Groundhog Day: 7 Pressing Questions You Probably Missed

5. Could It Really Be All A Trick?

Groundhog Day 7 Having watched both Groundhog Day and The Truman Show, my brain did what all nerd brains do eventually, fabricating links between the two to establish a shared mythology that just plain doesn't exist anywhere else. Specifically, I began to consider whether Punxsutawney is a manufactured community, filled with actors, and controlled by an unseen power who sought to teach the notoriously brusque and self-centred reporter an extremely long-winded lesson in morality, in order to change him for the better. And then when you look really closely at the film, it all begins to fall into place, because not everything is as identical as it first seems... On the first day, when Phil looks out of his window, the truck turns right just at the moment the radio duo shout "Groundhog Day.", but the next day this changes, and the shout comes ahead of the truck turns. Something smelled fishy, and then a further revelation: just before Phil meets Ned, on the first three days we see two women walking together in the background, one wearing blue, but then on the fourth and subsequent days the woman in blue is by herself. Perhaps the other "extra" was called away to work elsewhere? Perhaps. So is it all an elaborate trick played on Phil? The Answer Well no, silly, those are just great big continuity errors. Besides, unless the hospital facilities in Punxsutawney are literally on the very leading edge of every single form of medicine, there is no way Phil could have survived being "stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned" and wake up without a scratch every morning. It's all a lot less straight-forward than that.
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