Happy Groundhog Day, from Jeff Gordinier

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An important note to those who are tracking this season’s Oscar race: Groundhog Day came out in 1993, the same year as Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, and as far as I can tell from a couple of totally random and lazy Google searches, it received zero Oscar nominations.

Let’s consider this. No Best Actor nomination for Bill Murray? Not even a Best Screenplay nod for a script that has since been hailed as one of the most structurally brilliant and philosophically beguiling pieces of screenwriting in the past 20 years?

This should tell us a lot about the bogusness of Oscar mania. I can think of so many movies from the last couple of decades that have held up terrifically, over time, but which never had a prayer of being named Best Picture: Flirting with Disaster. Election. Boogie Nights. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Breaking the Waves. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Waiting for Guffman.

Anyway, you know what Groundhog Day is about, right? It’s about a snarling, sarcastic weatherman named Phil Connors who gets stuck out in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, covering an ancient winter ritual involving a rodent and his shadow. And I mean stuck — Phil becomes trapped in a kind of metaphysical feedback loop that forces him to endure February 2nd over and over and over again until he has worked out certain flaws in his cosmic and interpersonal outlook. (Bill Murray’s a boomer, obviously, but he’s a boomer who somehow seems to embody and reflect a Generation X sensibility, which is one reason why it makes such perfect aesthetic sense when he appears in wistful X-ish melancholia-comedies like Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.)

But okay, yeah, I suppose it’s strange and potentially perilous that I’m referring to Groundhog Day just as the paperback of X Saves the World is coming out. Do I mean to suggest that I feel some kind of time-warp kinship with Bill Murray’s character, since I now find myself talking about a book that I’ve talked about before?

Actually...no! The situation feels completely different. Really.

The hardcover version of XSTW came out in the spring of 2008, and I wrote the manuscript, of course, during the second term of the Bush presidency, when it felt as though we had a daily opportunity to be whipsawed by one colossal wrongness after another — Hurricane Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo. (An aside: I saw Dream of Life on DVD last night. It’s a documentary about Patti Smith, and yes, it’s what I watched instead of watching the Super Bowl. Sorry, America. Anyway, there’s a point in the movie in which Patti Smith and her band are covering The Who’s “My Generation,” and Patti launches into a brief but hair-raising rant about what the comrades from her self-congratulatory generation, the baby boomers, have amounted to. Her answer: George W. Bush. I liked that part. I also liked the part where Patti and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers stand on a beach sharing stories about urinating into bottles.) Even though much of X Saves the World involves my rampantly making fun of pop-cultural stuff, you can probably hear my teeth gnashing in between the riffs.

But...now America seems to have, shall we say, worked out certain flaws in its cosmic and interpersonal outlook. There’s that whole economic-collapse thing still going on, sure, but we have post-boomer president in Barack Obama (who was born in 1961, the same year that produced future Gen X soothsayers Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland), and there is a tremor of hope in the land, and the whole notion of X Saves the World doesn’t seem as knee-jerkingly, smirk-inducingly ironic as it did when I first gave the book its title. In fact, when the hardcover was coming out I succumbed once or twice (or more) to my usual insecurity and wondered if I’d climbed out on too quivery a limb by suggesting that Xers could keep the world from sucking.

But hell, maybe we are. Maybe we will.

Which is a long-winded way of saying: Happy Groundhog Day.

P.S.  I don’t even have to do any Googling to assure you that Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville didn’t get any Grammy nominations, either.

Next up: Will slacking save the stock market?

Jeff Gordiner, X Saves the World, Penguin, Penguin Books