Review
Culture
Film & TV
7 min read

Perpetually present in Palm Springs

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

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
Migration
Politics
6 min read

It's 2029 and PM Farage has reformed asylum

Are refugees really no longer deserving of our protection?

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Nigel Farage stands and gestures in front of a flag.
Reform.

The year is 2029 and Nigel Farage has just been elected as the new prime minister of the United Kingdom. 

As one of many sweeping reforms in his first few months in office, the new PM has deported thousands of asylum-seekers to countries including Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iran.  

Upon return to these countries, it has been reported that several of these asylum-seekers have faced arrest, torture, and even execution. 

Now of course this is only a fictional depiction of one possible future, but it is a future that would appear at least conceivable, given recent polling and the pledge of the Reform party leader to deport every individual who travels illegally to these shores, whether or not they may face a risk to life upon their return home. 

Such statements would have been almost universally lambasted not so many years ago, but the current status of our immigration system - and politics - has seemingly rendered them palatable to a growing number of Brits. 

“I don't think it's about hate,” said one caller to BBC Radio 5 Live when Reform’s plans were announced last week. “I think it's about the way [immigration’s] been handled up to now by this government and the previous government, [which has] created a lot of unease.” 

Another caller admitted the issue had divided opinion, but provided a contrasting perspective: 

“This is Nigel Farage all over,” she said. “It's what he's done since before Brexit. What does he need to win in this country? He needs division. And what's the most divisive issue we can come up with? Immigration. And what a privilege we have to live in a safe country where, God forbid, none of us will ever have to pick our children up and flee persecution!” 

All of which brings us nicely back to the particular - and certainly complex - issue at hand: namely, what should be our response to those asylum-seekers who have genuinely fled from persecution and may face more of it should they be returned home? 

The safeguarding of such individuals is at the very heart of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which all Western democracies (including ours) have ratified and long defended, and which includes the principle of “non-refoulement”: prohibiting "the forcible return of refugees or asylum-seekers to a country where they are liable to be subjected to persecution”. 

“Our values have always been that where people are under a real and substantial risk of physical torture or persecution … then we as a country have always been prepared to have them,” former head of the judiciary Lord Thomas explained on another BBC Radio show last week. “I don’t think we should abrogate values embodied in the convention … because that’s part and parcel of our history and our tradition and our standing as a liberal democracy.” 

And yet, as Lord Thomas’s interviewer correctly pointed out, this is precisely what Reform are pledging to do, should they come to power.  

Indeed, an increasing number of politicians here and elsewhere now argue that the Refugee Convention and other similar treaties, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, must be reformed - or even ignored - in light of a much-changed world. 

We are not the only country facing an immigration crisis, of course; nor are we the first to consider drastic measures to stem the tide of asylum-seekers arriving on our shores. 

In his own first few months back in office, the US president, Donald Trump, made good on his own pledge to tighten up America’s borders by, among other things, deporting illegal immigrants

Among them were several Iranians who claimed to have a reasonable fear of persecution should they be returned home, given their expressed conversions to Christianity. 

In May, a US congresswoman proposed that legislation should be amended to protect such religious refugees from deportation, naming her bill, the Artemis Act, after one of the Iranians who had been deported to Panama. 

In June, the issue returned to the headlines when another Iranian asylum-seeker was filmed having a panic attack as her husband and fellow Christian convert was taken away by the US’s immigration enforcement agency, ICE. 

In July, the couple’s pastor - another Iranian Christian who had arrived in the United States as a refugee some years ago - travelled to the White House to conduct a three-day hunger strike in protest against the detention of his church members. 

And in August, in an interview with the director of the advocacy organisation for which I work, the pastor called for “deep reforms” to the immigration system, saying that “most [Iranian Christian asylum-seekers in the US] tried many times to come through a legal way, like a refugee pathway, but there is no legal way for Iranians to become refugees in the United States.” 

“If you were in the UK, and you had nothing to feed your children or grandchildren, what would you do?” 

A legal pathway for religious refugees is also something that has been called for in the UK, including by the frontrunner to be the next leader of the Church of England - another Iranian former refugee, Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani.  

So the need to reform the asylum system here and elsewhere is something that would appear to be agreed upon by all sides in the debate. 

Reporting on the plight of refugees was not something that was considered part of my remit when I first joined Article18 midway through Trump’s first term in office. Back then, our focus was only on documenting the persecution Christians were (and still are) enduring in their homeland.  

But as the years have passed and the numbers of Iranian Christians seeking asylum have grown while the opportunities for them to be resettled have drastically shrunk, the issue has become an increasing and ultimately un-ignorable concern. 

In the last two years alone, my organisation has released reports on the plight of Iranian Christian refugees in Turkey, Georgia and, closer to home, Sweden, while concerns have also been raised about Iranian Christian refugees in several other countries, including Armenia, Iraq and Indonesia. 

In each of these countries, as in Blighty, the common denominator appears to be simply that these refugees - however worthy their claims may be - are unwanted and untrusted by their hosts. 

During my research, I came across a refugee support group in Colchester, Refugee, Asylum Seeker & Migrant Action (RAMA), whose director, Maria Wilby, I had the privilege of interviewing, and whose perspective has stayed with me. 

Ms Wilby picked me up on a comment I had made, when I suggested that “one could understand why people may feel less sympathy for economic migrants, but surely not refugees”. 

Her response was not dissimilar to the words of the second caller to 5 Live: 

“If you were in the UK, and you had nothing to feed your children or grandchildren, what would you do?” she asked. “You’d go to the next country and ask them to feed them. And that’s what it means to be an economic migrant. It’s not about, ‘Oh, I’ve got a nice car, but I want a nicer car.’ These are people who are literally starving, and feel so disadvantaged that they think the next generation will also be equally disadvantaged. And of course then you try and move. 

“And back in the day, it used to be that if you had a child in another country, they would basically be a native of that country. We’ve changed the rules to mean that migration and borders grow and grow. And actually, we’ve created this system – all of us have created this system by standing by and letting it happen – and it’s not right. If I believed in God, God certainly didn’t intend there to be borders. Nobody would. Why would you? It’s an unnatural concept. We are one world, and we should share it.” 

I’m not sure Nigel Farage would agree, but whatever one’s perspective on the need for border control, surely we should all be able to agree that those with genuine claims to have fled persecution should be afforded our help, or at the very least protected from refoulement.

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