It cannot be! And Bill Murray better hope not!
Nietzsche’s description of the Eternal Recurrence was as an Eternal Recurrenceof the Same.
Danny Rubin, who wrote Groundhog Day, said the question that inspired the script was, "If a person could live forever, if a person was immortal, how would they change over time?"
Phil Connor, Bill Murray’s character, lives the same day, but each time the day’s events are altered by Murray’s actions. All the while, Connor learns to be more caring and cognizant of what’s important in life, and is finally freed from his daily cycle by falling in love with Andie Macdowell’s character, Rita.
As Nietzsche conceptualized it, nothing new would ever happen as we lived out an infinite number of lives. There would be no evolution, change, learning, or accruing wisdom across the span of time.
Nietzsche formulated his version of the Eternal Recurrence as an effort to create a simple formula for life that, if adopted as true (even if it weren’t), would lead people to live the most beautiful, meaningful, and exciting life available to them.
He thought that if people were convinced they would have to live the same life eternally, they would opt for the kind of life that would be worth living eternally, having come to fear the soul-deadening, spirit-crushing, weight of complacency more than any other danger in life. He wanted us to live the kind of life that would make us rejoice at having to repeat eternally.
According to Nietzsche’s theory, Bill Murray would not only have to live out the portion of his life that came before his hellish Groundhog Day odyssey, and not only the years that came after, but all his countless Groundhog Days as well. If Murray heard this he would certainly wail and gnash his teeth! It might just be the most horrible thing he could imagine, knowing that he’d experience Groundhog’s Day FOREVER.
Nietzsche’s famous passage in The Gay Science (The Greatest Weight) begins with a demon sneaking into your room and saying the following: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"