This may have been in the cultural zeitgeist and I was oblivious to it (totally possible) OR something has shifted in the mass media awareness of time and time loops, but what is most interesting to me in the light of my recent discoveries (uncover-ies?) is how movies and television shows are approaching the manipulation of these time loops.
I’ve always been intrigued by the way books, movies, and television shows seem to be one step ahead of the curve in paying attention to issues bubbling under the surface of mass awareness. In my lifetime, the best example of this was the movie “The China Syndrome” which was in the theaters in 1979 when the nuclear near-catastrophe at Three Mile Island occurred. One of the most downloaded movies of 2020 was “Contagion,” a film from 2011 which described a plague on modern society, which interestingly started in a casino. So it is fascinating to see so many movies dealing with Time and manipulating time show up in my online viewing queues. The grand-daddy of these movies was “Groundhog Day” which has become the template for observing our hero (or anti-hero) dealing with being stuck in a time loop.
“Palm Springs” on Hulu is the most recent addition to the this genre. I watched it last night, loved it, and enjoyed the characters’ arc from being trapped in a loop to using physics to escape it. In a review in The Atlantic, David Sims writes:
The film belongs to the growing canon of time-loop stories, which ensnare their characters in a repeating cycle from which there’s no discernible escape. Life proceeds normally enough, but its rhythms are unchanged; the monotony is comical and then unbearable…Where other time-loop movies (Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day) were about their characters gaining some karmic sense of self-improvement, Palm Springs is about how reality can feel endless…
Now characters are attempting to take control of time, or at least corral it.
I had signed up for Hulu in order to watch “Devs,” Alex Garland’s multi-episode follow up to “Annihilation” and “Ex Machina.” A tech zillionaire assembles a team to conquer time solely so he can re-connect to his dead daughter. While on Hulu, I discovered that there is an entire category dedicated to shows about Time Travel. While scanning the list, I discovered a former NBC network show, “Timeless,” that spent 2 seasons with the good guys chasing the bad guys in time machines through some of the most prominent events of the modern era.
What would have been the movie of the summer for 2020 was Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” had theaters been allowed to show it. Or it will be, time will tell. From the trailer, “Tenet” seems to be about a technology that reverses the flow of time and how it is weaponized. I am enjoying the energy being applied to this new movement towards taking control of Time, instead of being at the mercy of it.
Maybe the reason that this feels so relevant is that Time feels different in 2020, especially because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its upheaval of all of our schedules. The lockdown and the switch to working from home, or being out of work, has disintegrated the traditional Monday through Friday work week, adding to the sense of time speeding up or slowing down, or alternating between the two. The Aspen Brain Institute posted an interesting article “To Build Resilience in Isolation, Master the Art of Time Travel.” Author Adam Grant uses astronaut Scott Kelly’s year on the International Space Station as a template for handing life during a pandemic, and this quote caught my eye:
In isolation, time becomes meaningless. Every day starts to feel like Groundhog Day.
The grandfather of Time Loop movies has become daily life in 2020, ouch! Grant’s solution could be from my website’s landing page:
Taking mental trips to the future, to the past and to an alternative present can help build resilience.
David Sims again:
It’s not hard to view all art through the focus of the pandemic right now, but in Palm Springs, the subtext is practically text: We are all trapped.
But some of us are Shawshank-ing out of our cells. Stay tuned for more on the Timeline Journeying process.
https://aspenbraininstitute.org/blog-posts/25q5prvubs2pgze1v2wii4otluwpuq