“Increasingly, this feels like Groundhog Day, or groundhog week,” said Ivana Bacik last Thursday – a day when the Dáil was, to borrow a line from the film referenced by the Labour leader, “playing yesterday’s tape”.
Never mind groundhog week, or even groundhog year. A recent chance hearing of Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe – the song that blares out from Bill Murray’s clock radio every morning – sent me spiralling down a weary path of wondering if we are, in fact, living through a groundhog decade. Increasingly, it does feel like it.
Groundhog Day, in its original meaning as a Pennsylvanian celebration of meteorological superstition, is this Sunday, so it’s as good a time as any to posit that Trump 2.0 and humanity’s related failure to address its most pressing problems have combined with the media’s love of regurgitation to fast turn the 2020s into a chaotic mash-up of all the worst parts of previous decades.
Well, it’s a theory. But it does seem as if things we might once have expected to have left behind by 2025 – misogyny, extended power cuts, Michael Lowry’s political career – are all still with us and may never not be, like scammers, broken appliances and Grey’s Anatomy.
Bacik, for her part, attributed her sensation of being trapped in a time-loop to Micheál Martin and Simon Harris swapping roles, the reinstalling of Donald Trump in the White House and her sense that Ireland is “returning to the bad old days of stroke politics, of a-nod-and-a-wink politics, with Fianna Fáil back in the driving seat – all we need now is the return of the Galway tent to complete the picture”.
I’m not sure where the Galway tent is billowing about these days, but it’s not just politics, of course, where reboots and rehashes are in vogue. In the entertainment industry, too, they’re everywhere.
At least 1980s TV detective Bergerac, freshly dug out of intellectual-property retirement, has had plenty of time to enjoy the quiet life on Jersey before his reimagining this year as Irish actor Damien Molony.
At the higher-octane, higher-budget end of the spectrum, Superman and Iron Man are both destined to return to screens in 2025, about five minutes since they last appeared on them. Nothing, it seems, is as unshakeable as Hollywood studios’ belief that what audiences want most is a man who swoops in, saves the world and then hightails it out of there before anyone can ask awkward questions about the law of diminishing returns.
Still, the collective penchant for citing Groundhog Day as a metaphor for repetitive events is almost as enduring, and this is where I have to confess that I have, appropriately enough, written about this before.
Three years ago, in a sort of post-pandemic cry for help masquerading as media analysis, I noted how frequently journalists invoke this now 32-year-old film, written by Danny Rubin and director Harold Ramis, to capture the despondency of everything, not least their own working days, going around and round in crushingly samey circles.
Copying and pasting whole paragraphs of that piece here would be a meta timesaver, but I’ll confine myself to repeating this one key point: that the despair of Groundhog Day is not about the same things happening over and over, it’s about the same things happening over and over without consequence. Once more, without feeling.
This is what makes the re-election of Trump, after four years of healing, ranting from the periphery and cathartic attempts at accountability, so draining and numbing for the Americans who did not vote for him. And it is why the “Trump bump” for news traffic, subscriptions and television ratings is scant to non-existent for most media outlets this time around. Indeed, a “Trump slump”, prompted by a sanity-preserving surge in news avoidance, seems poised to be the more lasting trend.
It would be nice to think the Atlantic is wide enough to protect us from the regressive cultural shift under way in the US, but the nodding along with Mark “masculine energy” Zuckerberg is enough to suggest it isn’t.
This is where my own Groundhog Day senses spike. It’s been a while, for sure, since I read Susan Faludi’s 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. But I think about this book, in which Faludi dissected the Reagan-era media-driven counter-attack on the feminist advances of the 1970s, almost every week. I’ve lived through this timeline before.
A major portion of that backlash included the demonisation of women in paid employment and we see that again now in this groundhog decade’s toxic remix of the 1980s and the Trump 1.0 era just past.
It’s not only there in the rollback of reproductive rights in the US, the once again explicit equation of “merit” with white heterosexual men and specific policies-in-waiting, such as Trump acolytes’ insistence that women in the US military shouldn’t be allowed serve in combat roles. It’s also present in the news media tendency to give reactionary “movements” a 21st-century gloss.
Say what you like about “trad wives”, they’ve got a great agent. Maybe the women who didn’t get into the Cabinet last week should get in touch.
As ever, the same old tired sexists find it easy to reframe themselves as refreshing iconoclasts. Even the entire “woke” discussion – interminable in its own right – is just the “politically correct” one on steroids. This, to echo Bacik’s take on the “new” Government, “would be funny if it were not so serious”. There are headlines every hour showing how serious it is.
Maybe someday we will get to play a new tape. But it’s not looking great for the 2020s, a decade in which politics and culture have – at best – stalled. Call me pessimistic, but I’m not sure AI is going to help.
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