As part of my reading and watching around my current novel project, I’ve gone through a number of books and films involving characters coming back to life repeatedly. Herein a quick survey of some of those narratives.
In book form recent ones included:
I also have Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, but haven’t started on it yet.
In film form, these included:
[*]
I’m sure there are other films I’ve forgotten about, possibly with computer game vibes, like Ready Player One or similar. The original Lego Movie’s opening scene (which is wonderful) is a useful loop as well. But I’ll focus on the two books and two films I’m most familiar with / enjoyed.
The challenge with replay narratives (naming for Ken Grimwood’s phrase) starts with the purpose of such a device. What does it enable? Inevitably, the trope of characters coming back to consciousness over and over invokes a kind of Christian/Achaean hell: doomed repetition of mistakes as a punishment inflicted on people who can’t learn, like Sisyphus (who couldn’t reconcile himself with death) or any sinner. The characters are ciphers in moral parables unable to learn correctly, according to the moral framework of the authors. But that’s the key point: humans are learning beings, adaptable and that’s an essential survival mechanism. Putting a character through such things exposes their capacity for learning and the need for change in their many lives.
An Aside on Undead and Military-Industrial Complexes
The zombie – or other undead, like vampire – traditions are also influences on my writing and on the trope of return. There’s an unkillability in some stories and films, but it seems to come from a different place. I’m fairly convinced the new zombie horror stuff is basically an excuse for the military-industrial complex (in the sense of a psychological complex, as well as real-world economic investment in films) to justify wholesale slaughter of others without empathy or moral gripe.[2] Zombies are rarely treated as human. They don’t bleed or have non-red blood. This enables a lot of violence in films and games, while keeping the age rating low – it’s supposedly worse to show humans being killed in a realistic fashion, compared to fantasy violence. This means you get to show off a lot of military hardware to teenagers. A bit like recent comic book franchises.
These aren’t replay narratives. Things that are harder to kill just take bigger munitions, or skill. And the undead don’t need death, whether because they’re brainless or incomprehensibly deviant. They don’t learn from it, least of all Dracula, who just wants to indulge his appetites and ignore any moral message he might have picked up from the last time someone staked him and dropped his coffin hotel into the sea.
Books
So, to human narratives, where people supposedly learn their lessons. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life is awkwardly imbalanced. On the one hand, the rebirth scenarios relate to the attempt by Ursula Todd (who I guess is very loosely a spin-off from the real communist spy, Ursula Kuczynski) to murder Hitler. The novel’s what-if scenario progresses through a series of little deaths which reset the narrative each time. The main character dies at a young age repeatedly, of stillbirth, of a cat allergy, of a drunk doctor failing to do something correctly, of Spanish Flu…
I may have misremembered some of that because I found the book dull. One of the weaknesses in the trope is that every time you reset the narrative you have to trot over the same events again. Atkinson makes this interesting at first by taking different perspectives from the birth scene, even the cat’s at one point (again, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t). Other readers might find this more engaging than I did, but the turgid, tea-at-4pmishness of Ursula’s family quickly began to grate each time it looped around again and this didn’t get much better once she grows up and starts to find more interesting role models. Not that she doesn’t suffer, but I picked up what I needed for my own writing and moved on at around 150-200pp in. It’s a loooong book and I wasn’t there for socially realist descriptions of bourgeois life in the first half of the 20thC.
I felt like the resetting began to overstay its welcome. There’s a bulky chunk in the middle of the book where the rebirths simply get in the way of what seemed to me to want to be a more traditional, linear narrative wherein Ursula comes into her own and becomes politicised. Also, importantly, Ursula only learns for plot purposes for much of the first half. The depth of the moral quandary she is in doesn’t lead to any kind of wisdom about her relation to the historical forces she was able to see from the replay form’s unique vantage. At least, not quick enough for this reader.
Ken Grimwood’s Replay was far more entertaining – and bonkers. The main character is stuck in a loop triggered by a heart attack at the end of a slightly curtailed life of failure. In each of the initial rebirths, he tries exploring different purposes to life: capitalism, hedonism, spiritualism… Eventually he feels so lonely he starts looking for another replayer, buying ads in papers. When he finds her, the entire dynamics of their rebirthing changes, shifting the terms of the novel to amazing effect. Then Grimwood introduces a further, disturbing dynamic, casting a strange shadow on the overall premise of rebirthing.
It’s incredibly moving. Perhaps the writing is a little functional in places (I think Grimwood was mostly a journalist and worked in radio), and I definitely felt that key emotional moments in the story moved at the wrong pace, particularly the ending. Yet the sum of the narrative becomes increasingly urgent and purposeful, without ever declaring a ‘meaning’ to life. It’s an open narrative, taking you right up to the wire with the tension over the replayers’ reducing options at the end.
The challenge of the replay is extremely well handled. The replayers are trapped in their bodies and lives throughout and so they have to come to terms with frailty, with fallibility, with the problem of how to connect with someone else. The avoidance of death becomes something else: the repeated experience of mortality and its value. Meeting another replayer appears to undermine the wisdom they each have been searching for, giving them the (temporary) illusion of immortality and happiness, but taking it away again.
There’s an especially powerful element to the notion that in their past lives they have done things, like raise children or produce uniquely powerful works of art, which will be permanently lost to everyone they encounter, along with the knowledge of who they are to the people they form connections with, apart from each other. When things go badly between them, the loneliness they feel is all the more potent.
Learning is front and centre – a moral learning. It’s couched in some new age metaphysics, but this also absorbs the emergent neoliberal frontiers of the 1980s, looking at venture capital, late hippy communes, etc. Ultimately, the replayers have to come to terms with the idea of a life where the future is unknown.
Films
Edge of Tomorrow and Source Code are so firmly lodged in the US military industrial complex that I find them desperately hard to watch without some kind of major critical ranting. My favourite scene was the former’s montage in which Emily Blunt’s character shoots Tom Cruise’s character in the head over and over again, which seems like a good metaphor for a certain kind of relationship’s learning demands. Yet, while it seems like it wants to move into the love story mode, Edge of Tomorrow goes full action-boss fight at the end, giving up on its character developments. Source Code is relatively forgettable, a kind of wish fulfilment narrative playing on home terrorist fears, though Jake Gyllenhaal is very watchable in most things he does. It did feel like the opposite of what Jar Head was trying to do, so maybe he was evening out his karma.
Groundhog Day (GD) and Happy Death Day (HDD) are both fantastic fun and do great things with replaying. Film can certainly speed up the replay element with sharper montages and the use of rhythm and jump cuts. I love those moments on screen. I don’t see an easy way to do the same in writing and Life after Life is further evidence, to me, that novels have to do something different. But that’s a simple trick and it’s how replaying messes up each film’s genre that fascinates me most.
GD is a romcom. On a rewatch it felt a little saccharine and male-protagonist heavy, but the all-powerful knowledge Bill Murray’s character develops through replaying gives way to another kind of impotence: the lack of meaning that might come from a perfect play when you yourself haven’t the ambition to think beyond shallow ambitions. Even as he manages to achieve his aim and bed his love interest, he realises he hasn’t grown up. I very much like the fact that he’s only able to find a way out of the loop once he learns, matures. Also, GD makes an excellent decision in never bothering to explain its replaying premise.
HDD takes GD‘s premise of the romcom and splices it – with great panache – against a thriller/detective/slasher genres. As the protagonist, Tree, searches for her murderer, she picks up a love interest almost by accident. It’s actually quite liberated in how it then resists giving him, or the romcom genre tropes, centre stage. There’s even an enjoyable meta-conversation at the end wherein he tries to say something clever about GD and she kind of brushes it off (arguably reinforcing the other kind of learning this film is really about).
But really, it’s about murder and self-exploration. She wakes up each day mired in a dissolute college student life, struggling with a hangover in a stranger’s bedroom. She has to clean up her relations with each of the elements established in the opening replay scene: partying too hard, her academic fuck buddy, her relationship to her father (and her dead mother) and her sorority girlfriends. Each of these elements are fraught with risk for her moral development as a character and each has to be solved.
There’s also the added pressure of a developing dynamic – each time she’s murdered, she’s less able to function, less healthy – which gives urgency to the main plot. And there’s a great pacing to her replays’ jump cuts and montages each day though the film doesn’t particularly challenge GD‘s nicely established approach.
Perhaps there’s a bit of deflation at the end of both films, in that the overarching genre demands limit the scope of the metaphysics. While the characters have to grow out of their moral quagmires, ultimately they get to eat their respective cakes in a way that feels satisfying, but ignores the greater perspective replaying might apply to their sense of mortality. The character dilemmas are neatly tied off, the murderers unmasked, the love interests bagged. And that’s very satisfying after 2hrs of watching.
I guess that’s the book’s advantage over film. I can’t imagine a (genre) film ending with a three minute philosophical monologue reflecting on the new values a replayer brings to their mortality, especially not in the lighthearted contexts of GD and HDD. And I’m not sure there’s a conclusion to this particular spurt of thinking-out-loud, even after replaying (i.e. editing) it. It’s more a record of a vein of my cultural consumption to remind myself of what I’m doing with this current project. So, a genre-loyal anticlimax.
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[1] I also tried to read Joseph Heller’s Something Happened for the office politics, to inform the novel, but it made my skin crawl. Heller overindulges in misogyny, racism, antisemitism, etc. and I just gave up. It didn’t help how turgid and rambling the narrative voice was. I couldn’t get through much of Mad Men for the same reasons, though people repeatedly told me that it began to liberate itself somewhat. But why did it take so long to start challenging its premises? Awful.
[2] Even The Walking Dead, which purports to challenge that mindset with a moral dilemma vibe also revels in gun culture and violence in its own way, showing different perspectives, but what does it say when everyone dies anyway, is already infected, and nobody gets to learn anything before coming back as a brain-eater? Admittedly, I gave up around season 3 or 4.
[*] Retrospectively, other titles are occuring to me, e.g.
And there’s a host of other options after a quick online scan, e.g. on time loops in fiction and there’s a comprehensive list on TV Tropes’ Groundhog Day Loop page.
=== 14 Mar ’23
As an addendum, I got around to reading Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. It was extremely irritating. Around a hundred pages in, the book announces itself to be lost between a replay narrative and a time travel narrative, in which the replayers (called ‘kalachakra’) actually can alter the course of history. This comes across as a massive paradox – if they’re reborn each time, how can they influence the course of history?
North solves this by having her replayers spread out across history, able to make decisions before the protagonist is born which affects their presents. Yet at no point is Harry’s first few years any different, in any significant way. All the changes start with technology advancements around the end of the Second World War. So the macguffins of their natures, revealed late in the story and explained halfheartedly, seem at odds with the characters she’s creating.
In fact, the characterisations are very much held at a distance, with plotting and thrills taking over. It’s the kind of story I might have forgiven in film adaptation because you can ignore such details while bombs are going off, etc. Yet it’s the very nature of North’s writing that she keeps drawing attention to the world, the nature, through lengthy reflections on the action in Harry’s somewhat windbaggy voice, countermanding the plot’s drive.
On the whole, it has been an interesting diversion into replay narratives, but mostly for its failures. The most interesting character, Akinleye, goes through the cycles of immortality: caring, learning, seizing the day, then realising it goes on and on and descending into dissolute indulgences of her appetites, then reaching for a reset button. But she’s only visible through Harry’s increasingly psychotic, white saviour complex, as a distant foil to his needs, a trusted friend.
The one strength of the approach that I respected was the very minimal interest North shows in repeating Harry’s early life. Actually, it’s all about variation alone, the opposite of, say, Kate Atkinson’s approach. The book glosses through those details with speed and a degree of grace. Though I was a little annoyed about Harry’s therapeutic working out of his relationship with his father, which feels like an attempt to make an otherwise shallow plot character deep, and actually has next to no bearing at all on the story.
Anyway, the longer I spend looking at it, the more irritations I’m recalling about the pretense of depth the book aspired to. If you can squint hard enough, it’s a disposable taking-its-silly-parts-too-seriously thriller of surprising bulk – just over 400 pages. I’m sure there are many other books that do a better and much leaner job.