Review

Culture

Film & TV

6 March 2024

7 min read

Perpetually present in Palm Springs

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

Beatrice Scudeler

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.’

Interview

Belief

Books

Creed

28 August 2025

15 min read

Marilynne Robinson: “an ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar”

The self-confessed daydreamer and slacker talks with Graham Tomlin

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of best-selling novels including Housekeeping, the winner of the Hemingway Award, and Gilead, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written numerous non-fiction works, including her most recent book, of which the New York Times said: ‘Reading Genesis is alive with questions of kindness, community and how to express what we so often struggle to put into words’. Rowan Williams has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists".

This interview is an edited transcript of a Seen & Unseen Live event.

Graham
I've got a number of your books on my table here. I've got my copy of Gilead, Housekeeping. I've got Jack, all the novels. I also have a whole series of other books of essays you've written, like When I Was A Child I Read Books and The Givenness of Things - I love that title. You write a lot of different things, but you're primarily known as a novelist, and I wanted to ask how and why you became a novelist. Did you always want to write stories? Was that always part of your kind of your mind? Was it made up when you were a child growing up? Was storytelling always part of your life?

Marilynne
You know I have very vague ideas about that. I was encouraged by teachers, and so on, to feel that I could write well. That if I made a choice I could follow up on it. I took a writing class in college, a workshop. I felt I had come to Brown [University], which is in Rhode Island, from Idaho - which is definitely not in Rhode Island! I listened to people talking about the West, basically where my ancestors had settled, and it reminded me of how differently I experienced it than the way that people talked about it. So, in a way, I wanted to create a West as I felt it as a child. Especially with the importance of women in that culture, which was very great. It gave me an opportunity to just recover the sense of the strange loveliness of a very wild place, and this richness of being there. So that was my first try at fiction.

Talking about Gilead for a moment, which is the first novel of yours that I read and probably the one I still enjoy the enjoy the most. It's always struck me it's a kind of unlikely novel to become very well known. It's the story of an elderly pastor writing a long letter to his son. It's a book in which, in one sense, not many things happen. It's doesn't have big plot changes. It's not set against seismic events in history like a war or an earthquake, or a disaster. It's small-town America, quite local in many ways. Was it a real surprise to you that it became so popular? Why do you think people resonated with it in quite the way that they did?

You know, those are the kinds of questions that I hesitate to ask myself. I feel as though the ordinary with which I am identified is extremely rich, and it has a very important place in any life. An ordinary moment in its own way is sort of metaphysically unaccountable as the most spectacular moment at least as we perceive these things. An ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar. I mean, there's no point pretending that we can make gradations of interest, I think, among people. And, if I have one aesthetic banner that I fly, basically, that's it. That anything that is looked at closely, and with an eye to the fact that the beautiful is sort of the signature of reality, there's everything to be done there.

There’s a sense that everything matters, even the small things are of real significance if you look at them closely enough. And that's one of the things that comes out of the book. And rereading it recently, that focus on ordinary things came out for me. Maybe because I was aware of some close friends who died recently, the theme of death also struck me. It's a novel that is kind of anticipating death. It's about an elderly man, 76 years old, who thinks he's probably going to die soon, writing a letter to his son. Did you sense that it was a meditation on death when you were writing it?

Well, I started it simply because I had a voice in my head, and the voice in the head was saying, you know I'm going to die soon. That was the the situation of the voice that was central to the novel for me. And so it necessarily became a meditation on death, whatever death is - the cessation of life in any case. Which is a profound retrospect on things that seem trivial as we pass through them, and are amazing in retrospect, just voices and gestures, and other people.

One of the lines that stays with me from the book is one from John Ames, the main character. He says something like: ‘I've been trying to think about heaven. But I found it quite difficult to do so. But then again, I wouldn't have been able to describe this world if I hadn't spent the last 70 years walking around on it’. Has writing the book helped you think about death in a different kind of way? As we get older, I suppose it becomes more part of not our experience, but of our anticipation. Do you find you think about these things more?

I think that one of the things that's wonderful about writing novels or poetry is that it makes coherence, it puts things in relation to each other. It lets you explore your mind and understand what you read and what you are attracted to, and all the rest. I think that just the fact of writing has sort of transformed my ideas of both life and death. The need to make them, as it were, palpable or visual in one's own imagination. You have to make choices in terms of what is beautiful or what matters, So, yes, my sense of death is no doubt very much modified by having written that book and also my sense of being alive.

The other book I wanted to talk about is your latest book, Reading Genesis. It a bit of a departure for you. You've mainly written novels, essays and books of cultural commentary. You suddenly find yourself writing a book about a book of the Bible. What led you to do that? Why did you focus on Genesis rather than one of the Gospels, or the Psalms, or any other book within the Bible?

Genesis establishes so much that becomes an assumption for the rest of the Bible. It establishes the basic metaphysical circumstance of humankind in relation to God. You find it echoed everywhere. It's so basic to the whole literature that the fact is that it is very much underread and it's been exposed to centuries of criticism that was very condescending to it, as if it were a primitive literature when, of course, ancient people were capable of extremely sophisticated thinking and perceiving. I thought that in order to clarify anything subsequent to Genesis, you had to clarify Genesis. It seemed to me as if it functioned so beautifully in terms of self-referential qualities, structure, the argument was there to be made. it's not recherché or anything. It's in the text that it is literary and that certain meanings are developed by literary methods through the course of the of the book.

How did you find coming at it as a as a novelist? Most books I've read on Genesis have been technical commentaries by Biblical scholars who've researched the history of the times, and the texts around it. You come at it as a storyteller, as a novelist. Did that give you an advantage in telling the story of Genesis, looking at again, or a different angle than you'd find in many of the commentaries?

I have my limitations. I looked at it, of course, in the way that was natural for me to look at it. But I felt as if it was badly treated by critics. I asked a friend of mine, a theologian, if people still used JEDP, the old 'documentary hypothesis'. He did a poll of people that he knew that wrote in the area, and one of them said any self-respecting scholar uses the documentary hypothesis. So, I thought, well, that's not me, you know. I'm not a scholar. The documentary hypothesis is very old at this point and however many ways it's been modified its impact is essentially the same. It makes the text incoherent in its most crucial parts.

This is the hypothesis that breaks it down into different sources, and tries to identify which part of the book comes from J, or E, or D, or P?

Yes, exactly, exactly. And they question the reality of Moses, but they believe deeply in J or D. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, and they proceed as if they were a kind of documentary evidence that really does not exist. So, I thought the fact that scholarship has been manacled to this one theory for 150 years does not oblige me to be shackled to it also.

If you ask the average person their view of the God of the Old Testament they might imagine a kind of vengeful, capricious, angry character who smites people because he doesn't like them. Yet your depiction of the story seems to say, actually, no it’s God who is faithful and good and patient. It's the humans in the story who are angry and vengeful and capricious. You're turning that on its head. Some people may not be convinced by that, and are still wedded to this idea, that that the God of the Old Testament is this vengeful character. How do you respond to that when you read people who depict God in that way?

This is a very ancient thing, this making the sharp distinction between the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament, giving Moses horns and all the rest of it. This is dualism, it's a violation of the assumptions of monotheism. which I think are very beautiful and important. I'm very ready to defend monotheism, but in any case, I think that if there's a punitive structure in the narratives of the Old Testament, what they are telling us is that most of the world's evil is created by human beings and there are certain points at which it becomes intolerable under almost all circumstances. The evil that is insupportable is violence against human beings. It is the tendency of human beings who are images of God to act revoltingly badly toward human beings who are images of God. If you think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war and famine and plague, and so on, all of these things are humanly created in the vast majority of cases, perhaps every case, and I think it's an evasion of of the fact of human moral competence to say that you know God is to blame for the violence that we do.

And letting ourselves off the hook by doing that....

Yes, exactly.

You make quite a contrast between what the Book of Genesis says about humanity, for example, and some of the Babylonian myths of the time, similar creation stories like the Gilgamesh epic or the Enūma Elish. You contrasted them because they seem to give a very different understanding of humanity from what you get in in Genesis. Why does the view of humanity in Genesis have much more nobility and grandeur than these other origin stories?

Well, the idea that human beings are images of God, that is utterly Biblical. There is nothing to compare with it. Human beings are made in the Babylonian myths to do groundwork basically, to spare gods having to do work that would fall to them because they lost the war among gods. A certain number of people are created. They are not named. They are no objects of any god's devotion or anything like that. Brilliant as the Babylonians were, they're not assumed to be a creation of the status of an Adam. ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ The way that Genesis sets up, so that the beginning is this wonderful explosion of being, and at the end is this human being that reflects it all basically, that is the adequate second presence in this amazing moment. And you find that picked up in the Gospel of John. That's just very beautiful, and I know of nothing that is comparable to it in any way. Certainly not myths that were current in antiquity. Certainly not in our very declined anthropology since then.

Genesis probably is one of the most influential books in the whole of Western intellectual history, given that it's given us a whole language for thinking about the way the world is, the way we are, who God is, how we relate to one another as human beings, how human society works. Would you pick out other themes or ideas apart from that anthropology, that you think were revolutionary in the Book of Genesis?

One of the things that is amazing about it is that the people upon whom God's attention rests are very ordinary people. Abraham is not a king, or a magnate, or anything like that. He's just a wandering herdsman. The idea that the whole of history and meaning can rest on the person of someone who would have seemed quite unexceptional to the people around him as he lived. That means any of us. That's a way of re-understanding the fact that the Adamic figure at the beginning of Genesis is simply humankind. You know the grandeur and the the ordinariness are simultaneous.

The significance of each individual as a significant moral actor within the world.

Yes, exactly.

So, if Abraham has had such a role, then you and I can. And everyone listening to this or reading this conversation can do the same.

And assume that we do it. One of the things that I think is very clear historically is that people are morally competent, for one thing, and then deeply consequential. When you have an election and you make a very appalling choice, 51% of the individuals in the United States made that choice. They truly did. We can't hide behind the idea that what we do does not matter, that we're minor figures, and so on, that God knows what the ultimate consequences of these kinds of things might be. :

In writing the book, did you find yourself reflecting on the kind of current situation in America and what was going on in it? You were writing it before the recent election, but did it have any reflections for you on where your nation is right now?

Well, it necessarily has reflections on history in general, because it is about what human beings are, and how things happen among them. I would not have anticipated anything of our present circumstance, even a re-election of Trump. This is horrifying, astonishing.

I want to ask one more question. I was reading recently one of your essays, and I think it started with the line ‘I reached the point in my life when I can see what has mattered’. I wondered if you wanted to reflect back on your life as a as a novelist, as a writer, as a thinker, as a Christian? What do you find has mattered more as time has gone on, and what has mattered less? What are the things that really do matter for you now, as you look back and you see what has mattered?

I have found out how important teaching was to me. No doubt you know things become radiant in memory. I think I enjoyed the interaction of my life, and my mind, and my literary interest in that particular moment more than I've ever done in any other circumstance. One of the most important things to me was my first experience writing Housekeeping when I was in isolation more or less. Trying to remember things that had happened two decades earlier, experiences I had had, and finding out in those circumstances that I remembered them, that I knew what kind of flower bloomed, in what place, at what time, that my memory was much more active and alert than I think my conscious attention was. I found out that from that that I had lived a much broader life, a much more intense life than I realised. I would never have known that if I hadn't made the kind of demand on myself that writing that book made, writing any book makes really, but fiction especially, because you're trying to conjure a sense of reality. Even from the point of view of when I talk to my students, I say, don't imagine that you know your mind. It is much larger. There's it's almost another life beside your life. The finding that out was just incredibly important to me, not just because it helps me write, but also to find out something about what I am as a human being.

Linking that to the previous point about the the significance of each individual as a moral actor, it also maybe says something about that each of us lives much richer lives than we think we do.

Absolutely.

Maybe memory brings those things to the surface in a way that that we don't often recognize?

Exactly, and that we don't normally access. I was in a kind of an extreme situation, trying to remember Idaho while I was living in France - kind of an eccentric project. It's finding the place at which the past is evoked in the mind. Very powerful.

I'm noticing the things that otherwise you might not see which is, again back to the point about the ordinary, the ordinary being significant.

Yes.

Are there things that seemed very important to you when you were younger, that now don't seem quite so important?

You know I think of myself as a sort of a slacker. I think I have friends who could affirm my view of things as a slacker. I've always enjoyed just simply being in my own head. To the extent that it's a distraction for me. I know people who have lives like mine, who are much more productive than I am. Where did my time go? Well, daydreaming, thinking, watching, just being in my head. I was told when I was a student when I was in high school. that I should give myself a mind that I wanted to live in because I would live in it for the rest of my life, and I did that, and I have done that. And you know it's been a great pleasure, finally. Maybe I should have done more!

Well, the the daydreaming has been a very beneficial thing for the rest of us who've been able to read some of the product of that daydreaming. So, we're very grateful, Marilynne. Thank you.

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