Palm Springs · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man floats in a swimming pool while a wedding assembles behind him. He knows the toast before the best man opens his mouth. He knows who goes into the water, and when. Nothing in this day can surprise him, and nothing he does to it will stick. Start there, because the whole film is in that image: a body at rest in a body of water that goes nowhere, while a party performs itself on the patio for what might be the ten-thousandth time.

Gilles Deleuze split the movies into two regimes. In the first, the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action lands. The sheriff draws, the town is saved, the cutting serves the chain. After 1945 that circuit came apart. In the Italian films shot among the rubble, characters see far more than they can do anything about, and Deleuze named the break the crisis of the action-image: the moment perception stops being the front end of effective action. Palm Springs is that crisis in swim trunks.

Which sounds like a stretch until you notice what's strange about Nyles. He isn't passive. He's enormously busy — stunts, dares, a desert explosion, whole comic runs the editing compresses into montage. But Deleuze's crisis was never about lethargy. It's about the link between seeing and consequence, and the loop severs that link while leaving every muscle free. Do whatever you like today; tomorrow is today. So Nyles is what Deleuze calls a seer, a voyant, someone who watches and endures instead of acting, and the joke of Andy Samberg's performance is that the sketch-comedy looseness has been recast as the affect of a man who stopped hoping. The glibness isn't energy. It's damage.

There's a piece of intellectual luck underneath all this. The philosopher Deleuze built his theory of film time on is Henri Bergson, and Bergson also wrote the best short book anyone has written about laughter. His definition of the comic: something mechanical encrusted upon the living. A person made to behave like a machine is funny, and stays funny right up until it isn't. A time loop takes that definition literally and runs it for ninety minutes, which is why this film can pivot from a gag into real dread without changing gear. Same mechanism, different distance.

Deleuze also has a term for the shot I opened with. Movement of world: the character goes still and the world takes over the moving. He drew it from musicals, where the dance seems to pick the dancer up. Here the choreography belongs to a wedding — the toast, the fall into the pool, the reception tent hitting its beats on cue — and Nyles floats in the middle of it, carried.

Deleuze's first great book was called Difference and Repetition, and its argument is that nothing ever comes back identical; repetition is how difference gets made. Nyles has concluded the opposite, and mistakes his own exhaustion for a law of physics. Sarah tests it. Given the same infinite day, she does the one thing he never tried: she studies. The film's exit runs on quantum physics, delivered with a raised eyebrow, and it matters enormously that it's her hands on it. Cristin Milioti carries the picture out of acid self-loathing into agency, and she is the proof that the loop was never a sentence. It was an offer, and someone had to put something new into it.

Her arrival also gives the film its sharpest temporal joke. Sarah's first day is Nyles's ten-thousandth, both are happening in the same frame, and the frame can't rank them. Deleuze calls this peaks of present: time that refuses to sort itself into before and after, several incompatible presents stacked on one another. Most films that show time doing this are austere — Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, corridors and hotels. This one gets its comedy and its ache from the same place. Every scene where he knows and she doesn't is two different days playing at once.

The craft that makes it work is the cutting, by Andrew Dickler and Matthew Friedman, and it solves the loop film's basic problem: how to convey an eternity nobody wants to sit through. The answer is montage. Repeated days get compressed into escalating rhythmic runs, so you feel the accumulated weight of infinity in a few minutes. That's a real trade-off, and worth naming. A time-image film usually gives you dead time, the everyday held until you feel its length; Antonioni will make you watch a street after the people have left it. A comedy can't. So Palm Springs converts duration into percussion — the wake-up beat, the reset, the match cut back to the same morning. Notice what the edit is doing there. Normally a cut joins before to after. This one joins the end of the day to the start of the same day, a join across a gap rather than along a continuity, what Deleuze would call an irrational cut. In this film it functions as the clock.

Quyen Tran shoots the trap in bright saturated desert light: pools, sun-bleached patios, dry mountains. Paradise as prison, and it keeps a one-location premise breathing. But something happens to a place when no action inside it can land. It stops being a setting and becomes an atmosphere. Deleuze's name for that is any-space-whatever, a space no longer serving as the ground of action, and the resort becomes heat and chlorine and a beige tent. Meanwhile the wedding keeps executing itself, and repetition strips its rituals down to visible social machinery — what Deleuze calls a gest, a posture that exposes the relation propping it up. The nerve of the film is that the eternity these people are condemned to isn't epic. It's a mid-tier destination wedding.

None of this arrives from nowhere. Groundhog Day built the grammar: the iteration montage where mastery visibly accrues, and the run from delight through despair to grace. Edge of Tomorrow made death the reset button, gave us the veteran looper schooling the rookie, and proved an audience could be dropped into an already-running cycle. Happy Death Day showed the loop was a chassis you could weld to any genre, so the wedding rom-com was fair game. Source Code bloomed a romance inside a repeated fixed interval and snapped its hero back with match cuts, the device echoed at every sunrise here. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind supplied the register Andy Siara writes in, the science-fiction conceit used as a delivery system for adult, ambivalent romance instead of spectacle. And Russian Doll, arriving alongside, found the shared loop: the discovery that someone else is in here with you.

What Max Barbakow and Siara did with that inheritance is specific. They deleted the discovery act. Earlier loop films spend a whole movement on someone learning the rules; this one opens on a man who has known them for years and is bored, which turns the premise from a puzzle into a condition. Then they made it two-handed and kept it there. Groundhog Day's loop was a moral technology — repeat until you're a better man, with the woman waiting as the prize at the end of the ordeal. Palm Springs declines that deal. The loop is relational, and the question shifts from how do I get out to who would I be willing to be in here with, and would I risk an ending for them. J.K. Simmons's third looper, all menace and unexpected pathos, is the film's evidence of what happens to someone who answers that badly.

It landed on Hulu in July 2020, into a summer when much of its audience was living undifferentiated days in a row, and a comedy that looked lightweight picked up a charge nobody planned. Rewatch it with the background in focus. Watch how much of the wedding keeps happening behind the leads exactly as before, on cue, indifferent to them. Then watch what actually changes, which is never the day. It's what the two of them are willing to put into it. That's the film's argument and Deleuze's: the trap isn't repetition. It's the conviction that repetition can only ever hand you back the same afternoon.