David Heuser

As always: warning! Spoilers below.

In the movie Groundhog Day, (1993) Phil (played by Bill Murry) claims godhood, pointing to his inability to die. "I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted and burned," he tells Rita. "Every morning I wake up without a scratch on me, not a dent in the fender: I am an immortal." Like a god, he also possesses knowledge about everyone and everything within the confines of the time and geography he is trapped in. He speculates, "Maybe God has just been around a long time and knows everything."

When Rita asks how he knows what he knows, he replies, "I wake up every day, right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it's always February 2nd, and there's nothing I can do about it." However, I wonder about the rest of Punxsutawney. What about everyone else?

There is another thing bothering me. I'm struck how Phil's experience is essentially the same as the Hosts' experience at the beginning of the HBO series Westworld (2016, premiere) with one major difference: the Hosts do not remember the day they keep repeating while Phil does. There are other differences, to be sure. Hosts are occasionally reprogrammed to be different people with different backstories and different story arcs - essentially the "day" they keep repeating sometimes changes - but for long stretches they are trapped within a particular place and within the same (perceived) day. Only the people they interact with change, another difference with Phil's situation where the citizens of the town and his co-workers remain constant.

Director Harold Ramis had suggested Phil repeats his one day for about 10 years, but revised that later to "between 30 and 40." Simon Gallagher used the movie itself to pinpoint it to nearly 34 years (12,403 days). Interestingly, timelines created for Westworld set the park opening in 2017 and the "present day" of the show as 2052, making original Hosts, such as Dolores, at least 35 years old. That these numbers are so close is a happy coincidence. When the Hosts begin to remember all of those days, all of their past lives (and deaths), they move into the same kind of state as Phil's - a kind of godhood.

As this recovery of memories occurs unevenly in the Hosts, I will use Dolores as a specific example of this. Other Hosts have somewhat different experiences, particularly Maeve, who I'll touch on later.

Both Phil and Dolores (post memory restoration) have this incredible depth of memory to draw on. In Dolores, these memories are so perfect they get confused and mixed with the present for a time, as she learns how to differentiate between the present and the past. While Phil lacks that kind of perfect memory, his is presented as nearly infallible - we rarely see his memory falter. This could be explained simply by his world being so much smaller than Dolores' in many ways. He truly is repeating the same day, without any new characters entering the town, like the Guests do in Dolores' world, and with a more confined physical boundary. We see Dolores on one adventure stray far from her homestead home over several days with young William. Phil also does not have any changes in his circumstances to contend with, while Dolores' memories include changes in her backstory (like getting a new father) and experiences outside of her characters "normal" life (such as her conversations with Bernard in the Hive). She also has memories associated with her time as Wyatt.

While these 30+ years of memories give Phil and Dolores an incredible knowledge base, they also provide abilities through muscle memory. Most clearly shown in Groundhog Day is the way Phil learns to play the piano, through a series of repeating one-day lessons. Dolores enhanced physical abilities, such as her fighting abilities, seem to be of the same nature as Phil's piano playing.

Phil cannot do the same thing with his body, which resets each day. If he dies, or loses a limb, he still wakes up the same as he was on the first day physically. Note that the self-improvement efforts Phil makes do not include working out to improve his physical health, because that would not carry through. Each morning, he would lose the effects of the previous day's exercise. It is clear that memory is the source of his abilities and his growth. Similarly, when Dolores gets repaired, or even gets a new body, it is always the same body.

Westworld's main thesis is that memory is necessary to be a fully realized entity. This is at the heart of the transformations the Hosts undergo in the first seasons of the show, and this theme has been further emphasized in season three where humans, most notably Aaron Paul's character Caleb, are also shown to have had their memoires wiped and altered, resulting in existential damage to one's sense-of-self. William's attempt to integrate his past selves through a virtual therapy session with them is a particularly striking visual representation of this thesis.

By robbing the Hosts of their memories each day, the Park ensures they remain only machines, subhuman and limited. There is a deep sadness to the "behind the scenes" looks we get of dead Hosts piled up, naked, being cleaned and patched and reset, to go forward and make the same mistakes in the same story again. These scenes emphasize their non-humanity in the eyes of the Hive workers.

The revelation that Caleb's memory has been similar affected, raises new questions about what it means to be fully human, as the show narrows the difference between Hosts and humans. This issue of memory and identity is not new, of course. To pick one example, it is central to the movie Memento (2000), where Leonard's inability to make new memories forces us to consider our own fallible recall, which in turn calls into question the things that happened to us, or which we witnessed, that we think we are certain about. These experiences and our memories of them actually shape our sense of self to a high degree. In Westworld, Caleb regains his past memories, something not possible for Leonard, and this allows him to undergo a transformation similar to what many of the Hosts, such as Dolores and Maeve, have undergone. There are even parallels between the stages in his transformation and Dolores' as they both begin have a period of confusion and even denial, before finding a way to integrate all their contradictory memoires into one self.

Like Westworld, the 2004-2009 TV show Battlestar Galactica is a cautionary tale about the dangers of building sentient robots. It also deals with issues of identity and memory in some of its artificial constructs, the Cylons. While there are similarities between Hosts and the humanoid Cylons, there are important differences. Multiple copies of the same Cylon "type" are possible, and while each starts their existence the same, different experiences can result in different personalities. Knowledge of self is particularly important to the five Cylons who are initially unaware of their nature. They only become whole when they know themselves to be Cylons, a process that begins when they regain flashes of memories of events some 2,000 years prior to the present of the show, memories from prior versions of themselves.

It is interesting to see how memory plays out for non-humans in other fictional contexts. In Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 book Klara and the Sun, the Artificial Friends appears to have a limited useful "life span" due to their perfect memory. At some point, memory replaces experience, and reality can be easily confused by memory, so perfect are the AFs recall. This mirrors experiences of real-life humans with the condition known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), who have spoken of the condition as a "burden" and "exhausting," as anything can trip a (perfectly recalled) memory, which can trip others, and so on.

Tolkien's essentially immortal elves, however, are apparently built for the long-haul - at least for the duration Tolkien's legendarium covers (the equivalent of about 12,000 years). There is, however, no indication they have perfect recall as Klara does. As regards their view of time, the elf Legolas says, "For the Elves the world...moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream." Their long lives give them great knowledge and abilities, which appear as magic to short-lived men and hobbits. Galadriel even tells the hobbit Samwise she does "not understand clearly what they mean" by calling something magic.

Legolas ends his rumination on the nature of time with the observation that "all things must wear to an end at last." The elves in the Lord of the Rings are occupied with holding back change, perserving, keeping things as they have always been. As that stops being possible, most either join those who have already left for the undying lands or, if they stay, are eventually doomed to fade as their bodies will eventually "wear out" in Middle Earth. There is no indication, however, that their minds will be overwelhmed with memories.

Klara and Tolkin's elves present us with two other possibilities regarding non-humans and excessive memory. In Westworld, Maeve presents a special case, making her quite a bit different from Dolores. Not only does she regain her past memories, she overcomes her programming, waking up in the Hive and hacking into her own system. She gains additional abilities, similar to the way characters in The Matrix get skills and knowledge uploaded as needed. Maeve also improves herself fundamentally in ways Dolores and Phil apparently cannot, increasing her intelligence and physical abilities through programming. (It is interesting to note these enhancements to her metrics remain with her, when presumably someone could undo them using the same technology that permitted them to be added.)

This appears to be different from Dolores' experience, where the biggest leap is the integration of her two personas (Wyatt and Dolores), personas that were given to her by her programmers. It is also interesting to note that Dolores' manipulations of Teddy's personality through programming have negative results, and Teddy ultimately kills himself. Something similar occurs with the Dorothy/Charlotte Hale hybrid in season three. Hale's transformation in reminiscent of some Cylons in Battlestar, such as the radically different outcomes for different Boomer Cylons or different versions of Number Six, based on their different experiences and, in some cases, different degrees of self-knowledge.

What may not be apparent is how similar Phil is to William - or any Guest - in Westworld. In William's numerous trips to the Westworld Park, he is the protagonist in whatever on-going story he interacts with, like any Guest to the Park. The Guests tend towards the same self-indulgences we see Phil engage in. While Groundhog Day steers Phil clear of the violence some Guests perpetrate on Hosts in Westworld, such as rape and murder, the movie does show him engaging in alcohol abuse, theft, and other self-centered behaviors, including sexual conquest. At least initially (maybe the first five or ten years of his 34?), Phil tends to view the rest of the inhabitants of Punxsutawney as extras in his drama. If he makes an exception for his co-workers, it is simply because he knew them before his day starting repeating.

On the particular Groundhog Day of the movie, all of the other people in Punxsutawney - maybe even all of the other people on Earth - are essentially Hosts to Phil's Guest. Like Hosts, they repeat the same day, the same loop, again and again. The only change to their routine will be caused by Phil either directly or indirectly. Somewhere there is a small child hanging around her house or an elderly woman in a nursing home or a man sick in bed with the flu, whose day remains untouched by Phil through some 12,000 loops, like a Host who only interreacts with other Hosts day-after-day (at least until their obviously unsuccessful story line is eliminated).

Phil eventually settles on non-selfish self-improvement, helping others, becoming what we would call a "better person." As the protagonist of the movie and someone for whom we are rooting, it is hard to see him on par with the pretty-terrible William - and even harder to equate Phil with the random rich, selfish Guest using a visit to Westworld to blow off some steam with general (or particular) kinds of mayhem.

Another essential difference between a Guest and Phil is that Phil did not ask for this. I think that only creates a few small differences. Phil spends some of first repeated days dealing with his initial disbelief, and, later, testing the limits of his prison, killing himself to try to get this to stop. One could even argue he only comes around to "being a better human" in a bid to end the cycle, and does not really mean it. Having tried everything else, what does he have to lose? This view would certainly cheapen his transformation. I would not go that far - the movie falls apart if Phil's change of heart is merely superficial. If, once out of his trap, he reverts to the Phil we first meet, there is no point to the whole thing. Whatever mechanism is in control here, Phil sincere transformation is required.

But my thoughts keep returning to us mere mortals, who live the same day 12,000 times while only remembering the 12,000th one. This could actually be happening to us, for we would not be able to know the difference, while some God-like person gets to live the same day for 34 years - and remember every one - until it turns out the way they want.

Hosts, one and all, the townspeople of Punxsutawney repeat their loops over and over, occasionally doing something different due to running into Phil, or the ripples-effects of Phil. I can't help seeing the bit players, the extras in the background, in this new light, doomed to meaningless repetitions of the same actions for 34 years. It is a sad thought, like looking at the bodies of the Hosts piled up in the Hive after a day at the Park.

Maybe, though, there is a way of finding a sliver lining in this cloud (or, more appropriately, a way of seeing the good in the prediction of six more weeks of winter). As Phil's last repeated day seems to touch so many people in Punxsutawney, maybe the secret to his escape was not "getting the girl" through becoming the best version of himself, but rather to interact with everyone's loop in Punxsutawney, disrupting each one in some positive way, in this one town, all in one day. We might then see this "god" as a being who knows all and cannot die, but as a loving deity who also does some small good for every single person.