I’ve been rewatching Game of Thrones recently. I’m not sure why. I’m reminding myself of the story before checking out the prequel, due to have a second season soon. It’s something to do on an evening, even though it appears to me that there has been much less fanfare about House of the Dragon. Yet more diminishing returns…
Having already wistfully cast my mind back to the 2015 general election, I think about “Abandon hope (summer is coming)”, the rousing k-punk post that followed Labour’s defeat that year. Mark’s insistence that “summer is coming” was an obvious inversion of the Game of Thrones tagline. “Winter is coming“, the Starks tell one another incessantly until their house is all but decimated. The left’s house was ruined too then. “The Lannisters won on Thursday, but their gold has already run out, and summer is coming”, Mark writes. Nevertheless, he notes how there was “a rising tide, an international movement, a movement of history, which has not yet reached an England sandbagged in misery and mediocrity.”
The situation might now feel the same, but in June 2024, as I sit in my flat and watch the rain beat down on the world outside, summer feels much further off. I have dressed myself in winter garb before planning to go and write in the wind to ease my cabin fever. But I won’t sit with my laptop out in the rain. I dress myself, makeup on, only to sit at home, the view outside unchanging. The Northern winter has been long this year and it shows no signs of abating. There was even hail yesterday.
Back in spring, I thought a lot about Groundhog Day. “Six more weeks of winter!” says the prognosticator to his shadow. But those six weeks have dragged on and on this year.
I love that film for its stoicism — not the Silicon Valley variety, but a far more defiant Nietzschean variety. I look not for hope but confidence in my memories of defeats past and the enduring fatalism that underwrites it all. The paradox at the heart of Nietzsche’s eternal return is that, although it appears to suggest there is nothing “new” in experience, our feelings are bound to change in response to a growing awareness of this unending repetition in itself. Like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, though we may come to find these repetitive experiences torturous in their familiarity, this negative feeling acts as a force that leads us to advance and hone our actions anew in each encounter with that which is supposedly the same.
Groundhog Day remains an exemplary exploration of this process in popular culture. (It is not the only one; From Software’s punishing videogames might be a more fitting contemporary example.) In the film, Bill Murray plays the grouchy TV weatherman Phil Connors, who is suddenly and inexplicably fated to live the same day over and over again, seemingly for eternity — a wintery day in the Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney, during which crowds have gathered to witness the annual Groundhog Day tradition, when a groundhog is consulted on the coming of an early spring.
Connors’ character is analogous to the groundhog itself; figuratively speaking, his inability to see his own shadow forestalls the event of his transformation. After first waking up to a day he has already experienced, he is soon disturbed to realise that he has been fated to live this same day over and over again. Over time, he falls into a maniacal despair. But even when he resigns himself (repeatedly) to suicide, on death he awakens in his hotel room to relive his day over once more.
Coming to reluctantly accept his predicament, Connors learns the daily routines of Punxsutawney’s inhabitants, averting (or even exacerbating) a number of catastrophes and accidents that befall them, from the mundane to the more serious. Eventually, he takes up piano lessons and commits himself to mastering various other skills as well, such as ice sculpture; every lesson is always his “first” lesson, as far as his teacher is concerned, but his eventual mastery of these skills is all the more suggestive of how many “first” lessons Connors has had.
Connors pursues all of these skills and acquires this knowledge of his surroundings in pursuit of an overarching goal: the wooing of his television producer and love interest, Rita Hanson (played by Andie MacDowell). Though at first a self-serving desire, driven by his own ego, Connors does eventually succeed, but only once his pursuit of Rita is no longer out of self-interest. He has to let go of his lofty and egotistical ideals, dissolving a resentful self and instead becoming immersed in his immediate circumstances, demonstrating not only a capacity for self-improvement amidst a pervasive sameness, but also a new love and appreciation for the people around him, whom he otherwise treats with a cynical distain at the start of the story. Thus, it is only when Connors truly starts to look at his predicament, his world and its other inhabitants differently, in spite of their abject repetitions and fantastical sameness, that he finally wakes up to a new day with Rita by his side.
The film illustrates the paradox of the eternal return well, showing that, as we hone our ideas about human existence through our repetitious and habitual encounters with other subjects and objects, we become all the more capable of making leaps beyond the realms of personal habit and social doxa. It is a metaphysical quandary that leads to broader ethical and epistemological concerns, as we go in search of whatever sense of difference might still be available to us.
For Deleuze, it is this function of the eternal return that makes it not an existential trap but a situation that forces us to enact a “selective principle”, necessitating our choice of which affects and actions to pursue in the midst of life’s repetitions. This transforms thought, even whilst it is “trapped” within routine doxa, into an active and unending process of thinking, and being into an active and unending process of becoming. By giving ourselves over to the paradoxes of the eternal return, as Phil Connors eventually realises he must, we see how this situation “is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation”, wherein “the moment or the eternity of becoming … eliminates all that resists it”.
What is most striking about Connors’ journey is that, in spite of the sameness of his experiences, we watch as the self itself unravels. Connors is at once the same and different as he is shaken by his experience of the eternal return. But beyond the fantastical mode of its presentation, we can sense something recognisable in Connors’ experience: a strange sense of subjective continuity that is complicated by shifting appearances and behavioural adaptations. After all, to draw on a far more quotidian example, who has not felt for themselves, or heard someone else describe, how, on celebrating the passage of another decade, at the ages of 30 or 40 or 50, etc., they still feel 21? What is the nature of this experience, wherein the repetition of an event – a birthday – collides with the contextual differences that emerge when one annually takes stock of who a person is, has been and is becoming
I want to be like Connors. I should probably stop thinking back altogether, concerned that this retrospection is part of the problem. What is the point, at 32, of thinking back to the political landscape of my early 20s? There is no mania here; only a political depression. Still, as I try to find a grasp on the present, considering the ways in which these moments in time differ (or not) feels like a necessary exercise.