i've seen this before
this is an abridged essay i wrote 2 years ago. it's about repetition, loving my dad, and being a sentimental monster. not everything in it is still true today (my dad retired, for example)
I’m not particularly fond of Bill Murray, not after hearing about the way he treated Lucy Liu on the set of Charlie’s Angels. I don’t think about him or about Harold Ramis’s classic rom-com Groundhog Day all too often, and when I do, I mostly feel ambivalent. That being said, I’ve probably seen it over a dozen times. I’m my father’s daughter, after all.
My dad is a poster child for engineers, a creature of habit, proud owner of spreadsheets and white tube socks. When I was growing up, whenever my mother went away for the weekend, he would come home from the grocery store with a six-pack of beer and a box of plain Triscuits. That’s your guilty pleasure? I often wanted to ask. Triscuits? If he wasn’t paying attention while driving me somewhere on the 405, he would instinctively take the wrong exit and head straight to his work office, making me late for basketball practice. And whenever Groundhog Day was playing, on any given channel, even if it had already started, even if there was only a half hour remaining in its 101-minute-runtime, my father would put it on and watch until Phil the cynical meteorologist and Rita the saint-like producer were in love.
On the couch with my father, I watched Bill Murray’s Phil experience the same day over and over, strolling through his time-loop predicament with different eras of excess. We were enchanted as he explored permutations of the same scene, with slightly different outcomes, informed by his knowledge from the previous iteration. Phil’s moves through this ordeal (the duration lasts about 10 years) by indulging in phases of binge-eating, womanizing and repeated suicide; until finally, he decides to devote his piece of eternity to connecting with others — the only worthwhile way to spend time, whether stuck in an infinite loop or not. We witnessed an entire lifetime, a redemption arc, a dozen times over, contained neatly in a single day.
My father loves stories about inescapable time loops. He gave me the plot synopsis of Christmas Every Day (I probably could have guessed it) in lieu of a bedtime story one night when I was five or six. He rented discs enclosing the show you’ve never heard of, Day Break, after its untimely cancellation left him and whoever else was watching it at the edge of a cliff. Never a fan of the horror genre, he still raves about Happy Death Day. When my family watched Hulu’s Palm Springs together last year, he seemed pleased to have encountered a new narrative approach — science rather than mysticism — to ending the infinite repetition. I keep Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s short story “Through the Flash,” in which characters respond to a similar time loop by torturing neighbors and killing the ones they love, to myself. I think it might sour his love for the conceit.
When I was younger, watching Groundhog Day in my pajamas some late Saturday morning, I somehow wasn’t disturbed by the scenes of Phil repeatedly committing suicide. I laughed when he takes Phil (the groundhog, of course) and drives a stolen red truck into a quarry, erupting in flames. Maybe it wasn’t scary because Groundhog Day always felt familiar to me, like a nursery rhyme or hymn. I can’t remember the first time I saw it. With all its repetition, it probably felt familiar to me that time too.
I never thought to be haunted by the scenes in which Phil tries in vain to save the life of an old man destined to die, by Phil’s general sleaziness, by the chilly chipperness of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe'' playing on the radio each morning. Instead, it’s the movie’s exploration of repetition and the trickiness of memory that continue to move me.
Sometimes I fear my father is at the center of a time loop. He wakes up at 5:45 every day. He reads the bible for 15-20 minutes and does not eat breakfast, or if he does, it’s a jelly-filled donut from Nevin’s on Los Alamitos Blvd. He drives a white Tacoma (before that a white Ford F-150, before that a white Ford F-150) for two hours of gridlocked LA traffic, listening to talk radio. He does whatever he does at work, which is information I believe no one should really know about their father. He drives home through two hours of traffic again, but listens to music this time. After dinner, he does the dishes, and sometimes, the laundry. After that, he watches television. And if there’s not a new airing of The Voice to be viewed with my mother, he will probably watch a movie he’s seen before.
My mother tries her best to surprise me, but my dad has always given me routine. When I was young, he’d test my memorization of the state capitals and we’d play a game quizzing each other’s movie knowledge from a single famous line. I’d try to trick him with vague phrases like “Hi” or “What are you doing?” We played our games over and over again. When I was a little older, we would go to the movies, and every time he’d buy a mini container of Dibs, those chocolate-covered ice cream morsels, to share. In the car he’d explain to me the basis of calculus, again and again, as though I had never heard his lectures before. When I was sixteen, he’d say the same things to me every day: you should eat if you feel cold, you should eat if you feel tired. It all blends together to the point where I can’t extract a singular memory involving these events. I just know they happened and then happened again.
When watching Groundhog Day, I am caught by the same scene each time: the one in which Phil and Rita throw playing cards into a hat, and Phil declares with resignation that Rita won’t remember the day’s events, come the next morning. Only he will be left with the memory. Even when I was a kid, this scene left a far greater impact than the declarations of love and dedication to good deeds Phil took up after this version of February 2. I know Phil must have grieved this day, and the loneliness that followed it. But at least he got to keep it. I keep wondering if Rita grieved what she knew she would forget.
Sometimes I worry about what memories get lost in routine. It troubles me that I can’t extract and preserve the singular moments my father and I spent together when I was a child; I can only draw up measly supercuts. It troubles me that memories never seem to be shared equally, that because of who I am in this world, I will always remember things slightly differently than my father. It troubles me that someday I’ll have sole custody of these memories, but by then they may have been corrupted, victims of lossy compression. I have all these fears, but then when I go to the movie theater with my father and smell popcorn as he sits beside me, the muscle memory, the familiar comfort of routine comes rushing back to my body like a flood.
I can’t recall the last time I told my father I love him, outright. We don't talk on the phone late into the night the way I might with my mother. But every once in a while my father will text me that he rewatched a movie I like. When I’m home for a week or for a month, we’ll probably watch it together again and again, again.
Recommended reading for memory monsters like me
Watch: Groundhog Day, C’mon C’mon, The Worst Person in the World, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Read: Severance, Conversations With Friends, The Year of Magical Thinking, After the Three-Moon Era