I Feel Like I've Seen This Before

If you could only have one superpower, what would it be? Maybe you'd want a heightened ability like super strength or super speed. Maybe you'd want an extra ability like clairvoyance or telekinesis. Or perhaps you'd want to just fix that one thing in life that's annoying you like the ability to never gain weight or never get sick again. For me, I've always wanted the ability to control time. Being able to correct any mistake I've ever made and have an infinite undo button on life would be my utopia, and it seems like I'm not alone. Whether it's short stories or Hollywood we seem to have this odd obsession with time loops.

I was inspired to write this post after reading the short story "Memento Mori", a story by Johnathon Nolan that was inspired by the same story that inspired his brother to make the movie Memento. "Memento Mori" follows a man as he reads signs around his house telling him his daily routine because he can't remember due to his short-term memory loss. It implies that he has lived through this exact same day many times as his notes are uber specific and seem like minute details. It breaks down the optimization of a routine, something we don't often pay much mind to, but when your window to learn things is shrunk, everything because about spending as little time on the necessities as possible. Plus, Memento spawned a pretty funny CollegeHumor sketch.

When I read this story, it got me thinking, what other stories have time loops in them, and for such an obscure situation, it's more than you may think. The obvious, and most famous one, is Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray. It follows a man who keeps living the same day over and over again until he figures out how to break the loop. This then spawned the hilarious Happy Death Day and its sequel, Happy Death Day 2U. Both of which are clever, underrated horror movies that have the same plot as Groundhog Day except the loop is repeated when our main character is killed. That was preceded by the comedic Project Almanac, which was preceded by the mind-bending Looper, which was preceded by the Disney Film Minutemen, and now you're starting to see my point. My favorite of the bunch is Edge of Tomorrow, a war movie was based on "All You Need is Kill", a manga that I actually own so how about that. It's written almost like a video game where you desperately try to make progress by trying different things and seeing if they work out, producing a perfectly optimized run.

So why do we love this concept? It's that feeling of achieving perfection. We hate making mistakes because it feels like we've wasted our chance, we had an opportunity right in front of us and we blew it. We love watching a character slowly achieve a goal through trial and error because we see ourselves in that character. We know what it's like to tirelessly fail at something only to finally get it after countless failures. It's like the old quote goes, "The difference between the master and the novice is that the master has failed more times than the novice has tried".