Perpetually present in Palm Springs

A movie's time loop explores the meaning in the mundane.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A young couple lounge on floating rings in a swimming pool.

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg ponder time.

Hulu.

I first watched Palm Springs on the evening of my wedding day. It was the very beginning of what would be a peaceful and relaxing honeymoon, sandwiched in-between planning a pandemic wedding and finishing graduate degrees, and planning a move across the Atlantic to Canada, where my husband had just got a job – which was quickly followed by getting pregnant for the first time. Those two weeks were the only restful time we got in the whole of 2021 -- and arguably to date! It felt like time stood still for a while. We walked on Cornish beaches, talked about our future, ate ice-cream. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to a deep sense of peace.

It’s quite fitting that, at such a quiet moment in our lives, we watched a film about getting stuck in a time loop at a wedding. Palm Springs’ time loop premise is familiar from cult classics like Groundhog Day. Tala and Abe are getting married on 9th November. An earthquake opens up a strange cave that traps any unwary visitors into a time loop. Nyles, one of the wedding guests and the boyfriend of Tala’s friend Misty (yes, these are their actual names), enters the time loop by accident. Every day, Nyles wakes up in Palm Springs, and every day is 9th November, again, and they’re celebrating Tala and Abe’s wedding, again. He can leave Palm Springs and travel anywhere he likes. But if he falls asleep or dies, the time is reset to the morning of the wedding.

An undetermined amount of time passes, until two more guests get stuck in time: Abe’s cousin Roy, a middle-aged, disillusioned family man, and later Sarah, Tala’s sister. Roy takes revenge on Nyles by torturing and killing him every few ‘days’; he was lured into the cave by a Nyles high on drugs and is furious that he’ll never get to see his kids grow up. In one iteration of the wedding day, Roy finds Nyles and shoots him with a crossbow. As Nyles re-enters the cave to make the day reset and escape another gruesome death at Roy’s hands, Sarah follows him in, not heeding his warning to stay away. She gets stuck in time, too.

And here is where the story actually begins. All of this we find out as a shocked Sarah, having woken up on her sister’s wedding day for the second time, goes to Nyles for answers. For the rest of the film, the sci-fi premise is fairly incidental. Palm Springs is really about Nyles and Sarah coming to terms with their brokenness and their longing for permanence as they get stuck in time – and stuck in love. At first, Nyles acts very cynically. He’s been in the time loop for quite a while and fails to see the purpose of his existence. ‘Today, tomorrow, yesterday, it’s all the same’, he says. His advice to newly stuck-in-time Sarah is to simply ‘embrace the fact that nothing matters’. Sarah accepts the invitation, beginning to act erratically. She and Nyles drive around Palm Springs aimlessly, spend their time choreographing an 80s dance, and she even throws him a ‘millionth’ birthday party. In a darker moment, she intentionally gets run over by a truck, hoping – to no avail – to finally escape. They see their lives just like the lost souls in Dante’s Inferno, condemned by sin to relive the same punishment over and over and over again, for all time.

Love reenchants the aimless and the mundane for them. They’re no longer stuck in hellish infinity.

But something happens in the process. Because they know they can’t leave, Nyles and Sarah lower their defences. Their relationship essentially works as a marriage: they are stuck in it for the long term, and so they become honest. They get to know each other more deeply than they have ever known anyone, and they come to love each other deeply, too. Suddenly, they are no longer waking up dreading more of the same, but excited to see each other again, and spend another day together.

Nyles’ disenchantment slowly disappears. When he first met Roy, drinking at the wedding bar, he cynically quoted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present’. But Eliot’s poem is not actually about the dull, hellish, infinite repetition of time. Rather, it’s about our desire to reach out to God’s eternity in heaven. It reminds us that, when we receive God’s grace, we stop experiencing our lives in a linear way, always looking ahead to new experiences and greater achievements, and instead start finding joy in the mundane. Nyles is finally learning this. He now enjoys Eliot’s perpetual ‘present’, because loving Sarah has allowed him to regain a childlike wonder at the world. As G. K. Chesterton argues in his wonderful book Orthodoxy, ‘Because children have abounding vitality’ they do not tire of repetition, but rather ‘want things repeated and unchanged’:

They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

Roy has learnt this, too. He stops trying to torture Nyles, and rather starts appreciating being able to spend every day – albeit the same day – with his wife and children. When Nyles visits him at his family home, it’s clear that Roy no longer sees repetition as a punishment, and that he’s found a sense of peace.

Finally, Nyles and Sarah realise that the time loop has instead given them the chance to mend their wounds, and come to terms with their mistakes. In a moment of despair, Sarah runs Roy over, causing him several injuries. ‘Nothing matters’, she tells Nyles as an excuse. But Nyles no longer agrees. ‘No. Pain matters!’, he tells her. ‘What we do to other people matters…It doesn’t matter that everything resets and people don’t remember. We remember. We have to deal with the things that we do.’

That’s exactly what Sarah spends the rest of the film doing. She deals with the consequences of her actions and attempts to repair her relationship with her sister Tala, whom – without giving away exactly what happens – she had deeply hurt and betrayed.

I won’t spoil for you whether Nyles and Sarah ever manage to escape the time loop and return to ‘real’ life, but that’s almost besides the point. But I will tell you that they stay together through it all (this is a rom-com as well as a sci-fi film after all…).

Love reenchants the aimless and the mundane for them. They’re no longer stuck in hellish infinity, but are rather looking ahead to the kind of eternal peace we hope to find in heaven, just like I did on my honeymoon.

I recently rewatched Palm Springs, a newborn baby girl in my arms, and it reminded me of when my other child, my son, was first born back in 2022. I remember walking down the street in downtown Toronto, where I was then living, and telling my mother that I felt like I was experiencing a taste of eternity. She was understandably confused by my sleep-deprivation-induced philosophical musings, but there was a reason I said that. Just as time had expanded on my honeymoon, each day feeling like everything stood still, and yet each day so full of variety, so the newborn days of my first experience of motherhood were both very busy and very quiet. But while my honeymoon had decidedly felt like a foretaste of heavenly peace, motherhood has been more complex than that. Sometimes it’s so repetitive that it can seem aimless – ‘how is his nappy full again?’ I often ask myself – and in this it can appear as static as Dante’s hell. As adults, it is very difficult to recapture the kind of joy and delight in repetition that Chesterton writes about. It can really feel like you’re stuck in a loop, every day bringing more of the same, more nappies, more bath time, and more baby food thrown at the wall. But motherhood is also full of the endlessly new little joys. When my son says a new word for the first time, or when my newborn daughter looks at me and smiles, I think that I’d be happy to relive this day forever, just like Roy.

Although I’m not actually stuck in a time loop like Sarah and Nyles in Palm Springs, it can sometimes feel that way. But perhaps it’s good thing. Perhaps that’s what reminds me that being a good parent means getting tired of your kids by the end of the day, then waking up the next morning, and loving them all over again. That’s what being a parent means, and that’s what marriage means, too. As Nyles says to Sarah right before they enter the cave for the last time, unsure if they’ll see each other, and whether their relationship can survive the mundane reality of domestic life, ‘We’re already sick of each other. It’s the best.’

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.