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One of the most compelling actions that a hero can perform is an act of redemption. A redeeming act is any behavior that corrects a previous misstep or wrongdoing. Redemptive acts are common occurrences in athletic competitions, as when a football placekicker boots the winning field goal after botching a kick the previous week. Especially powerful instances of redemption are great acts of morality that follow prior moral transgressions. This type of moral redemption is portrayed in a most poignant way in Groundhog Day, a movie released in 1993 starring Bill Murray and produced by Harold Ramis.
In Groundhog Day, the lead character Phil Connors is a television weatherman who is arrogant, nasty, and utterly self-absorbed. Connors spends February 2nd covering the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a place he despises. But when he wakes up the following morning, he discovers that it is February 2nd in Punxsutawney all over again. To his horror, this day continues to repeat itself, and Connors is trapped in Punxsutawney in a seemingly endless time loop.
At first, Connors uses the repetition of the day to steal money and to manipulate women to sleep with him. Yet the one woman he grows to love, his producer Rita, won’t succumb to his advances. Connors grows depressed when he realizes that his methods will never allow him to achieve real intimacy with Rita. He becomes suicidal, believing he is stuck, alone forever, in a dull town on an endlessly cold winter day.
Connors’ road to redemption begins when he honestly confides to Rita what is happening to him. She shows him great empathy, suggests that his plight may actually be a gift, and for the first time spends the entire day with him. When Connors awakes to repeat yet another February 2nd, he is a new man. He takes piano and ice-sculpting lessons. He helps a poor homeless man. He saves a boy from a bad fall, performs the Heimlich maneuver on a choking victim, and fixes an old woman’s flat tire.
Rita witnesses the change in Connors and falls in love with him. The arrogance and selfishness that once characterized him have been replaced by kindness, enlightenment, and a drive to make the best out of one’s circumstances. At the end of the day, they fall asleep, in love and in his bed. And when Connors awakes, she is still there, it is finally February 3rd, and the cycle has been broken. Connors’ long redemptive journey has been completed.
Over the years, Groundhog Day has received high acclaim from both critics and audiences. The movie has found its way onto Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” series. In 2009, the American literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish named the film one of America’s all-time greatest movies. In 2006, the film was added to the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.”
Groundhog Day‘s story of redemption moves many people deeply, a reaction that caught director and producer Harold Ramis by surprise. “This movie spoke to people on a lot of levels,” said Ramis. “The spiritual community responded to this film in an unprecedented way. Hasidic Jews held up signs outside of theaters asking, ‘Are you living the same day over and over again?’ Then I started getting letters from the Zen Buddhist community, the Yoga community, the Christian fundamentalist community, the psychoanalytic community, and everyone claiming that this was their philosophy and that I must be one of them for having made this movie.”
The story of a hero’s redemptive journey has universal appeal and touches something powerful inside the human psyche. To legions of people, there is great spiritual significance in Bill Murray’s unforgettable portrayal of the hero Phil Connors. Groundhog Day suggests that all of us, whatever our flaws or circumstances, can redeem ourselves.
Below is a clip from the movie, showing Phil Connors’ inept attempt to woo Rita before embarking on his journey of redemption.
Oops! We had to remove the hero profile you’re looking for because it will soon appear in our new book Heroic Leadership: An Influence Taxonomy of 100 Exceptional Individuals, to be published by Routledge in 2013.
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Teachers are a precious, if often overlooked, resource in any society. But even more precious are those rare few who, in addition to offering knowledge and nurturing, keep the flame of culture alive. Bob Mitchell was such a teacher. He was, ostensibly, a high school Latin teacher; but he was, in fact, much more than that.
You’d have to know this guy to fully appreciate him. Picture long blond hair, glasses, a handlebar mustache and a barrel chest, always moving like a runaway train– in heavy clogs, so you could hear him coming a mile away (he was a devoted runner and participated in the Boston Marathon many times). He was the smartest person I’ve ever met face to face. He spoke more than twenty languages and could flip between them like another man would flip between TV channels. He read at least one book a day and retained everything. He had traveled all over the world and retained all of that, too. He didn’t just teach a dead language– he breathed life into an ancient world, he took the words and made you see beyond their definitions to what they meant to the people that had actually spoken them, the colors and shades and nuances of idioms and turns of phrase and slang and how it related to their culture and their daily lives.
I’d sit in his class and be in awe of him. He was never still, always moving at a hundred miles an hour; but that was only a fraction of the speed of his mind. Watching him teach was like watching a brilliant performance– or, rather, a performance of brilliance, a stand-up act of the mind, a Vaudeville of the intellect. Stories, puns, wordplay, endless digressions into the minutiae of the ancient world; a single word could conjure up an entire aspect of a lost civilization and he would paint a picture of it as if he had been there. Seeing him in action was inspirational; it was like watching the pure essence of Humanity at work. Or, rather, at play. Mister Mitchell never worked. He just lived and breathed his passions and let them overflow into whoever was lucky enough to be near him.
He was an inspiration just by existing, but he also was generous with his individual attention. No student ever lacked for his undivided focus, no question ever went unanswered, no quirk or eccentricity ever went unappreciated. For me, he always encouraged my writing, and was never less than brutally honest in his assessments. After graduation, he actually took me out to dinner at the No Name Restaurant to talk about writing and give me encouragement. He was, in short, the coolest teacher a student could hope to have.
The following anecdote, related by his student Esther Mobley, will give you a bare hint of what he was like:
"Once a student casually asked him if there was a translation of the Gettysburg Address in Latin. There was not, and so Mr. Mitchell came into school at six o'clock the next morning and translated it himself, from memory, unaided by any dictionary, within a matter of hours. He filled Room 318's two wall-length chalkboards in his narrow, near-unintelligible calligraphy."
How can you not love a guy like that?
At the youthful age of 60, Bob Mitchell succumbed to melanoma. He is no longer with us, but he has left behind a legacy of cultural and intellectual devotion, passed on like an Olympic torch to not one, but thousands of kindred spirits over decades of teaching. We gained from him not just a wealth of knowledge, but the example of a life well lived: To embrace your passions and to never pretend to be less than you are.
Below is a video tribute to the late, great Bob Mitchell.
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Rick Hutchins was born in Boston, MA, and has been an avid admirer of heroism since the groovy 60s. In his quest to live up to the heroic ideal of helping people, he has worked in the health care field for the past twenty-five years, in various capacities. He is also the author of Large In Time, a collection of poetry, The RH Factor, a collection of short stories, and is the creator of Trunkards. Links to galleries of his art, photography and animation can be found on http://www.RJDiogenes.com. He’s no Mister Mitchell, though.
Oops! We had to remove the hero profile you’re looking for because it will soon appear in our new book Heroic Leadership: An Influence Taxonomy of 100 Exceptional Individuals, to be published by Routledge in 2013.
Our contract at Routledge required us to remove many of our profiles on our blog at this time. But we do have other hero profiles and information about heroes on the menu bar located on the right side of this page. Check it out!
Our contract at Routledge required us to remove many of our profiles on our blog. But we do have other hero profiles and information about heroes on the menu bar located on the right side of this page. Check it out!
