ever be easy, or how far, really, anything will change. With the exception of Lauren, a former cast member who Truman fell in love with and who despises the show’s exploitation of him, it’s not like he actually knows anyone on the outside, and his life is presumably still going to be subject to intense media scrutiny. He’ll still be someone who’s only trained to be a (fictional, ineffective) insurance salesman.Â
Phil’s future appears bright — he agrees that he’ll move to Punxsutawney with Rita, and he’s got a new lease on life — but while he’s changed from the shallow snob he once was, and perhaps Punxsutawney has a certain charm that falls a bit outside of what he was used to, the world hasn’t evolved with him. The film ends with him talking about buying a house after moving, building a future — but it’s a future which is still on capitalism’s terms (if anything, it’s even more normal than he used to be) and on a certain level it’s hopelessly naive — I mean, what’s he going to do for a job? In a film about surfaces, it’s even left open whether Phil really has changed, or whether it was just an act or something forced by his circumstances. When he finally wakes up on the morning after groundhog day, he’s thrilled that it’s something different, but he’ll still be in a society where he has to work for a living. He’ll still keep getting advertised insurance, even if it’s not by the same insurance salesman in the same interaction every time.
The moments of real power for both characters, when they could really change things about their life, was when they realised they could live essentially without consequences. Phil goes on a crime spree, even kidnapping the groundhog, and Truman stands in the middle of the road and stops traffic and blows off work, because nothing anyone can do can meaningfully harm them. Neither are particularly happy at these points, and maybe their actions during these periods aren’t sustainable — but they represent something genuinely new in a way the endings aren’t, and indeed there’s an extent to which the traps they’re caught in offer a chance to escape from capitalism and the consequences it enforces. This is highlighted in each film: in Groundhog Day, when Phil asks some people he meets at a bar what they’d do if nothing mattered, and they highlight the possibilities of living with no consequences; in The Truman Show, when Christof tells Truman that:Â
‘There's no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. Same lies. The same deceit. But in my world, you have nothing to fear.’Â
He’s right, to an extent. At the end of each movie, the protagonists of Groundhog Day and The Truman Show return to the real world, but it’s far from clear that it’s in any way less horrifying than the realities they’re leaving. Though at least, I suppose, it’s on their terms.