What do you do when you encounter the impossible? Something that doesn’t compute with your understanding of reality and drastically challenges your worldview?
You can ignore or deny it, confident the existing story you tell yourself can render any mystery or inconsistency meaningless to your everyday life. You can resent it and lash out in anger, yearning for the time before this thing crashed into your conscience and caused irrevocable change. You can also lean into it, treating it not as a threat but as a thread that needs just the slightest tug to unravel.
On my journey away from the religion of my youth, I did all three pretty much at the same time. And not only that, but I saw those very same dynamics play out among the three core characters in Max Barbakow’s 2020 film Palm Springs—a terrific time-loop comedy (5 years old today) with a lot on its mind.
Read the rest of my latest essay at Cinema Sugar, which touches on the movie’s magical combination of humor and humanity, how the time loop is like a religion, and how all of us find meaning to make sense of the nonsensical.
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