Every couple of days I get an email along these lines:

I saw the movie Groundhog Day for the first time over the weekend. I used to avoid it, but was interested in seeing it after the mentions of it on NRO and your piece in NRODT.
All I got out of it was that it wasn’t after Murray’s character began thinking of others and doing good deeds that he got out of the repetition of Groundhog Day because he had finally “gotten it right.” He was released only after he had bedded Andie McDowell. In other words, I think the movie stands for the redemptive power of fornication.

I do not want to start another GHD thread in here. But let me just say this once so I can have a link to send to readers in the future. The spell doesn’t end because Murray and McDowell have sex. They don’t even have sex. They merely fall asleep together, a point made explicit by McDowell when they wake up in the morning. Second, as a reader pointed out to be the other week, the first sign that the GHD spell is broken is not when Murray wakes up on a new day. It comes the night before when it snows unexpectedly while McDowell and Murray are mooning over each other after he makes an ice-sculpture of her. Not to get too sappy, but it was love, not sex, which broke the spell.

Now in the porn spinoff Groundho’s Day, sex does have redemptive power…