My nerdy thing is what when a movie has a place name as its title I always try to rate the movie on how well it works as a snapshot of that place, since it's going to come up in Google searches for it for years afterwards And by that standard Palm Springs is pretty good
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Palm Springs is a desert resort town, which the creators chose as a setting because if you live in LA everyone ends up having their wedding in Palm Springs Of all the timeless places in SoCal it's one of the most timeless
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I totally believe them when they say the mundane setting of a Palm Springs wedding weekend came first and the time loop idea was just a cinematic escalation of it It's one of the best possible places to go to feel completely cut off from the forward motion of time
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Even though they didn't actually film in Palm Springs they totally captured the feeling of being there, the weird surrealism of cheesy tourist trap stuff squatting in the middle of this terrifying ancient desert under the expanse of an endless sky
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Real edge of eternity shit, great place to get high And it is kind of deep that it's such a popular wedding venue, that we have this impulse to retreat away from real life and change to celebrate an event that, traditionally, leads to a LOT of sudden real life change
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Anyway all of these time loop gimmicks do inevitably invite comparison to the ur-text Groundhog Day And you'll notice Groundhog Day has Phil complain about how he was once in vacation in the Virgin Islands and had a great day then and why can't that day be the one that repeats
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The usual Buddhist read of Groundhog Day is that being trapped in Punxsutawney appears to be a curse but is actually a blessing By being trapped in a shitty town with bad weather and nothing much to do, Phil manages to get over himself and get free a lot sooner
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Palm Springs deliberately plays with that Nyles is in fact hit with the curse Phil avoided He pisses away eons of time in Palm Springs because it's just so darn pleasant, why would you want to leave
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Notably Palm Springs is still not a very big town, though bigger than Punxsutawney It's not like, say, Russian Doll taking place in the heart of New York Rather than a big city where there's a million stories taking place every day you're restricted to at most a few dozen
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But there's no snowstorm blocking the way to the airport You can leave, and unlike the rules in Groundhog Day there's no time limit, it only resets when you fall asleep Nyles got high as hell on meth and did successfully fly to Africa (unlike the guy from Toto)
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He just gave up on traveling because it wasn't worth it Going places is hard, staying awake is hard Why bother when you can just stay in Palm Springs and nap
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It's not a particularly deep or subtle metaphor but it's a powerful one and one that draws a lot on cinematic language to drill it in What's so bad about just sitting in the pool in Palm Springs for eternity under that endless blue sky Isn't that how most people imagine Heaven
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Just like the slightly deeper thing about how he's specifically in Palm Springs as a guest at a wedding What's so bad about not wanting to move on from the wedding to the marriage Why should the party have to end, why should you have to leave the hotel and go back home
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(The whole thing implying that the sequel to Palm Springs would be titled Irvine and the line "I hope you find your Irvine" is one of those cheesy things that's mostly saved by the knowledge it's intentionally cheesy)
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Anyway that particular angle of the movie is very strong for me, as someone who's lived in multiple parts of the country, and who deeply sideeyes people from SoCal who talk about wishing they had "real weather" and thinks it would be fun to live someplace with snow
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As someone who is, like, violently opposed to the idea of being a responsible adult and raising kids in the suburbs and finding my Irvine I'm willing to accept this may make me a stunted broken person but I also just don't care
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End of conversation
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