On Palm Springs

[cw: rape, date rape]

I watched Palm Springs for the first time during the horrible winter lockdown of early 2021, when Covid rates were sky-high in the UK, and both global and personal traumas were bearing firmly down. My boyfriend and I rewatched the film for the first time over a year later – last night, on Valentine’s Day, after skimming the requisite streaming platforms for something to fit the holiday, but, you know, not too neatly. 

On the rewatch, I was struck by just how tight the script is (it’s a bullseye-hitting 90 minutes long) and how stratospherically charismatic Andy Samberg is in it. His comedic chops are unbelievable! We all know this, but still, I am awed! I’m already a Brooklyn Nine-Nine fan as well – on the Valentine’s theme, it’s what my boyfriend and I used to watch on our very first nights we were hanging out together, four winters ago – but it still feels like Samberg is under-used by Hollywood. He and Cristin Milioti both turn in hilarious and layered performances as Nyles and Sarah, clearly mining every moment of the film’s (fewer) serious scenes as well as its many hijinks. And I really do have to hand it to screenwriter Andy Siara for succinctly weaving in just enough of the philosophical content that lurks beneath any Groundhog Day scenario. For instance, there’s a moment where Sarah, still adjusting to her new reality, is scolded by Nyles (who has been trapped much longer) for treating the people who fill their eternally-resetting days with reckless abandon, happy to cause pain without a second thought: 

NYLES: Pain is real. Why can’t you understand that?
SARAH: It doesn’t matter! Nothing matters! Right? Those are your words.
NYLES: No. Pain matters. What we do to other people matters. Being a source of terror is not fun, okay? It’s not fulfilling. I know this, from experience. It doesn’t matter that everything resets and people don’t remember. We remember! We have to deal with the things that we do!

There is enough engagement with these explicit themes that our minds don’t go wandering off to find them ourselves, but not so much that the film gets too bogged down in the logistics of its universe, which, as ever in films that dabble in time-travel or multiverses, simply do not make sense. (The contradiction that really bothered me on this rewatch was in the stinger, where JK Simmons’ character finds Nyles at the wedding and realizes he has no memory or knowledge of the time-loop situation. This does not match what Sarah reports about the goat she’s freed – it doesn’t get amnesia, it disappears! But I digress.)

However, the greatest pitfall of this genre (and how funny, my boyfriend noted, that Groundhog Day is now a genre unto itself) is not related to metaphysics or even plot holes: no, it’s something much more mundane, even here in the unscripted world. That’s right – it’s time to talk about men’s entitlement to women’s affection!

Once you notice it, you can’t unsee it: a strangely prolific trope, within Groundhog Day style plots, where the male protagonist uses his infinite-replays ability to successfully get with his female romantic interest. In addition to Groundhog Day itself (which at least unpacks the situation somewhat), perhaps the most brazen example of this trope appears in About Time, an otherwise charming British film with a heartwarming message about seizing every day and treasuring your loved ones. My boyfriend showed it to me early in our relationship, just after the Brooklyn Nine-Nine days, as one of his favorites. It didn’t upset me overmuch at the time, but I still told him exactly why it was not charming to see a guy who has, unbeknownst to a woman, already slept with her, use his extra knowledge to charm her into a sexual encounter where, again, he uses information about her that he has gathered without her current awareness to show her a great time, and gets a relationship (and eventually, marriage!) out of his efforts. 

It doesn’t ruin a film completely, but it does just sort of…feel icky? It’s probably too much, probably, to see in these depictions of men benefiting from sexual encounters with women who do not remember them, something akin to date rape. The violation that plays out on Sarah’s face in Palm Springs when her realization hits – it’s something different! I know that! But…I still thought about it? I don’t know what to do with this. There is usually some reason why these stories still work, or at least work more than they don’t work, in the end. Maybe it’s the chemistry of the leads. Maybe it’s a charming, funny script overall. But when you zoom out and look at the whole pattern of how this information-imbalance dynamic appears over and over and over in stories, almost always favoring male characters over their romantic female counterparts…well, that ickiness does swell up a bit, and it starts to look pretty disturbing. It sure feels like we are consistently expected, as an audience, to automatically and instinctively identify with the poor awkward male protagonist. It sure feels like we are supposed to think only of his desires as he struggles to win some woman’s heart – they’re such enigmas, these women! – and to view it as only fair that he is given a leg up in this insurmountable task. Because…she never would have given him the time of day otherwise, right? That’s an argument for overlooking what he’s doing, right? God, it can feel so harmless and so insidious at the same time, this persistent centering of men’s desires and total lack of validity afforded to women’s own innate desires, the total lack of curiosity about how things might be going down from their perspective.

And immediately I feel like I need to couch this – many stories that follow this track do show an interest in their female character’s perspectives! Palm Springs certainly does! The information-imbalance trope isn’t a black-or-white issue, I suppose, but more of a spectrum, more of an oh, this element is also here, to some extent. Because the information imbalance is, at its core, a power imbalance. So it makes these stories a little uncomfortable, somewhere on a sliding scale from mostly-fine to brazenly-immoral. And you don’t need to explicitly be a Groundhog Day plot to use the information-imbalance trope, or even to find its source in something supernatural or sci-fi related. It’s a trope that goes back to Shakespeare, and it’s all over modern storytelling too, from 50 First Dates to Spider-Man to You’ve Got Mail.

This brings up a great point, and an opportunity to point out that it isn’t just my boyfriend who nurses a favorite film within the wide church of the information-imbalance genre. Full disclosure: I love You’ve Got Mail. I used to watch it with my grandmother growing up, the only other person in my family who really shared my love of reading, and I think I imprinted on it a bit, imagining what grown-up life could be as a bookish person in a big city moving through intellectual circles. I loved the patter of the characters and the unashamed sentimentality of Meg Ryan’s character, like the way she could scold Tom Hanks for his (gendered, of course) shaming of taking business decisions personally. For those of you who have not seen it approximately ten thousand times, here’s a short summary of the plot: Meg Ryan owns a small independent bookstore, and Tom Hanks is a corporate suit-slash-heir to a company that is very definitely not Barnes & Noble. They also exchange love letters in an anonymous chat room online, and he figures out her real identity before she figures out his, and he decides to play the long game and woo her in real life – while continuing the online flirtation, of course – and, meanwhile, he happens to be putting her small family bookstore out of business. It’s more romantic than it sounds! It’s loosely based on Pride & Prejudice and an old Jimmy Stewart movie, The Shop Around the Corner! Nora Ephron wrote it!

But I’m already protesting too much. When I showed it to my boyfriend for the first time, he zeroed in on the whole information-imbalance dynamic immediately, and made fun of the movie for its sexism in that regard. But hear me out: You’ve Got Mail is also a movie that centers a very realistic thirty-something woman and her emotional life – her relationships with her colleagues and female friends, her self-serious but well-meaning journalist boyfriend, her late beloved mother – and presents a type of living, a type of womanhood, that was, frankly, rare in the blockbuster rom-coms that would dominate my teenage years. (Think 27 Dresses or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which had plenty to offer too, don’t get me wrong, but had a much less rich intellectual life on display for their young, tanned female leads.) This could quickly derail into a whole other post on the 90s and 00s films like Legally Blonde and Miss Congeniality which, while obviously relics of their time with their own baggage and problematic elements, were hugely foundational to my young years of imagining what stories (and what life!) could look like for women. These films, like You’ve Got Mail, have enormous empathy for their female leads, and are deeply invested in their lives, their relationships, their thoughts, and what it is like to be them. These women aren’t plot points or trophies, and in that regard, their films stand out from a huge chunk of Hollywood’s output, especially from this time period, and especially compared to typical information-imbalance fare.

Which brings us back to Palm Springs! Inevitably, for some reason, we fall into that old trope here. It feels worth spelling out: there is no reason that Andy Samberg’s character needed to have an information advantage over Cristin Milioti’s, no reason that his character needed to be the one that had slept with her “thousands” of previous times and withheld that knowledge, no reason that this dynamic has to be a part of a new Groundhog Day iteration at all. That said: the movie handles it kinda fine? There are several reasons why, in this particular film, this trope doesn’t feel as gross as it could. For ease of organization, I’m just going to work through them in a list:

• Nyles’ seduction of Sarah was not a singular obsession where he was pursuing her to make her fall in love with him – as he admits, he was just messing around and not taking anything seriously in his infinite loop, and that included hooking up with lots of people lots of times
• And by this point in the story, Sarah has also displayed this sort of reckless carelessness, in terms of no longer treating the un-trapped people around them as if they are also real people
• The film (through Nyles) does point out that this behavior is, in general, a bad thing to do (see the quote above)
• Nyles also takes the time to reflect and thoroughly apologize for what he did, articulating why it was bad, after Sarah is righteously furious with him
• And for what it’s worth, it is sort of understandable that Nyles’ instinct is to start out with a clean slate after Sarah has become trapped with him forever, though it was obviously wrong and massively disrespectful and Sarah deserved the truth
• Importantly, once Sarah is trapped too, Nyles doesn’t start angling for sex from her – the film makes it very clear that she is the one who initiates their eventual sexual relationship
• Much of the rest of the film concerns Nyles’ realization that he is in love with Sarah, while she instead dedicates herself to getting out of the time loop for her own individual reasons, and after figuring out her escape on her own she isn’t willing to give that up for Nyles

It’s a bit of a get-out-of-jail card, I suppose, to be like: “See! The power imbalance caused by the information imbalance is actually fine, because he loves her (to such an extent that he says he can’t live without her) while she explicitly says she could live without him! So the power imbalance swings in the other way, too, because of their emotions!” I reflexively get a little antsy if it looks like we’re saying the messed-up things a man does to a woman can be hand-waved away because, at some point, he’s actually super in love with her (bonus points if that love isn’t returned!!) Like, yikes.

But credit where credit is due – in this case, I think Palm Springs somehow sticks the landing and gets the balance right. And there’s something to be said for going ahead and engaging in the full classic Groundhog Day information-imbalance trope, just staring into that directly, and then working out a response to it: a male protagonist who is genuinely convicted and apologetic, and a female protagonist who figures out her desires for what comes next for her, on her own terms.

My favorite response to this trope, however, will always be a play I saw in London, in the final days before the first Covid lockdown: The Haystack, at Hampstead Theatre in March 2020. In this version, our male protagonist is a young British spy – the hacker sort, who sits behind a computer screen all day – and the female love interest is an imperiled journalist who he’s been assigned to track. His espionage turns extracurricular, however, as he hacks into her webcam at all hours, scours her personal correspondence, and generally becomes totally obsessed with her as a person. This eventually leads to him tracking her down in person, making up a fake identity, and winding up as her serious boyfriend. For a while, it’s not clear how the play is going to handle this. The protagonist is pretty likable throughout, and we’ve certainly seen this sort of narrative play out before in story after story, never anticipating the slightest discomfort in an audience. But when the female lead of The Haystack works out who her boyfriend actually is, she lets rip in a glorious scene of near-metatheatrical rage, laying out to him and the whole audience that what he did was not remotely consensual, it was invasive and destructive in the worst possible way, he is definitionally a rapist, and there is no room for him in her life, ever. I was shocked and practically ecstatic to witness this articulation of what exactly is so horrific about the Groundhog Day information-imbalance trope up there on stage. 

One day, I hope such sentiments will make it into a mainstream film. For now, offering perhaps the most mature and entertaining approach possible to this comedic set-up, and bursting with all of the feel-good chemistry that such a takedown would necessarily lack, Palm Springs is the ticket.

Written 15 February 2022