The Green Screen
Following the credits, an effective bit of visual imagery is used to communicate the essential nature of Phil’s personality. The film opens with his hand reaching across blue background which is revealed to be the “green screen” which allows weather maps to inform television viewers of climate conditions. The camera then pulls to create a masterfully incisive image: Phil’s alone against a blue running behind him while to his right a video monitor showing what viewers are seeing at home. Various edits convey the disconnect between Phil blowing clouds across map of America when the project image is combined with that of Phil and then shots of what Phil actually looks like with nothing but blue space behind him. The point of this imagery will serve to become the focus of the narrative: this is a man who is there, but there; disconnected and alienated from everyone and everything, even as he is a public figure and not some recluse behind closed doors.
The Winter of Discontent
The dominant imagery of the film the reminders that not only is it winter, but that the groundhog has predicted the bleak frigidity is going to drag on for another six weeks. Snow layers the ground throughout, a blizzard prevents Phil from going home, he builds a snowman every day when he is romancing his producer and those are just the most obvious uses of imagery to under the cold sterility of Phil’s underlying misanthropy that needs to be slowly melted away before he break free of the time loop in which he is trapped. That process is directly symbolized, of course, by the image of Phil showing off his mastery as an ice sculptor, using a chainsaw to chip away the cold hardness with artistic precision. Tellingly, the film does not end with a vision of the snow cleared away, but into a landscape literally covered with snow. The difference lies in the perspective inside the man; no longer cold and afraid to expose himself to the elements (like his namesake hibernating underground) he rushes out what is now a picture perfect postcard of a winter wonderland.
Waistcoats and Bums
Phil has a deep-seated dislike of the human race, yet seems curiously able to establish individual relationships with little problem before before he starts reliving the day and over and over again. A persistent recurring contrasting imagery hints that Phil’s real problem may not be people being stupid, but the world they live in. Phil clearly does not look forward to the Groundhog Day ceremony. Perhaps the underlying reason is that while the city spends big money on the ceremony and the local leaders are dressed in formal attire usually reserved for royal weddings, society as a whole does nothing about the guy that Phil passes every day standing on the sidewalk in dirty clothes begging for a little change. Individuals reach out to him—including, eventually, Phil—but not the local government that views taking care of the celebrity rodent as a much higher priority for municipal revenue.
The Bed (and Sometimes the Breakfast)
Every new, rebooted Groundhog Day begins in the morning when Phil wakes up at the bed & breakfast at which he is staying overnight. That setting becomes place recurring locale for imagery that underscores the evolutionary process taking place. The manner in which Phil is shown getting out of bed and sometimes his approach to eating breakfast downstairs typically foreshadows the mood and tone of how that particular day or series off days will play out. The most intensely suggestive image is that the most fundamental change Phil’s new life after being stuck in the loop for what may have been decades and might possibly have been a millennia of Groundhog Day is that he is not going to be alone. The loop comes unstuck when he finally wakes up to the same song playing yet again only to have Rita’s arm stretch across chest as she snuggles up next him.
