Spend Your Summer in Palm Springs

Have you ever gotten stuck in an infinite time loop with some random dude you've just met? Or tripped so hard you saw dinosaurs march across the desert horizon? How about dodged flying arrows fired by an assassin from a wedding you got dragged to by your cheating ex-girlfriend?

Sounds like something that could only happen in the summer. I feel closer to the cosmic powers of the universe in the summertime, don't you? In another article, someone mentioned that summer is a pretty horny time (oh yeah, this one), and in many ways I agree! But summer is also a time for fast-blooming rose coloured glasses, Sunday scaries, and the shedding of a sort of chrysalis. I find romance, as well as regret, grows rapidly with frequent sunlight and nutrient-heavy doses of delusion. Now, bring in a bottleneck, time-loop, unable-to-die, relive-your-worst-mistake-over-and-over and you'll have Palm Springs. 

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There's just something about multiverses, the incomprehensible concept of eternity, and an undeniable thread between two characters that splits you wide open and injects the most vulnerable emotions straight into your chest cavity. Despite the bright, plastic-y “romantic comedy” this film presents itself as, do not be fooled. Just like its main characters, there is a cavernous ache residing at its centre. But not to worry. Everybody finds their Irvine in the end.

Nyles, as a Namesake

Nyles is our first protagonist, named after the philosophy he preaches for the majority of the film. Nihilism, if you are not familiar, is basically the belief that life is meaningless. This is something we hear Nyles express over and over again, in different ways. To be fair, we meet him after he has supposedly lived the same day over and over an indefinite amount of times - and also his girlfriend is cheating on him. So, Nyles says things like:

“We are born lost…”

“Learn how to suffer existence…”

You get it. Nyles is goofy and fun, but at the same time aloof and detached. It's only when we stumble into the loop with Sarah that we get to know who Nyles really is - a man who has accepted his fate, and determined his efforts to escape are futile. He has built a protective mindset against the unexplainable, tortured existence that his life has become. His only choice is to believe in a lonely, cyclical punishment. He literally can't even die. But is this a belief he entered the loop with? Was he always living up to his name, or did the loop fulfil a certain prophesy?

Sarah, a Saviour

Through the slapstick, violent comedy of Sarah and Nyles testing their mortality within the loop (flying a plane, shooting guns, getting hit by cars, getting shot by Roy, a man that Nyles accidentally dragged into the loop with him) and Sarah's despairing realization that she is doomed to repeat the worst day of her life, it's the relationship that blossoms between them that is the core of the film.

Eventually, Sarah buys in to Nyles' perspective. They memorize dance choreography, prank wedding-goers, continue dying and, eventually, develop real feelings for each other. Summer, right????

There's a scene where the two of them are camping in the desert at dusk, tripping on mushrooms together. A herd of what appears to be diplodocus (yeah…dinosaur nerd over here) traverse the skyline between distant mesas. They talk.

Nyles doesn't believe in knowing someone's past. It's irrelevant to him. He only cares about the present, who someone is now. Sarah disagrees. She says, “Ignoring your past makes you destined to repeat it". And it is this moment that we begin to see the difference between them, a fundamental gap. Despite this, they decide to sleep together for the first time. It's sweet, but somehow sad, as the soft underbelly of their relationship has just been exposed to the audience and to each other.

How do you move forward? (major spoilers!!!)

Sarah is haunted by the bed she wakes up in after each loop. 

The setting of the film takes place, duh, in Palm Springs, at Sarah's sister's wedding.  At the climax of the film, we find out that Sarah slept with her sister's fiancé the night before the wedding. Every time the loop-day ends, she wakes up as the same Sarah who betrayed her sister.

As she lives the day over and over, Sarah gains distance from the person she was on that first real day. She meets Nyles, falls in love with him, and develops a new perspective on life and herself. But, however much fun she is having with Nyles, she cannot escape her mistakes of the ‘past’ if she is constantly waking up to them every morning. She can't move forward. Because of this, Sarah realizes that life in the loop truly is meaningless.

After acknowledging their clashing perspectives, and after Sarah discovers that Nyles has actually had sex with her several times while he was in the loop (and she wasn't), they split. Sarah's determination is refreshed, and she gets to work on an escape route for herself. 

Nyles is the opposite. He struggles with his set-in-stone perspective. He even visits his nemesis, Roy, for advice. Nyles observes Roy's simple life of repetition with his family in Irvine. Opposite of Nyles, Roy finds meaning in all the small things. He appreciates every single moment, because it's all he has. To Nyles he says, “Nothing worse than going through this shit alone.” 

"Find your Irvine"

We all have one! 

Nyles goes to Sarah on the verge of her escape experiment, and delivers what I believe to be one of the more lovely, simple, and realistic confessions. We all know in a romantic comedy that this moment is coming, but my favourite part about it isn't what Nyles says, but how Sarah responds. 

Nyles says, “I'd rather die with you than live in this world without you.”

Sarah replies, “I can live just fine without you. But there's a chance that this life could be a little less mundane with you in it."

In this short exchange, and their confession as a whole, we can see that Nyles and Sarah are still their own independent people. Sarah, who used all of her loops to study quantum physics and develop a way for them to escape, certainly doesn't ‘need’ Nyles. But it doesn't mean she loves him less. It means she's willing to be with him because she chooses to, not because she has to. 

You don't have to be a ‘shitty person’

What I ultimately love so much about this film is that it's not just about becoming a ‘good person’ or finding love. It's about forgiving yourself and having the courage to move forward even when it might feel hopeless. Sarah proved to herself and the audience time and again that she is not a bad person, and sometimes it just takes someone else by your side to help you believe it. 

Nyles thought that life was meaningless, until he found someone that meant more to him than life did. Sometimes it takes losing someone to realize what you had, right? 

This is always how I feel at the end of the summer, too. September rolls around and you think, wow, I really took some of those sunny days for granted.

Like I said, it's just the kind of thing that might happen in the summer. Falling in love in an ‘infinite time-loop situation’ seems like a good August activity to me. 

Thank you all for reading! I hope everyone is having a friggin epic summer! Don't walk into any mysterious desert caves though. You might have to learn quantum physics and go on the run from a murderous J.K. Simmons.