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At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the movies that were most resonant for many people were ones that directly confronted the calamity: Contagion. The Thing. Safe. Outbreak, for a time, was one of the most popular movies on Netflix. But Jeep understood, with the canny intuition of the advertiser, that as the emergency became more permanent, viewers might be seeking a different kind of catharsis. As the days blend and blur—as the weeks become months and the tidy boxes of the calendar melt into formless liquidity—Groundhog Day, now more than 25 years old, has adopted a new kind of urgency. Earlier this month, the Today show featured a video essay explaining “Why Every Day Feels Like Groundhog Day Lately.” Esquire offered tips on “How to Avoid Groundhog Day During Social Distancing.” On Facebook and Twitter, a meme has been proliferating: an image of Murray, as Phil, announcing, “It’s quarantine day … again.” Read: The perfect quarantine joke is not about quarantine The comparisons are signs of privilege; they are typically made by and for the people who have the luxury of doing their jobs remotely, of schooling their children from home, of counting boredom as a hardship. But the comparisons are reminders, too, of how easily quarantine, that act of physical separation, can also cause people to feel distanced from time itself. I’d remembered Groundhog Day, hazily, as a comedy above all, its profundities packaged as a love story, its message hopeful about the giddy possibilities of self-improvement. Watching it again, though—watching it now, in the interstitial space between the Before Times and the After—I was struck by how dark the film is before it gets light again. And I was struck most of all by the film’s suggestion that the true source of Phil’s agonies isn’t repetition alone; it’s the fact that Phil endures the endless days not knowing how, or whether, the repetition will end. Here is the basic premise of Groundhog Day: Phil, a Pittsburgh-based weatherman, is assigned for the fourth year in a row to report on the Groundhog Day festival in Punxsutawney. He is extremely indignant about the assignment. And so Phil spends his day in Punxsutawney doing a version, the film implies, of what he does pretty much every year: mocking the festivities, belittling the people who partake in them, generally assuming that the celebrations—and their adherents—are beneath him. (Phil refers to himself, at one point, to his cameraman, Larry, and his producer, Rita, as “the talent.”) The pique continues apace, until: A blizzard blows in. Phil, Rita, and Larry have to spend another night in Punxsutawney. And for reasons that Groundhog Day, in a twist of filmmaking genius, leaves unexplained, Phil wakes up the next morning … to realize, slowly, that it is February 2 once more. He is doomed to repeat the day, caught in a loop of unknown origin or duration, until, finally, he is able to live a day of selflessness, of joy, of love—and, therefore, to break through to February 3.