It is beginning to look like the preeminent American film is a proto-comedy and a proto-philosophical work. It is Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. The actual story everyone knows. Interestingly the story is resolved in a somewhat romantic form. Murray is propelled by a desire to attract the interest of MacDowell by improving himself. He becomes so enamored of the improvements for their own sake that he loses his own arrogance and in romantic fashion, ‘gets the girl’.
The focus on re-living each day until he gets it right is what most people focus on as the lessons of the film.
Not me. The idea that a meaningful life comes from finding your own internal qualities and nourishing those qualities is the message of the film. Happiness comes from fulfilling one's own internal competences and inclinations.
That is why I call this a film about commerce. Commerce has created tens of thousands of niches in our society for individuals to become authentic. To become fully developed beings. No other system, certainly not government, military, religion or bureaucracy has the potential to unleash the tens of thousands of individual authentic personalities and livelihoods that exist.
Groundhog Day is an encomium to commerce.