What Day Is It Again?
This page is in development. Please check back for links to articles on the cultural work of time-loops in television and film and updates on Duncan's book project on the same theme. Open to inquiries.
This page is in development. Please check back for links to articles on the cultural work of time-loops in television and film and updates on Duncan's book project on the same theme. Open to inquiries.
Excerpt from This Feels Like Groundhog Day:
"Before leaving the discussion of time-loop plots as norming devices, I’d like to briefly attend to the “fun montage.” The “fun montage” is a collage of scenes where characters engage in activities that they would not otherwise engage in if there were consequences. Even within norming loops, where the characters are simply relineated at least or rehabilitated (or killed) and straightened at worst, the fun montage offers characters — and viewers — a glimpse of time used unproductively and solely for pleasure. Before their time-loop, characters likely made time for pleasure and hobby-like activities, but they would have had to do so within the expectation that time was overwhelmingly chrononormative (progressing as a way to maximize productivity, making them good citizens in the eyes of the nation-state).
Within the time-loop, though the rhetoric is often that one is “stuck” and “trapped” in the loop, characters are often their most free. They can say what they would like to be able to say, pursue a passion without having to be good at it, or eat for pleasure outside the oppression of diet-culture. For Mindy Lahiri, her montage included nudity, sex, spending loads of money, learning to dunk a basketball, and eating a whole vending machine of snacks (after bashing in the glass of the machine with a baseball bat). For Zari Tomaz, her montage included eating anything she wanted (lots of whipped cream, pastries), learning to play the violin, dressing up in costumes, playing with weapons for fun, and antagonizing the Legends for her own enjoyment (i.e. throwing snowballs at them). There are other examples. In “Looperheroes,” (2018) from the Nickelodeon show The Thundermans, two (white, cis, straight) superhero teens go through a fun montage as they navigate a time-loop, too: they play with whipped cream, dress in silly costumes, and start a dance party in a restaurant. In “Life Serial,” (October 2001) from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy’s desperate frustration at being stuck in a time loop pushes her to do a number of funny, cathartic actions: ripping the doorbell of the door, throwing slug scented candles at customers, and speaking in gibberish.
The time-loop’s fun montage offers viewers and characters the experience of pleasure without the necessity of growth. While Mindy and Zari do learn new skills, they did it because they felt like it, not because they were pressured to improve or impress. Mindy felt like messing around with a basketball, and she did it long enough that she ended up making a basket. But even if she hadn’t, the fun montage offered her the chance to do something outside of her responsibilities and work (and outside of her pursuit of romantic, heterosexual partnership) for no reason at all.
Is this expanded capacity to do new things, which the characters do with and without others, close to the kind of joy Spinoza was theorizing? Quite possibly, though it isn’t a seamless link, considering that much of the fun montage actions are done alone. It’s also unclear, at least from the texts themselves, if we as viewers are supposed to root for or against a sustained fun montage. Is the fun montage showing us ourselves outside of the pressures of linear time in order to encourage us to step completely out of it? And is that even possible to do, entirely and unceasingly? Is the fun montage embodying a combination of Edelman and Munoz’s theories on queer futurity — a futureless and yet utopic queer temporality safe from oppressive normativities? And/or an Indigenous futurity, which Laura Harjo defines as an active temporality where Native people can participate in the present without settler permission or negation? Perhaps also a Black futurity which Kara Keeling conceptualizes as an assertion of a temporal Blackness beyond the past and the future? Either if none or all of the above (or somewhere in between or outside of that binary altogether), these pockets of out-of-time, unproductive activity for the sake of pleasure alone is a reminder that doing so could — and even does — exist."
(pp. 55-56, Duncan).
"Before leaving the discussion of time-loop plots as norming devices, I’d like to briefly attend to the “fun montage.” The “fun montage” is a collage of scenes where characters engage in activities that they would not otherwise engage in if there were consequences. Even within norming loops, where the characters are simply relineated at least or rehabilitated (or killed) and straightened at worst, the fun montage offers characters — and viewers — a glimpse of time used unproductively and solely for pleasure. Before their time-loop, characters likely made time for pleasure and hobby-like activities, but they would have had to do so within the expectation that time was overwhelmingly chrononormative (progressing as a way to maximize productivity, making them good citizens in the eyes of the nation-state).
Within the time-loop, though the rhetoric is often that one is “stuck” and “trapped” in the loop, characters are often their most free. They can say what they would like to be able to say, pursue a passion without having to be good at it, or eat for pleasure outside the oppression of diet-culture. For Mindy Lahiri, her montage included nudity, sex, spending loads of money, learning to dunk a basketball, and eating a whole vending machine of snacks (after bashing in the glass of the machine with a baseball bat). For Zari Tomaz, her montage included eating anything she wanted (lots of whipped cream, pastries), learning to play the violin, dressing up in costumes, playing with weapons for fun, and antagonizing the Legends for her own enjoyment (i.e. throwing snowballs at them). There are other examples. In “Looperheroes,” (2018) from the Nickelodeon show The Thundermans, two (white, cis, straight) superhero teens go through a fun montage as they navigate a time-loop, too: they play with whipped cream, dress in silly costumes, and start a dance party in a restaurant. In “Life Serial,” (October 2001) from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy’s desperate frustration at being stuck in a time loop pushes her to do a number of funny, cathartic actions: ripping the doorbell of the door, throwing slug scented candles at customers, and speaking in gibberish.
The time-loop’s fun montage offers viewers and characters the experience of pleasure without the necessity of growth. While Mindy and Zari do learn new skills, they did it because they felt like it, not because they were pressured to improve or impress. Mindy felt like messing around with a basketball, and she did it long enough that she ended up making a basket. But even if she hadn’t, the fun montage offered her the chance to do something outside of her responsibilities and work (and outside of her pursuit of romantic, heterosexual partnership) for no reason at all.
Is this expanded capacity to do new things, which the characters do with and without others, close to the kind of joy Spinoza was theorizing? Quite possibly, though it isn’t a seamless link, considering that much of the fun montage actions are done alone. It’s also unclear, at least from the texts themselves, if we as viewers are supposed to root for or against a sustained fun montage. Is the fun montage showing us ourselves outside of the pressures of linear time in order to encourage us to step completely out of it? And is that even possible to do, entirely and unceasingly? Is the fun montage embodying a combination of Edelman and Munoz’s theories on queer futurity — a futureless and yet utopic queer temporality safe from oppressive normativities? And/or an Indigenous futurity, which Laura Harjo defines as an active temporality where Native people can participate in the present without settler permission or negation? Perhaps also a Black futurity which Kara Keeling conceptualizes as an assertion of a temporal Blackness beyond the past and the future? Either if none or all of the above (or somewhere in between or outside of that binary altogether), these pockets of out-of-time, unproductive activity for the sake of pleasure alone is a reminder that doing so could — and even does — exist."
(pp. 55-56, Duncan).
