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Writer's pictureLaurel Creighton

Groundhog Day and Fabulism



What is the difference between plot and story? According to Russian Formalists, the plot is what we see and hear while a story goes much deeper. The Russian Formalists’ term for the story is “Fabula.” Fabulists were interested in what happens to the viewer, and a “Fabula” is a pattern those viewers of narratives create through assumptions and inferences. By picking up narrative cues. We may never see the family background, but there may be a reference in the story to corroborate our view and sense of the story. We are presented with two or more narrative events (are they connected?) with causal, spatial, and temporal links. This is the imaginary construct we create. Progressively and retrospectively. A story is different from the plot, which is the film’s actual presentation of certain events in the narrative. A story is not a story unless someone tells it—a series of actions enacted by a character. A story is all the events we see and hear, and those we infer have occurred. We rearrange events in their presumed causal relations, chronological order, duration, frequency, or spatial locations.

This is an important distinction to make, especially in the case of Groundhog Day (1993, America). The plot of Groundhog Day is deceivingly simple. Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, becomes trapped in a seemingly endless time loop where he must, like Sisyphus, re-encounter the same trial day in and day out. The difference between Connors and the great Olympian is that Connors’ boulder is to spend every day in a sleepy Pennsylvania town, repeating February 2nd, known as Groundhog Day, indefinitely. The story behind Phil Collins’ eternal damnation is a little more complex. The genre of the plot can be considered as comedic or fantasy, but when looked at through a Fabulist lens, the story is significantly a tale of self-improvement and redemption.

This is a forking narrative path. However, it deviates from Bordwell’s criteria in Film Futures, giving Groundhog Day an especially experimental feel. According to Bordwell, most forking narrative paths have 7 criteria in common; forking paths are linear; the fork is signposted; forking paths intersect sooner or later, forking-path tales are unified by traditional cohesion devices such as appointments and deadlines, forking paths will often run parallel, all paths are not equal; the last one taken presupposes the rest, and the last path taken is the least hypothetical one.

There is no signpost in Groundhog Day. We are as confused as Phil Connors is when he awakens to the Sonny and Cher song playing on his alarm clock. The film continues to resist an equation through the ending credits. We as an audience never know and, in some ways, begin the journey in media res, trying to figure out how to deal with the situation that’s just happened to Phil. Granted that the setting is a familiar space: the Frank Capra of American pastoral, the holiday occurrence of pulling a groundhog from its slumber to predict how many more weeks of winter will be left is exotic and unfamiliar.

In most forking path narratives, only a few parallel narratives are explored to keep continuity and to fit into the Hollywood standard runtime of about 2 hours. In these two hours, we explore the allotted number of narratives through until the end of the film. The film Groundhog Day differs exponentially because it is all about beginnings. Our forking paths of possibilities are endless but only enduring a set amount of time, 24 hours. Even in this relatively short amount of time span, there are common occurrences for Phil to navigate: the slimy insurance salesman from his past, the homeless man (whom, in the most Capra-esque narrative, Phil realizes it is his last day to live), the impending weather storm that Phil has not predicted correctly, Sonny and Cher on the radio, and the emergence of Puxatawney Phil down in the town pavilion.

While the plot shows us a particular number of sequences of events during Phil’s time in small-town Pennsylvanian purgatory, we get a real sense from the story that there are many days and experiences we are not seeing. In the original script, there was a sequence written where Phil would read only one page from a bookshelf covered in books, and towards the end of the film, we would discover that all the books had been read. Harold Ramis claims that the story of Phil’s new beginnings takes a total of 10,000 years, which in Buddhist principles is the length of the third age of Buddhism before passing into Nirvana; however, this theory is denied by Danny Rubin. Rubin does ascertain that the film does have a feeling akin to Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha in terms of its epic quality and duration throughout a man’s life. Rubin and Ramis deliver a deeply moving, philosophical, and bitingly satirical story within a 110-minute plot.

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