10,000 Years? Here's How Long Phil Connors Was Trapped In ...

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Nearly three decades after its premiere, the 1993 movie Groundhog Day has reached a new level of relevance under COVID-19. The world’s locked-down, working-from-home millions often report that they feel trapped in the movie’s plotline of an unending, inescapable time loop. “It does have this feeling like we’ve done this before. We’ve been here before. There’s nothing new on the horizon,” psychologist Steve Joordens told the Canadian Press last week.

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But one of the enduring mysteries of the classic film is just how long the main character spends in his bizarre temporal limbo. Almost since the film’s release (which happened 10 days after Groundhog Day), it has obsessed fans and dogged the film’s cast and crew.

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Groundhog Day follows Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, a TV weatherman who becomes mysteriously trapped in a time loop during a reporting trip to Punxataney, PA, for the town’s annual celebration of Groundhog Day. Whatever he does, every 24 hours Connors wakes up in the exact same Punxatawney bed-and-breakfast on the morning of February 2.

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The screenwriter’s initial plan was to have Connors trapped in the time loop for several millennia. The original script contains a final confession by Connors to his love interest Rita that “I’ve been waiting for you every day for ten thousand years.”

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This first draft also struck a much darker tone in making it clear that Connors was the victim of near-unimaginable torture. At one point, Connors describes his fate as one of “total despair.”

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The final film explicitly cut any reference to the length of Connors’ penure, but his time consigned to purgatory appears to have been much more reasonable. Director Harold Ramis, who died in 2014, once told the New York Times that Connors was stuck in Groundhog Day for only 10 years. Later, in a 2009 email to Heeb Magazine, Ramis would revise his estimate. “It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything, and, allotting (sic) for the down time and misguided years he spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years,” he wrote.

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Still, almost since the inception of the internet, amateur sleuths have attempted to more precisely crack the code of just how many days Connors was trapped in Groundhog Day.

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These generally focus on the skills that Connors acquires during his imposed purgatory: He becomes a skilled pianist, an ice sculptor and learns to quote French poetry — in addition to fulfilling a daily routine of helping out the various townsfolk of Punxatawney. By film’s end, Connors is seen rescuing a child falling from a tree, changing a troubled motorist’s flat tire, delivering the Heimlich maneuver to a choking man and counselling a nervous young couple to follow through with their imminent marriage.

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Easily the most-cited calculation comes in a 2009 blog post by pop culture writer Wolf Gnards. The post counted 42 individual days that are either depicted or referenced in the film, and then tacked on extra days based on Connors’ skill acquisition, such as allotting three years to learn piano. Wolf Gnards’ final total was 8 years, 8 months, and 16 days.

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In 2011, the website WhatCulture delivered an even more obsessive calculation, arriving at a total of 33 years and 350 days. However, this version suffers from some extreme overestimates, such as the supposition that since Connors is seen at one point to recite French poetry, he must have spent 12 years of his life in the time loop exclusively learning French.

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None of Connors’ acquired skills are necessarily indicative of someone who needed decades of practice. It’s possible to become a passable piano player in as little as six weeks, particularly if one had the laserlike focus of a man trapped in a time loop. Notably, there are numerous instances of actors crash-learning musical instruments for roles, such as Taron Egerton undergoing intensive piano training in preparation to play Elton John in the movie Rocketman. For Groundhog Day, even Bill Murray coached himself up on the piano just enough so that he could play the instrument in wide shots.

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The expert-level ice carving displayed by Connors might take a bit longer, but even then a dedicated student could reach proficiency in months or years, rather than decades. The ice sculptures in the film were made by real-life Punxatawney resident Randy Rupert, who had been plying his trade for about 15 years before he was hired by the film’s producers.

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Ultimately, it’s not implausible that Phil Connors could have acquired his Groundhog Day skills in a timeline not much longer that the 10 months of COVID lockdowns that have plagued much of the world since March, 2020. But Groundhog Day’s producers were intentionally cagey about the length of the time loop for a reason: By not putting defined boundaries on Connors’ story of redemption and finding meaning, it becomes a much more relatable film.

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As director Harold Ramis said in a 2009 talk, almost immediately after the film’s release it became embraced by Jewish, Buddhist, Christian and even psychiatric communities as a metaphor for their own quests for meaning and deliverance. Ironically, it’s also become one of the most serially rewatched movies in history. “There’s something in (the film) where every time people see it they can reconsider where they are in life and question their own habitual behaviours,” he said.

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