A group of plane crash survivors struggle to survive in the wilderness. The occupant of a life-raft finally makes landfall on a deserted beach. Contestants are taken to an isolated spot and filmed participating in various challenges and staged confrontations. The genre in which Yellowjackets positions itself (at least initially) is a familiar one, and one that has achieved a high level of visibility in American popular culture (especially) over the past two decades. As Jane Elliott observes in her analysis of this mode of storytelling, which she terms “the microeconomic mode,” the stakes involved in these narratives are invariably existential. Characters find themselves operating in “capsule worlds” (mysteriously undiscovered or uninhabited islands, torture dungeons, gaming arenas, remote forests), where they must compete against others (or elements of the environment itself) to ensure their continued survival.1 As the island does in Lost, capsule worlds often take on the dimensions of characters in their own right, placing additional obstacles and challenges, or the embodiments of unsympathetic non-human intelligence, in the survivors’ paths.
One of the rules of the “microeconomic mode” is that there can be no hope of immediate rescue by third parties. The plane was always “off-course” and out of radio contact, skirting some storm or other, any potential search grids hundreds of miles away. After the crash, mobile phones get no signal and their batteries run down in any case before anyone can decide on who best to call. Rogue survivors are perversely inclined to destroy transceivers and emergency locator beacons should they ever emerge from the wreckage. Passing ships decline to respond to signal fires. Game-like and ritualistic survival dynamics inevitably seem to emerge in these environments. No matter how sheltered from choice or unimportant they were in the outside world, in the capsule world, survivors must continually play games with each other, navigating the new factions and hierarchies that emerge within the group and ensuring that someone other than them ends up being the scapegoat.2 These games and rituals do not take place in the safe, “as-if” world of play, but encompass the difference between life and death for those who take part in them.3
In a flash-forward sequence in the opening scene of the first episode of Yellowjackets, we see how the rules governing the teenage social clique and the competitive, game-playing logics of the soccer field and training ground have apparently evolved into an arcane series of rituals, which enable the girls to manage death and group belonging in their hostile new environment. The symbolism and significance of the various lures and fetishes hanging above the snow-path along which the girls’ victim runs are unclear to us, but the wider narrative structures of the scene clearly suggest ritualistic human sacrifice. In episode 5, the apparently childish game of the séance turns adult and threatening in a way no-one in the group seems prepared for. Finally, at the climax of the 1996 story arc in season one, former popular girl and queen bee, Jackie (Ella Purnell), having progressively failed to adjust to the new, survival-based rules of the game (so different from those of high school in suburban New Jersey), as well as the girls’ increasingly cultish new belief system, is finally frozen out of the group. The stakes involved in social ostracism are neither metaphorical nor purely affective in the microeconomic mode, however, but literal and existential. Next morning, the other girls find Jackie frozen to death in the snow outside the cabin.
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The miniature universes of the “microeconomic mode” operate as scaled-down and simplified models of the outside world. By placing characters within them, writers and filmmakers can focus in on wider social dynamics, or perhaps imply that our own social arrangements might be operating according to similarly “reductive” or “model-like” rules.4 The gamified, existential dynamics of the “capsule world” do not only apply to the survival narrative, however. Another contemporary storytelling trope, the time loop, works according to a similar logic. Indeed, the time-loop narrative elevates the “snowglobe”-like claustrophobia of the “capsule world” to an extreme degree by delimiting its temporal as well as its spatial dimensions, removing yet more degrees of freedom from those characters trapped within them.
In Palm Springs (Hulu, 2020), we watch the film’s protagonist, Nyles (Andy Samberg), reliving the same day over and over. What initially presents itself as an attitude of cheerful, day-drinking nihilism, expressed in Nyles’s pool lounger catchphrase, “yesterday, today, tomorrow. It’s all the same,” is, we realise, a completely literal expression of the film’s structure and Nyles’s narrative plight. Nyles’s world has been reduced down to the delimited model of a single, 24-hour circadian cycle (9 November), which repeats and recycles endlessly. When he wakes up, he is in a hotel room at a Palm Springs resort wedding, watching his narcissistic girlfriend, Misty (Meredith Hagner), putting on her bridesmaid’s gown. Whenever he finally falls asleep (or loses consciousness) that evening, the day will inevitably reset and restart, reverting everything to its default settings. All that persists are Nyles’s accumulating memories of what transpired on the countless previous iterations of the day he has already experienced, events no-one outside the time-loop bubble will have any inkling of.5
The logic of the reset/respawn cycle has lately become pervasive across the culture industry, extending its storytelling tendrils far beyond its most proximate origins in table-top and video gaming and Fighting Fantasy and choose-your-own-adventure narratives. The main effect of the reset idea, as François J. Bonnet argues in After Death, is to “reaffirm” the “existence of an eternally identical, unalterable present” that it is beyond the powers of anyone to influence.6 In Palm Springs, Nyles has been abruptly removed from “historical time” and inserted instead into the synthetic, “intensive time” of the endlessly present moment.7 Here, under the “real time” regime of the loop, his personal history is irrelevant and most things he does seem to have no lasting significance at all. Asked what he did before he entered the time loop, he can respond only with bafflement and indeterminacy: "it was all so long ago."
Trapped indefinitely in the blandly pleasant, impersonal “non-place” of the tourist resort, which already seems to bear the imprint of no history earlier than that of the latest occupancy turnover, Nyles has learned how to configure every aspect of his human environment for maximum self-indulgence (and, it would seem, maximum self-abasement).8 Like Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia in Russian Doll, Nyles behaves like a game tester, using the time loop’s endlessly recursive logic to systematically test the libidinal boundaries, vulnerabilities, and potential exploits of the other characters in the bubble. We see him initiating desperately one-sided and masturbatory sex with his girlfriend, Misty (who is far more preoccupied with her bridesmaid’s dress than she is with him), day-drinking beer in a pool lounger, and delivering the most perfect (and perfectly insincere) impromptu wedding speech for the evening’s celebrations. These are all (we are given to understand) the tested and optimised outcomes of countless trial runs that Nyles has performed over many previous November 9ths—an endless sequence of meaningless repetition that Nyles is powerless to stop.
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Over the course of the 1990s, Jean Baudrillard developed his concept of hyperreality to take into account new developments in digitalisation and the emerging technologies of virtual reality. In The Perfect Crime (1996) and then in The Vital Illusion (2000), he described:
a project to reconstruct a homogeneous and uniformly consistent universe … that unfolds within a technological and mechanical medium, extending over our vast information network, where we are in the process of building a perfect clone, an identical copy of our world, a virtual artefact that opens up the prospect of endless reproduction.9
This new, virtually defined world would be an entirely “positive” one, devoid of “illusion” and “negativity”—a realm of the Same from which the Other had been utterly expurgated.10 What Baudrillard envisages here is not simply a Matrix-style simulation (in which we are all projected, Tron-like, into the separate virtual environment of the simulation—and could potentially leave, given the right mix of pharmaceuticals). Instead, the “perfect crime” involves the total mediatisation of reality—the emergence of a series of digital overlays that merge with and eventually replace all analogue norms and processes; the production of a virtually mediated and enabled way of knowing and living. This is a world in which gamified logics and digital affordances come to structure both thought and action, and older, analogue ways of making sense of the world and its ideas are not simply deprecated but erased from cultural memory.
The brutally reductive “capsule world” of the time loop narrative provides a kind of fictive window onto the “perfect crime” we are living in the midst of. Nyles’s world in Palm Springs is the ultimate customised “filter bubble.” Via his actions and inputs over time, he has fashioned what Byung-Chul Han calls a "you loop,” where every aspect of his environment essentially reflects his own libidinal desires back at him.11 Those in the loop who are not condemned to eternal recurrence are reduced to the level of disposable NPCs, or non-playing characters, exploitable for whatever they can give him (sex, drugs, some sort of riotous escapade that will disrupt the wedding), in the knowledge that they will reset with no memory of the day’s events the next morning. Yet, as Han points out, the temporality of the gamified world is an essentially shallow one, based on the logic system of "immediate ... reward" and self-gratification. "What matures over time," on the other hand, he writes, "cannot be gamified."12
When Nyles accidentally brings Sarah (Cristin Milioti), the disaffected, black-sheep sister of the bride, into the time loop, he is initially ecstatic at having someone else to share his world with. However, his attempt to sustain a romantic relationship with her inside the loop relies on her never discovering the truth about the extent of his game-playing—the true functions and contours of his customised filter bubble. Once Sarah forces Nyles to admit that he had long ago worked out how to seduce her at the wedding reception—that Nyles’s capsule world is essentially a “cosmic brothel,” in which he had had sex with thousands of NPC versions of her in previous iterations of the loop before she effectively entered the story as a main character—she leaves him, resolving to escape the time loop in any way she can.13 The short-term, simulated realities of pick-up artistry (and other forms of digitally mediated gamification) are radically incompatible with the longer temporalities of sustained human intimacy.14
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In Isaac Asimov’s 1980 short story, “The Last Answer,” an atheistic physicist is embarrassed to discover that there is an afterlife of sorts. Reborn as a disembodied assemblage of electromagnetic forces that preserve his mind and personality after his fatal heart attack on Earth, the physicist initially plots against his preserver, the eternal, God-like “Voice,” before discovering that this is exactly what the Voice wants. He and countless other beings throughout the universe have been created (and granted immortality after death) specifically in the hope that one of them will work out a way of killing the Voice and ending the agony of eternal being.15 The desire for (and illusion of) immortality is embedded in our new technologies, from digitisation and image preservation, to cloning, cryogenics, transhumanism, and the newly emergent life-extension technologies. However, as Baudrillard observes, no matter how much "we dream of overcoming death through immortality," eternal life itself "is the most horrific of fates."16 The uncanniness of the time loop is reflected in its inescabable nature. Death is no escape from the eternal return and repetition of the time loop, simply resetting it to its original parameters.
When Sarah abruptly returns to Nyles’s room in Palm Springs after an indeterminate number of years, her peace offering to him isn’t death, exactly, but the promise of an exit. Nullifying the temporal vortex that has trapped them in the time loop, Sarah transports herself and Nyles to 10 November (or some version of it). However, unlike the fantasies of online “trads” of a “retvrn to normality” before the “madness,” this isn’t yet another pressing of the reset button, but a journey to a fundamentally different and altered reality. Parties to the “perfect crime” and thoroughly enmeshed in our new digital technologies even as we fantasise about escaping them, we remain the denizens of our own capsule worlds. The airframe lies burning, smoke billowing into the cabin. There is an ominous glow of fire from the fuel tanks in the wings. We follow the chain of other passengers slowly down the aisle, feeling our way towards the exit row and the open door, outside and into the snow.
Jane Elliott, The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 1.
Elliott, Microeconomic Mode, p. 87.
Cf. Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 13.
Elliott, Microeconomic Mode, p. 27.
According to Palm Springs’ screenwriter Andy Siara, by the time of the film’s opening shot, Nyles has already been stuck in the time loop for over forty years. See Anna Menta, “‘Palm Springs’ Ending Explained: Writer Andy Siara Knows ‘Exactly What Happened,’” Decider (10 July 2020). There is nothing to stop a viewer, however, assuming that Nyles’s temporal suspension is essentially infinite.
François J. Bonnet, After Death, translated by Amy Ireland and Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2020), pp. 19, 21.
Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War: Twenty Five Years Later, translated by Mark Polizzotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 110.
On the amnesiac timelessness of the non-place, see Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, translated by John Howe (London: Verso, 2008), p. 84.
Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, edited by Julia Wittwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 7-8.
Baudrillard, Vital Illusion, p. 67.
Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy, translated by Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), p. 29.
Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, translated by Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2017), p. 49.
On the virtual world as a “cosmic brothel” of total sexual commodication, see Paul Virilio, Open Sky, translated by Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997), p. 114.
Cf. Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships (London: Pluto, 2022), p. 84.
Isaac Asimov, “The Last Answer,” in The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (New York: Doubleday, 1986).
Baudrillard, Vital Illusion, p. 6.