Infinite Loops
So, this is today. Today is yesterday. And tomorrow is also today.
My friend Maggie Moore, who last February wrote about how the movie 1917 got the intimacy of war right, returns to tell is how much Palm Springs, the new Hulu movie, resonated with her.
by Maggie Moore
Shutting my laptop is the end of the workday in my office, aka my kitchen table. I walk four steps to my couch, sit down, and chat with my boyfriend as he makes dinner. We enjoy some TV while we eat, and I do the dishes. We’ll watch some more Netflix before I inevitably get sleepy. After we get in bed, it’s only about 30 minutes or so before I fall asleep. Staying asleep is a fiction, a relic of the Before Times. Soon enough, it’s time to get up, have coffee, and go back to the office...which is four steps from my bedroom. So it goes.
By the numbers, quarantine has been incredibly kind to me. I’ve kept my job, my boyfriend’s byzantine experience with unemployment has sorted itself out. Neither of us has gotten sick despite living in New York City and despite being assaulted, on multiple occasions, by unmasked police officers at protests. Plus we share a home where we can support, comfort, and love each other up close. What’s to complain about? When we’re not yelling at the cops, we just stay inside and watch movies. A lot of movies. A lot.
Palm Springs wasn’t even the first time-loop movie I watched since quarantine started. There was a stretch of time where I was only interested in blockbuster action movies, which is how we ended up watching Aliens and Edge of Tomorrow in the same weekend. Both are incredible science fiction films with iconic female protagonists, aliens, and a unique relationship to the passage of time. Sigourney Weaver and Emily Blunt use their pasts to save humanity from certain annihilation and secure some type of future. It’s noble, it’s flashy, it’s heroic. But Palm Springs uses science fiction to ask a different question: when faced with infinity, do you choose apathy or growth?
When we first meet Nyles (Andy Samberg), we immediately understand that he’s stuck. He’s attended this wedding before. He seduces Sarah (Cristin Milioti) with classic time loop hijinks: he knows everything that’s going to happen before it does, resulting in a hilarious dance floor and wedding toast encounter. Their initial connection and budding romance is charming, hilarious, and effortless...until Nyles is hunted down. Literally. With a bow and arrow. Wounded, looking to end his suffering, he crawls back into the time loop, inadvertently dragging Sarah and us with him.
For the duration of the film, Nyles and Sarah are confronted with what I once thought was a fictional scenario: the same day recurring until infinity. No matter what they do, time moves around them in a circle, while only the two of them have the ability to make any progress. At first it seems great. There are no rules! No need for social graces! Shame and embarrassment cease to exist! What’s more attractive than the ability to hit the pause button on everyone else in your life, simply to benefit yourself?
What a gift.
I thought of quarantine as a gift for a while too. All the social pressure of plans was removed, and it was fun to just be online and look at all the bread folks were making. I lit candles at my desk and looked at cheap flights to far flung places. “I can do this!” I thought. “What a cozy time! This will be my moment to pause, reflect, and use my time indoors to make some progress.”
Then April came, and I stopped sleeping through the night. Then May came, and I started waking up screaming in bed. Then June came and it was too hot to go for walks. And now July is over and I realize that I’m falling apart. It took me four months to arrive where Sarah is on day 2: I have to get out of here. Only there’s no escaping the quarantine loop. Nyles says it best: “So, this is today. Today is yesterday. And tomorrow is also today. It’s one of those infinite time loop situations you might have heard about.”
Then April came, and I stopped sleeping through the night. Then May came, and I started waking up screaming in bed.
In Palm Springs, the time loop is a gift of confrontation. Normally, these two deeply flawed people would run away from their problems. But infinity offers them a consequence free environment to explore themselves, to get better. Without each other, they would have stayed stuck in their own individual loops of avoidance. Toward the end of the film, Sarah and Nyles’ growth is put to the test when an argument ruptures them in opposite directions. Nyles stays in his comfort zone, but Sarah takes it upon herself to figure out how to escape. She does the math to chart the path to freedom, and decides to share her discovery with Nyles. It’s a leap of faith, but one that’s the product of hard work. Day in and day out.
I thought quarantine would offer me the same gift of confrontation. Instead, it demands retreat. We’ve all had to retreat from public life — from each other — to stay safe. Really I’ve retreated from myself. I don’t explore things in my own mind anymore. I don’t daydream. Just slogging through the trauma of death and indifference is enough to render anyone catatonic. But I can’t be catanoic. Not when another tomorrow is starting and I still need to pay the rent. Not when I can still breathe. Not when I still get to choose between apathy and growth.
Palm Springs has been described as relentlessly charming. And it is. For me, it was a reminder that being happy takes effort and that growth doesn’t just happen. Even as time gently chugs cyclically around me, I can still move forward. But I have to choose to do so.
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