The Groundhog Day Format, if you’re not familiar, is any plot where the main character or characters are trapped in a time loop which lasts exactly one day, and a day is defined as the point at which the characters wake up, to the point where they either fall asleep, or die. Most often this is a regular 16 hour day although in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg’s character refers to doing a bunch of crystal meth and flying to Equatorial Guinea which google maps says would take almost 48 hours so it can be extended. The length of loop is important here. Wikipedia, Cinema Blend, and IMDb all have lists of time-loop movies, but they include some more generally about time travel and others, like Source Code, that use different, often shorter, time loops which exclude them from the Groundhog Day Format. Source Code, itself an excellent movie, uses an 8 minute time loop which gives it an urgency you won’t find in the Groundhog Day Format. A day-long time loop is a lazy sort of time loop. It’s long enough to fuck around, but short enough to fit nicely into a movie script. A day is also the basic unit of a human life.
Happy Death Day, Palm Springs, and Edge of Tomorrow are all enjoyable films that use the Format – Groundhog Day is an outright classic – and I think the reason we love this device and the reason we keep returning to it is because it’s about one of our favorite subjects: death, or more specifically, the postponement of death. We love to put ourselves in the shoes of a character who has all the time in the world. My favorite part of Groundhog Day is how seemingly overnight, he mastered the piano and learned to speak French. So often we feel like a task is too daunting because of how long it would take so we don’t even start. How nice then to be able to put the world on hold and devote day after day to one of our passions.
In Palm Springs, we meet Andy Samberg’s character, Nyles, already trapped in his loop. He’s been there for a while – we don’t know how long, it could be thousands of years – and he’s settled into a comfortable rut. The day he’s reliving is his girlfriend’s friend’s wedding day, and after a botched hookup attempt, he ends up accidentally drawing his girlfriend’s friend’s sister Sarah, played by Cristin Milioti, into his private curse. She then goes through the five stages of time loop, Anger, denial, acceptance, mayhem, and finally, trying to get back to a more traditional schedule.
Inevitably in these movies, after a period of funnin’ around inside the loop, the protagonist gets fed up and tries to get out. What sets Palm Springs apart is Nyles doesn’t want to leave. He’s happy, or at least comfortable, in his little slice of the continuum. “Why would I want to go back there anyway?” he asks Sarah. “It’s a world of death and poverty, debilitating emotional distress.” It’s an excellent point and one I’m happy Palm Springs makes. Anyone trapped in a time loop, especially a day-long loop, is effectively immortal, and immortal on the best possible terms. You get unlimited life units, you get to be out during the day and don’t have to feast on human blood, and, with most of these stories, you can kind of leave whenever you’re ready. Because immortality would definitely be fun for hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of years, but at some point it’s gonna be time to leave the party.
And you get to explore death in ways no mortal ever has. These movies almost always feature the characters killing themselves in a variety of gruesome and sometimes hilarious ways. “Don’t drive angry!” They get to know things about the process of dying that none of the rest of us will ever know. Maybe not what happens after, but everything about the moments leading up to it and those are true mysteries of the universe.
In the end Nyles agrees to try to leave his loop. Maybe he’s ready – like I said, it’s possible he’d been attending that wedding for millennia – and he’s got a good reason to go, but I wonder what it’s going to be like for him on the other side. We never get more than a scene or two after they leave the loop, but there has to be an adjustment period. You gotta remind yourself that you can’t just kill yourself or punch someone in the face. Readjust to the fact that your actions have consequences you can’t sleep off. Equally jarring to finding out you’re stuck in a time loop in the first place must be realizing you now have to plan ahead.
I really liked Palm Springs. It is a sweet little romantic comedy that adds a few wrinkles to a Format I would happily watch day, after day, after day.
criticalmush.com 