Nah, Ned’s just a People Person. He remembers everything about everybody he’s ever met, sure as heckfire.
And Ned can’t break out of his loop until he sells life insurance to everyone in town.
An interesting question. I think that, at least for a while, he would revel simply in not knowing everything that was going to happen. I think that he would also be accustomed to being so keenly observant about the minutiae of his surroundings as well as the people within it, that this attunement would continue reflexively. Nothing would be “background” anymore, no people would be “extras.” Every detail would be interesting to him, every person an individual. Ideally, he would also carry the newfound sense of gratification he gets from selflessness with him, and that would continue. I dion’t know that he would become a saint, but I do think he would enjoy his own life a lot more, and be perceived by others as a caring and generous person.
Not to mention, since this was the early 90s, it is not unreasonable for him to be carrying his check book.
The more I think about this, the more impressed I am by the idea. Ned DOES approach Phil pretty much exactly as Phil approaches Nancy.
Ned could be pretty early in his loop, because he still has a pretty obnoxious outward personality. He hadn’t relearned better behavioral skills.
If he reappeared at the same points every day in Phil’s loop, though, that suggests he didn’t have the freedom of action that Phil did.
It’s an interesting line of thought. I suspect the more mundane explanation is that Phil just took a page from Ned’s natural personality when going after Nancy.
re: the insanity thing. I guess it depends on whether you think that insanity can be purely a psychological thing. It seems apparent that Phil has practical immunity to any physiological illness that he didn’t already have that day, and whatever illness he did have would never get worse.
I would assume Phil’s body was somehow chemically reset every morning as he didn’t age. So I wonder if someone can go insane by basically just remembering how insane they’d been the day before, and continuing along the same track.
Then again, if his body, including his brain, was “reset”, how did he remember anything? The reset explanation would seem to work for everyone in town except Phil.
You are assuming they are in the same loop, rather than intersecting loops. From the movie, it appears that the Ned we see is the same everyday, but it could be that Phil is repeating Ned’s 232nd day, or whatever.
I don’t think it’s necessary that a person would learn better behavioral skills by being put through this wringer. Phil does, but that’s no guarantee that Ned would.
Sane people can be driven insane by extremely stressful events. I don’t think that mental illness is necessarily physiological.
Yeah, if memory is physiological, then the total universal reset doesn’t make much sense in Murray’s case. Clearly his body is restored or he’d retain injuries, but his mind, with the exception of damage incurred, seems to progress from day to day unchanged.
Or how would he develop the muscle memory needed to become a pianist or ice sculptor or even a trick card thrower? If he could build and train muscle day to day, that would make interesting conversation starters with the people he already knew (“wow Phil, how’d you put on 40 lbs. of muscle overnight?!”), and would help convince them of his predicament.
A variant of this is used in the Stargate SG-1 homage episode. O’Neill, who normally has a poor head for academics and scholarly work, gets the bookworms to teach him more and more each day until they eventually have to accept his predicament, because there’s no way he can know everything he tells them.
Is “muscle memory” physiologically resident in the muscles? I thought that it was, in the end, resident in the brain, albeit below the conscious level.
I think the only way it would work would be with two non-intersecting loops, like parallel universes. That’s the only way I can see the two of them both having freedom of action in their respective loops.
OTOH, the same could be true for every person in the universe.
Learning an instrument, for instance, requires brain power AND progressive building of hundreds of small muscles (fingers and arms for piano, facial muscles and arms for my instrument). I took 2 years off of trombone playing years ago, and though I kept “mentally practicing” nearly every day, it took six months of work once I started again just to regain most of my tone, flexibility, and endurance.
I just watched the director’s commentary. It was just an ad lib by Bill.
Is Ned god?
The documentary “The Weight of Time” is great, and Stephen Tobolowsky has a very thoughtful perspective. He points out that Phil’s “reward” is for time to start again, for him to grow old and die. But of course Phil has killed himself so many times that death should hold no particular fear. And he knows that there if a power greater than himself. Other people have faith but Phil has had a limitless power demonstrated to him.
This is one of the rare movies where the IMDB user reviews are worth reading.
The biggest mystery is how the writer has managed to have no career. He had one other movie in 1993 and one in 1994. That’s it! (There was an Italian remake).
All I can figure is that he gets paid to write scripts that never make it into production, or never writes anything that gets him credited.
I’ve seen that other movie (SFW). It’s actually pretty interesting too, in a very indy movie sort of way. It’s about a guy who becomes a national celebrity after being part of a group hostages in a convenience store robbery in which the assailants demand that the whole siege get broadcast live on television. The country becomes fascinated with the broadcast and one hostage (played by Stephen Doriff) becomes seen as a hero because of his smart-ass commentary and indifference to the situation. His repeated refrain of “so fucking what” becomes a catchphrase. After it’s over (and most of the movie takes place afterwards. The hostage situation is only shown in flashbacks), the protagonist is annoyed by his celebrity and the stupid repition of the catchphrase. The movie is kind of a satire of reality television and the phenomenon of people getting famous for being famous. It also feature a then unknown Reese Witherspoon as a fellow hostage (and lover intesrt for the protagonist) as well as a hilarious cameo by a young Toby McGuire as a starstruck, stoner fan who encounters the protagonist on the street.
BING!
I am the light of the world. BING!
I am the way, the truth, and the life. BING!
I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved. BING!
I dated your sister a couple times, until you told me not to.
To add to what Pat said, yes “muscle memory” most certainly requires the training of very specific muscles in concert with what happens in the brain. I’ve been playing guitar for over 20 years and can play at a pretty high level, BUT, let’s say I flip the guitar over and try to play lefty. If it was purely in the brain it would stand to reason that I should be able to make the adjustment relatively quickly, but in actuality I can hardly get a single note to sound right.
(actually, thinking about it, it would be a very interesting experiment, should we ever successfully manage to transplant brains, to see if the brain of a musician could learn to play the same instrument in its new body before the old body with a new brain but with trained hand/finger muscles could.)
I think if Phil had at least some natural talent to begin with he could play the piano as well as he did with 4-5 years of steady practice. He played well and it was quite musical, but (and this is something I always found to be a really nice touch in the movie) he was not playing anything particularly virtuosic or unreasonably difficult. He was playing a blues (5 notes and 3 chords at the most basic level) which is manageable in a relatively short amount of time. I found his playing to be at a perfectly appropriate and believable level for his general character (it would’ve rang a bit off if he got up there and played the Goldberg Variations for example).
I’m thinking what the world needs is a GROUNDHOGCON. Get all the cast members to come and sign autographs, as well as the writers and producer and director. Have seminars on all these issues of how it could be done in real life. Time travel, muscle memory, piano teachers, ice sculptors, drunk guys at bars.
I wonder if you could get enough fans to show up to pay the appearance fees and all that?
His father was a piano mover.