Today is October 10, 2020 or rather, 10/10/2020.
And it is Mental Health Day.
Quite the coincidence.
(At least it was at the time of composing this post.)
Psychological therapy has been one of the fastest-growing essential services and campaigns for national awareness during this pandemic. Whether stay-at-home orders were carried out alone, with roommates, with immediate families, or with extended families, the cultural news stories featured the collective experience of peoples’ emotions as if being on a roller-coaster. You can be okay and then not okay moment-to-moment. The uncertainty, the monotony, the fear, the loneliness, the overwhelming togetherness - finding balance has felt impossible and extremes quickly became the norm.
There are two perspectives that define covid-quarantine:
Side A - that you can finally step out of the rat-race of
daily life to instead focus on yourself, your relationships, and those special
projects you’ve been meaning to get to. It’s a time to reevaluate what matters,
and reaffirm a new set of priorities for moving forward.
Side B – that instead of having your routine of separated responsibilities, separated spaces of work from home, professional separate from personal, everything and everyone are instead all under one roof and there is no spare moment of quiet time for introspective reflection.
Though Vivarium filmed in 2018 in Belgium and Palm
Springs filmed in 2019 in California, both films released to streaming platforms
in Spring and Summer 2020, respectively. Both stories feature a romantic couple
finding themselves trapped in a seemingly inescapable enclosed space. They unintentionally
represent two sides of the same quarantine coin:
On side A, for Nyles and Sarah in Palm Springs their
time loop is at a literal party which gives them a million ways to have fun, to
wreck, and to learn from. They eventually realize their mutual priorities, the
only way out, and return to the ‘normal’ timeline. In one word, hope.
On side B, for Tom and Gemma in Vivarium, they find themselves abandoned to an indefinite expanse of identical housing with looping streets and a counterfeit sky. Their only escape is death. In one word, a nightmare.
Together, these films are the epitome of 2020, expressing the seemingly endless possibilities for and see-saw experiences of joy and torment.
Andy Samberg is so well-known for his previously played irreverent characters who pride themselves on slacker behavior, that our initially seeing Nyles’ complete lack of respect for the wedding he’s attending, nothing is amiss. But it turns out, whoever Nyles once was in the actual timeline, has eroded over the unknown days that have played-out since, so much so that he long ago lost count, he’s forgotten what his profession was, he’s already been killed by Roy dozens of times, and he’s slept with Sarah (a non-aware time-loop version) a thousand times. That day has apparently played out in all kinds of ways, yet starts exactly the same.
When Sarah follows Nyles into the cave’s time-loop, we are jumping into it as well. All that Sarah believes to be the rules and possible means of escape have already been contemplated and attempted by Nyles. He tells her, “I decided a while ago, to sort-of, give up and stop trying to make sense of things altogether because the only way to live in this is to embrace the fact that nothing matters…We have no choice but to live so your best bet is to learn how to suffer existence.”
After ignoring Nyles’ guidance with her own trials-and-errors, Sarah decides they make the most of it.
Sarah brings newness into Nyles’ exhausted existence. All that he has done before, multiple times, is refreshed with her being there too; still wasting time but no longer wasted time. Hanging out at an empty house’s pool, practicing their shot at the gun-range, joyrides, flying (and crash-landing) a plane, doing a silly dance routine at the local bar, playing tricks on the other wedding guests, tattooing dicks on each other’s backs, and celebrating what could reasonably be Nyles’ millionth birthday.
They wake up each day smiling; basking in the hilarity of the previous day’s mischiefs and anticipating whatever shenanigans to come. Nyles and Sarah are able to embrace their eternities because the space permits them to. There are no outside forces put upon them to make them experience one day different from the next. It’s their choice. It’s their perspective. They determine how each day goes within the parameters. They can zig and zag all they want within the box of parameters. Their emotions are their own. They might not be able to leave through acts of kindness or reckless suicide, but they still have some measure of free-will, to find meaning just as much as worthlessness.
All of their daily adventures come to a climax when Sarah and Nyles mutually decide to have sex. But instead of waking up in each other’s embrace (as they would in a normal timeline), they wake up separately, wherever they would have on that original morning. And it’s revealed that Sarah had spent that original night with her sister’s fiancé. All of Sarah’s good times with Nyles are immediately overwhelmed by her guilt from (long-ago) sleeping with Abe. She realizes that no matter what she does, she can’t escape her original sin. Everyone else resets and is completely unaware but she will need to live with herself knowing the truth of betrayal.
Instead of coming clean, she internalizes the pain, and hides it from Nyles – saying it’s all been meaningless. What she actually means is not that their night was meaningless but rather the larger idea that no matter how special something can be, the reset-button takes away its significance. Without Nyles sharing in that realization, he is confused and hurt by her reaction to what he thought had been without a doubt something significant between them.
His exhaustion from all of the days he had alone (and painful deaths from Roy’s revenge-murders) in the loop were momentarily paused when she became part of it, bringing him levity and excitement. Nyles continues the loop in utter despair without Sarah, realizing he loves her and the loop is better with her in it but she’s left him alone every day since.
Similarly to The Twilight Zone’s episode “Time Enough At Last”, Sarah decided to make use of the infinite loop to her advantage by learning all she could about the highly complex field of physics: figuring out that from understanding time travel, she can defeat time travel. And from an actually successful experiment, hatched their escape plan.
Knowing she has a way out, Sarah confidently gives her maid-of-honor speech as a final goodbye to the loop and all of her denial. She invited Nyles to join her but he initially rejects leaving their safe-place for the real-world where there’s actual death, actual problems, and no reset button. But of course as in all romantic genre movies fashion, he races to her at the cave and joins in her experiment of blowing themselves up.
Quoting Roy, “At least you have each other. Nothing is worse than going through this shit alone.” A shared experience creates a bond. And in times of uncertainty, it’s important to have a support system. Nyles and Sarah leaned on each other; they made each other stronger and better. Their characters and their story were constructed in order to exemplify that the glass can be half-full.
But Vivarium shows the opposite: that a tragically shared experience can be just as much of an opportunity to completely breakdown a couple when the rules of their confinement are constructed to keep them from having any choice, any free-will, any hope, and any happiness.
Jesse Eisenberg is well-known for his rather pessimistically inclined characters. We’re introduced to him playing Tom; happily in love with his girlfriend Gemma, in their hopeful search of finding a home to call their own. Popping into the seemingly harmless yet immediately peculiar real estate sales office of the suburban housing development called Yonder, it’s supposed to be “both tranquil and practical, all you need and all you want…near enough and far enough”. An enticingly worded sales pitch to represent the perfect compromise of what any couple would want, Yonder is “worth a look”.
Whether they were too distracted to notice, or willingly dismissed the eerily perfect sunny blue sky with perfectly still puffy clouds, Gemma and Tom followed Martin into his trap. But whether they would have turned around right after the welcome sign, or as they did when finding themselves looping through the endless streets of copy & paste houses (always coming back to House #9), upon entering Yonder, there was no leaving.
Tom and Gemma’s struggle starts mere minutes after Martin leaves them; arguing for hours over which direction they should turn that will lead them out the way they came in, and even who should be driving the car. Time only shows its real passing from the burning cigarette Tom threw to the ground and the car losing gas, not the setting sun and darkened sky. The cycle of day to night can no longer be trusted because it’s manufactured and controlled; like how it was in The Truman Show.
Not that their working together towards an escape would have mattered, but in the morning with a fresh start, they have hope and curiosity – quickly dispelled when Tom looks out to an unnatural indefinite horizon.
Tom and Gemma started their journey from their house, following the ‘sun’ and keeping as straight a line getting as far away as they could, through backyards and over fences, but they found themselves back at the start.
In their front yard, is a box of supplies; dried and canned food, milk and juice, toothbrushes, soap, etc. There’s no one in sight who could have dropped it off. Completely exhausted and dehydrated from hours of walking, Tom uses his remaining energy to set it all on fire with his lighter. Falling asleep on the curb as it all goes up in flames, they wake up covered in its ash, yet the house is completely resurrected in all its glory and decor. And a baby-boy in a box has appeared with the instructions, “Raise the child and be released.”
From however much time has passed in their world or the actual world, the couple has not aged and their hair hasn’t grown (much), but the baby has matured to look about 10 years old. It is clear he cannot be human; from his voice and mannerisms proving also that whatever Martin was, his strange behavior came from the same practice of learned imitation to pass as human. On their own in their lifeless enclosure, Gemma and Tom have woken up together and gone to sleep together each ‘day’ having to stay at their house, with the bare minimum of free-will and choice for how to occupy the moments. They only have each other for support but in this shared experience of prolonged forced parenthood, Tom and Gemma’s relationship sharply declines from partners to adversaries.
Though Yonder was not designed to test their (or any other trapped couple’s) relationship, for either passing or failing in order to be released back to the normal world, why could Tom and Gemma not maintain their loving bond even when faced with this highly stressful situation? Were they actually a poorly matched couple beforehand with naturally but unrealized opposing values and perspectives made even more clear under duress? Had this never happened, but found their dream house elsewhere, would they have eventually broken-up under more usual challenges?
The major turning point is when Tom accidently burns a hole in the yard’s fake grass, revealing clayish dirt that he can dig up to possibly find a tunnel so they can get out of the monotonous bizarre and puzzling world they are in. It becomes his daily occupation, leaving Gemma to be the sole parent of the boy and keep the home; especially having to settle him down when he screams out for no reason.
Before completely falling apart, but what ultimately causes their separation, is the boy interrupting a randomly found moment of joy. Tom joins Gemma breathing in the smells of their car and remembering their once normal lives, accidentally discovering that the battery still works enough for the CD player to turn on. They dance on the street in the glow of the headlights. The boy accidentally trips Tom and in retaliation, throws the boy down. Putting the boy to sleep, Gemma explains to him, “We can’t be with you all the time. People like to be alone sometimes.” Tom and Gemma needed to be alone together away from the boy in their car, but for the remainder of the movie, Tom and Gemma are separate from each other. Tom becomes so obsessed by the possibility of having found an escape, that he eventually sleeps in the hole instead of in his bed with Gemma.
Each day, Tom gets more sick from having breathed in the unnatural dirt. Upon finding the bagged dead body of the house’s previous tenant, does he feel completely hopeless; realizing his attempts at salvation were futile and meaningless. He has literally reached the bottom of the pit, and there is no way out of the hell they’ve been trapped in.
As he laid dying in her arms, Tom recalls how they first met. There were no particularly exciting or interesting details. He didn’t save her from anything. She didn’t say anything funny. And yet, from their first innocuous encounter, they were each other’s person. They led ordinary, normal lives in the real world. Their days were simple. Their goals were average. Their future unremarkable. So to find themselves ensnared by whatever creature(s) are in charge of Yonder, living out the remainder of their lives there, is the most unlikely incredible event that could have happened to them – despite it being of absolutely terrifying purpose and design.
Soon after, Gemma also dies, but her last words are as close to the exemplification of Dylan Thomas’ verse, “Do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light.” She defiantly affirms to the boy she raised who has become adult-aged, “I am not your fucking mother”!
After Gemma’s body bag is thrown into the pit, landing beside
Tom’s, the dirt hole is filled back up, the grass patch renewed, and the house
ready again for new residents. At the real estate sales office, an elderly
dying Martin is replaced by the new Martin, a new couple walks in unaware of
all that we’ve seen transpire, and the cycle of doom is assumed repeated.
Conclusion
Unlike how movies such as Palm Springs and Vivarium have their defined conclusions, we in the actual real-world don’t have an ending or ever really know what comes next. January 1, 2021 at 12:01am will not automatically cure or reset the world of this year’s struggles with the virus. And whenever there is a safe vaccine, it will be rolled-out intermittently, not readily available at the drop of a hat. (Even this year’s flu-shot was severely limited to a first-come-first-serve basis.) We don’t know what ‘new-normal’ awaits us.
Covid-19 might be a time-suck but despite the troubles and
changes we’ve all faced this year so far, I can at least attest that life has
not stopped. Each day has brought its highs and lows. Each day has the potential
to go well or poorly. And we will continue to wade in the natural ebb-and-flow
of life’s successes and hardships – as difficult as it can be to stomach or
hope for.
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