I haven’t watched Palm Springs yet but from what I’ve seen, this question applies to both movies. And I guess to other time loop movies and tv shows like Day Break, Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Russian Doll, etc.
Is everyone stuck in the time loop along with the protagonist? Or do their lives go on at the end of the day?
Let’s say Phil Connors wakes up on what is for him the 1000th consecutive Groundhog’s Day in a row. To celebrate this milestone, he goes out and sets the town hall on fire. The police show up and arrest him. He falls asleep in his jail cell. And, of course, the next morning he wakes up back in his regular bed and starts the same day over again.
Did the universe where Phil set the town hall on fire just disappear? Did everyone in the universe also wake up and repeat Groundhog’s Day with Phil? Was the only difference that Phil was aware he was repeating the same day while nobody else knew it?
The other alternative was that Phil was creating a series of new universes. Each day started the same but then Phil did something different. His actions would create Universe #1001. Then Phil’s day would end and he would wake up in Universe #1002. But Universe #1001 would still continue its existence and move on.
And if this is the case, Phil would still exist in Universe #1001 as well. He would have actually moved on with his life (at least in all of the universes where he didn’t kill himself on Groundhog’s Day). He would have woken up in that jail cell facing arson charges. And that’s happening to Phil Connors #1001 while Phil Connors #1002 woke up and repeated Groundhog’s Day.
And the movie ending we saw, where Phil woke up with Rita and it was a new day, was just one of those post-timeloop universes. A different version of Phil was still stuck in the timeloop, creating new universes.
Great question. There’s really only two possible answers I can think of, both of which you covered:
Everybody is stuck in the time loop with the main character, only they don’t remember when it resets.
The main character is creating a bunch of alternate universes that the others have to deal with when their futures move on. But what happens to the main character when they move on in that scenario is a very interesting question. Maybe he (or she) just disappears? Paradoxical time loops can get very confusing…
I think that about nails it. So we have 2-1/2 possibilities.
I recall reading a crappy novel from 1970-ish where the protagonist time-looped from about age 60 back to age 15 (IIRC; the exact numbers don’t matter). He always restarted on his 15th birthday, but the exact age he looped back varied and was a surprise to him when it occurred. But, a bit like our own deaths, the older he got, the closer to the end he knew he was.
It turned out there were multiple such people who eventually over the centuries located each other and had some minimal communication. But it was hard to re-establish contact with a looper after he/she returned to adolescence; needle in haystack. All this was pre-internet of course. Each looper was cycling at different times and different durations so always out of phase with the others. It got complicated and they never coalesced into anything like a group of superheroes.
Anyhow, the fact the loop was 40+ years long made the consequences for any single looper acting on their future knowledge very significant. IOW, make some killer investments at 16 and be filthy lazy rich at 22. Or not and live life as an ordinary schlub. Marry and have kids and experience them growing up. Or not have kids. etc.
For greater impact, pre-announce to the world some future events and then become a celebrity savant when they later come true. Followed by being captured by CIA / KGB / etc and forced to foretell the future for their advantage. Of course once major national-scale forces start acting on your advice then this trip into the future spins wildly out of your experience and your predictions become useless.
Once you posit multiple loopers on differing schedules, ISTM the alternate futures need to continue to exist after any one looper restarts his loop.
Or… (watch the video before reading; it’s only 5 minutes eh) it’s not really a time machine but instead a device that creates a copy of yourself in a parallel world that exists one minute in the past and kills the version of yourself in the world that you were in.
Would you care to share a spoilered version of how the looping looks from the non-looper’s perspective?. Evn just whether it’s one of our existing scenarios or something different?
It doesn’t give an answer though, it just brings that up as the central question. Basically,
A woman is just going about her daily life when she meets a man who is her perfect match, his interests are exactly the same as hers, it seems too good to be true. Then we learn that he’s stuck in a time loop and has lived this same day thousands of times, and just like in Groundhog Day, has learned what to do to get the girl. But because we are seeing this all from her perspective, he’s just really creepy and stalkery, and there’s a long scene where they are debating about what happens next, if he harms her he’ll just wake up and relive the day, but will she go on in the same world?
It’s one of the stronger episodes of the new series IMO.
I figure either way, there are a lot of off-camera implications.
If the entire universe was stuck in the time loop then the story was far more epic than what we were seeing. Phil Connors had the fate of all existence in his hands.
If the multiple universe theory is correct, then what we saw on screen was just a small fraction of Phil’s story. Phil was wrong in thinking he could live his life without consequences; he actually was living with the results of every day. And the ending we saw in the movie wasn’t really an ending to his story. It was just a change of perspective. It was the day we followed the Phil who moved on to the next day rather than following the Phil who looped.
The Endless (2017) — You can also watch Resolution (2012) if you really want to, but that’s optional
Source Code (2011)
Both also deal with time loops of a sort, but in different ways. They also more fully hash out the details (such as they are) of how their loops operate within the wider universe (or multiverse).
As for Groundhog Day, I’d say take it at face value. Forget about the existential dread of the multiverse theory and just take it as straight fantasy. The two films I mentioned above, however, have more of a sci-fi element to them, hence the slightly (or, in one case, much) deeper explanation of their mechanics.
In the case of Edge Of Tomorrow, I have always thought the premise there is based on video games, in that when you die you go back to the previous checkpoint to try another method to get past the villains and end-of-level Boss. So in that instance there are no alternative universes, it’s a reset for everyone with only one character aware of it, i.e. the player.
I hadn’t looked at it that way before. A very different and insightful take on the whole multiverse variant.
Thank you.
Which leads me to another wild scenario for a movie or book treatment that would be hard to tell well, but if well-told might be epic.
We do the groundhog day reset thing a couple times to set the trope that this is a stuck-in-a-time-loop story. Then on the next loop we follow the protagonist out into the future, like the end of GD. But only for a couple of scenes. Then we return to one of the earlier establishing loops and spin that forward a few scenes. And again with another of the earlier loops.
So after a bit there are e.g. 4 separate multi-verse futures unfolding separately, each being told interleaved with the others.
Lots of opportunity for confusion, but if done well we could see lots of interesting things like good starts gone bad, or bad starts ending good, etc. Proving that life is incredibly contingent on small decisions made years ago.
Interesting recommendation; I’ll dig it up. Though from imdb’s detailed synopsis it sounds like they told the 3 versions of the future each serially, not interleaved. That reduces audience confusion but blurs the SF-ey nature of the contingent multiverses all unfolding “at the same time”.
A book could tell an interleaved story more reliably than a screenplay. Though the longer each future played out the more you could use visual cues to help the audience instantly follow the jumps between multiverses. e.g. different spouses/SO’s, different houses, different protagonist clothing or hairstyles, etc.
SInce in RLR each contingent future only lasts 20 minutes there’s not much room for those big cues to diverge. Aside: Manni needed to replace about US$50K-75K. That must have been a heck of a store he wanted to knock off to raise that much cash.
Re: Groundhog Day, I’ve always figured everybody is looping, but Phil is the only one who knows it. Otherwise, each “new” Phil would be moving on to the next day, and the Phil who keeps re-waking would not have memories of all his previous Groundhog Days. Which would pretty much invalidate the whole premise of the film.
Russian Doll complicates this formula a bit, as she seems to loop back to a slightly different reality each time. But still I think when it’s all over, the rest of the world will have experienced only one reality.
I haven’t seen the other films mentioned in the OP, so I can’t comment on those.
I literally just got done watching this. It’s been on my Netflix watch list forever. I enjoyed it and it’s premise. A little low-budgety but a good story.