Palm Springs: Andy, Everlasting
This is strange. I just learned that Andy Samberg is 41 years old.
And to that, I say… how? He started as a cast member on Saturday Night Live in 2005. That means I would have had to been 10 years old. Ten. So while I was a literal child, not a teen or tween, but a bonafide kids meal aged person, Andy Samberg was on television. And it’s not like I didn’t pay attention to him, The Lonely island, SNL Digital Shorts, Hot Rod (what a film!), Samberg was always there, I just never questioned his mortality until this past weekend— until Palm Springs.
If Groundhog’s Day (1993) is the great grandfather of all time loop movies, Palm Spring is surely the hippy uncle of the bunch. After recent iterations such as (but not limited to) Happy Death Day (2017), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), and The Fare (2017), the addition of Palm Springs into the pantheon of time loop cinema marks the sub-genre’s return to a more… explicitly existential form. I would have said “romantic”, but let’s not all forget Netflix’s Naked (2017) or its poster for that matter. For a Lonely Island film, Palm Springs, the highest purchase ever at Sundance (thanks to 69 cents worth of pocket change from NEON’s Tom Quinn), is an unexpected trojan horse containing more philosophy than gags, more convictions than shenanigans, and the goop cementing the film together, the many, many, many Andy Sambergs.
Blame it on boyish tendencies, the aloof nature of his comedy, or his status as the current Peter Pan of the television comedy world, but watching Palm Springs makes it evident that there is something about Samberg in a time loop that just fits; he gives it drama without being dramatic; he gives it honesty without being overt. Especially for people like me, aware of his presence but not his impermanence, his inclusion in the film adds another layer to Palm Springs that cannot be ignored. The time-loop genre inherently fosters an environment that provides a factor that allows Samberg’s seemingly omnipresent cartoon character the means to evolve. It gifts him with infinity.
Palm Springs does not start at the origin point of its loop. We’re not even sure it starts in the middle. But what Samberg’s character Nyles makes clear is that it has been a long… long… long time. Time enough to learn that you can’t suicide, time enough to happily accept a pointless existence, time enough to eventually mess up and bring someone else into the loop. His counterpart, Sarah (Cristin Miloti), the second addition to Nyle’s Neverland (the first being JK Simmons bored psychopath, Roy), aids the his growing up process. She wants to leave. He wants to stay. It’s a simple enough conflict, but to Nyles, living in a cyclical world of lawlessness, chilling out, and the occasional arrow to the leg complimentary of Roy, any conflict at all could be enough to break the spell.
While Sarah’s world in the loop remains the same, her mind moves forward while Nyles’ tries to keep his in place. And by the end of the film, Sarah’s way out is going to happen with or without Nyles. He discovers that he wants to grow up, but he wants to do it by himself on his own terms. This is impossible. Suddenly, Nyles’ life, devoid of decisions, has to make the biggest one an immortal could. Do I continue to live forever by myself to do accept death to die with someone I cannot live without?
While Palm Springs is about the triangular relationship between love, life, and death, it also provides a unique lens that utilizes the time loop structure to question a life of immortality— questions that connect directly with Samberg’s Tuck Everlasting career as the frontman to man-childhood. Obviously outside the film, Samberg is not making quite as drastic a decision as his character in Palm Springs, but as a producer and actor in a film about his escape from the mundanity of high jinks, the correlation is ever present throughout. And though the film may still be a light romcom, and in my opinion, not nearly as hilarious as something like Popstar: Never Stop Stopping (2016) or Seven Days in Hell (2015), it has that “hmm” factor that lingers past the film’s runtime that solidifies it as Samberg’s career peak. A film in line with all his other work, but apart in its approach.
If the ideologies that Palm Spring’s two characters embody are taken outside the film, Nyles could be thought to represent the actor himself, and Sarah the world surrounding him. Prior to palm Springs, Samberg had stumbled upon time loops of his own— ambered in episodes of SNL, hundreds of millions of replays across Motherlover, I just Had Sex, and Jack Sparrow on Youtube, and watch after watch of Brooklyn 99 across millions of time slots and streaming services. Palm Springs, a feature film very different from The Lonely Island’s more rambunctious offerings, is the mechanism which Peter Pan escapes from Neverland.
The film is an important milestone in Andy Samberg’s growth as an artist, and reckoning with a fluctuating stasis. Audiences at home experiencing Samberg’s journey through this growing up process, used to watching him on their televisions, on internet clips, and on late night television, may have to come to a similar conclusion about everyone’s favorite goofy smiled, dough-eyed, friendly neighborhood immortal— he’s 41 years old, and going on 42.