Ok, Boomer: Market Verediction & the Entrepreneurial Self
Andrew Battista, New York University
What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? -- Phil Connors
About this talk: Every year I write an interpretation of Groundhog Day in which I try on a different literary critical lens and interpret the film through it. These essays are meant to be fun. They are at once a celebration of Groundhog Day and a very dry, tongue-in-cheek commentary on critical methods and jargon. Up to the plate this year is neoliberal critique.
Punxsutawney, PA and the Unwinding
In Western Pennsylvania, The Unwinding began long before the 1993 epoch, Groundhog Day. By the Unwinding, I mean the slow, pernicious erosion of the social contract, the removal of jobs, garnishing of pensions, evaporation of low-cost education, and the destruction of other safety measures that helped to create the well-being and stability of the American working class. These social and economic turns are coupled with unscrupulous public-private partnerships, unregulated markets and social services, and as Wendy Brown states in Undoing the Demos, an ever-growing alignment between corporate interests and public policy.
I argue that Groundhog Day invites us to think about the futility of choice in the context of an industrial society that has eroded support for basic public infrastructure. Phil Connor's existential nightmare is the nightmare of the neoliberal state, an apparatus which fosters the propensity of citizens to become obsessed with personal responsibility, and which is coupled with unwarranted optimism about the future, a habitus of improvement in which no person exists outside of the debasing logic of market capitalism.
Groundhog Day and the Responsible Self
Groundhog Day explores what it means to live through the same day over and over, without hope for a different future. In this sense, the film can be read as a commentary on life in post-Reagan America, in which life is characterized by an intensified inequality. Ego-centric weather reporter Phil Connors travels on location to Punxsutawney, PA to cover the annual Groundhog Day festival, but he soon realizes that he is trapped in a single day, February 2nd, which he lives repeatedly. His, panic, subsequent hedonism, and ultimate malaise manifest in an early scene, in which Phil goes drinking with some friends at a bowling alley.
The ease with which Punxsutawney local Ralph reduces the complexity of an existentialist crisis to a pithy saying about perspective is our first sign that the film indulges in the doctrine of neoliberalism. Although the film isn't overtly about labor and economy, the turn toward the glass-is-half-full canard is an early signal of Groundhog Day's totalizing market logic. There is no hope and no future because one chooses not to see a hope and a future. The human capital exists as part of a much larger societal order that seeks, on the one hand, to deregulate business, while on the other hand converting every aspect of existence, every human want and desire, into a potentially profitable enterprise that is dictated by the profit imperative.
Totalizing Market Logic
In reality, however, the dearth of social choice that is depicted in Groundhog Day is not a problem with perspective; rather, it is the result of decades of austerity politics, privatization, and downward responsibilization of the individual. The film depicts a world in which the engaged citizen, who is free to participate in the civic joys of winter celebrations but who also has the surplus time and capital to shape the life of the commonwealth, is transformed into the traditional figure of homo economicus. Every spare moment must become grounds for personal improvement and extension of human capital.
For Phil Connors in particular, the responsibilization of the self is a conceptual apparatus that encapsulates a felt sense of loss for the most fundamental structures: for security, fulfillment, and enduring worth within the social world we inhabit. As he "works his way" out of the infinite loop of Groundhog Day, Phil turns toward a path of bettering himself: he takes piano lessons, dresses well, volunteers at soup kitchens, and fixes flat tires.
Thus, Phil contributes to a scene of personal transformation, whereby he constructs himself to become personally virtuous. Again, Wendy Brown explains, such actions are no more than self-speculation.
[T]he idea and practice of responsibilization—forcing the subject to become a responsible self-investor and self-provider—reconfigures the correct comportment of the subject from one naturally driven by satisfying interests to one forced to engage in a particular form of self-sustenance that meshes with the morality of the state and the health of the economy. -- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos
OK, Boomer: Opportunities that Don't Exist Anymore
In the end, Phil Connors serves as the quintessential boomer. However, we cannot forget that the "Ok Boomer" meme that describes intergenerational frustration with the erosion of social structure, is a misplaced attack on rogue inequity.