Reporter | Pan Wenjie
Edit | Yellow Moon
The TV series "Beginning" attracted the attention of many viewers at the beginning of 2022, in which the protagonist woke up from the bus again and again, tried again and again to stop the bus explosion and save innocent lives, and failed again and again, they explained to the police again and again, were questioned again and again, and fell into the cycle again and again.
This kind of film and television drama setting that repeatedly returns to the past and repeats a certain period of time is not uncommon, from the movie "Groundhog Day" in the 1990s to the "Source Code" starring Jack Gyllenhaal in 2011, the protagonist is trapped in a similar cycle for various reasons, containing some kind of torture that cannot escape, but also has the opportunity to go back to the past and make changes.
01 Groundhog Day Ring
The protagonist of "Beginnings" uses the word "loop" to explain his experience, and the main space where the story takes place is the bus, repeating the same route day after day, which is itself a common circular image. The characters in the "Beginning" drama also mention Japanese anime such as "Summer Battle", "The Girl Who Traveled Through Time", "Your Name", among which "The Girl Who Traveled Through Time" is a novel by Japanese novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui in 1967, the story contains a plot that voluntarily enters the time loop, has been adapted many times, and was basically unknown to the Western world before the release of the animated film in 2006.
The setting of time loops is actually quite common. The Beginning belongs to a definite type of time loop, the "groundhog sun ring". The name derives from the 1993 American film Groundhog Day, which, while not the first to use this setting, established a time loop in popular culture.
In "Groundhog Day," weathercaster Phil travels to a small town in Pennsylvania to cover the local Groundhog Day celebrations, only to be trapped forever on February 2, the day of Groundhog Day. "Groundhog Sun Ring" is characterized by a plot in which the characters get caught up in a time loop, destined to repeat it over and over again for a period of time (usually a day) until something is corrected. In "The Beginning", this thing that needs to be corrected is the bus explosion.
Another aspect of the "Groundhog Sun Ring" setting is "anti-ripple effect memory," which means that the brains of usually only one character or group of characters are not affected by the reset and can retain the memory of each cycle – only they can realize exactly what happened, while others can only remember the reality in the new round of the cycle. In the TV series "Beginning", the protagonist and others began to call the police long before the vehicle exploded, and told a fairly detailed inside story, which aroused suspicions from all sides. Without waiting for the police officer to introduce himself, the protagonist called out his name, and even said the characteristics of his weak right hand, which surprised the parties even more. It can be said that the protagonist transforms the "hindsight" into the "foresight" in the current cycle by gaining experience through repeated failures of many cycles. On the one hand, they have a large reserve of information, and in the eyes of the audience, they have the crushing pleasure obtained by the information difference, on the other hand, they also feel lonely, no one knows how many times they repeat the day's life, trapped in it and unable to escape. We see Phil alone and helpless in "Groundhog Day", and in "Beginnings" we witness the rapid heating up and interdependence of the male and female protagonists who enter the cycle together, all stemming from the setting of "anti-ripple effect memory".
How exactly can someone caught up in a time loop escape from it? Phil in "Groundhog Day" discovers that even his suicide cannot end the cycle, so he begins to make various life attempts, such as robbing a cash truck, stealing a groundhog, mastering the art of ice sculpture, using the time of the cycle to learn how far he can play Rachmaninoff, and constantly playing tricks to court a lady but is repeatedly recognized. It wasn't until he began to enrich himself, help others, and truly gain the favor of the lady that the time loop was finally broken. In the setting of the Groundhog Sun Ring, the characters learn from a continuous cycle, thus gaining an increasingly deeper understanding of their environment and the characters around them. How many days did Phil spend in the loop? According to Christopher Hooton, author of The Independent, we can see 37 of these days in the film, but the actual time required may be between 30 years (estimated by harold Remis, director and screenwriter of the play) and 10,000 years (the time it takes for the soul to evolve to the next level according to Buddhist teachings).
02 Reasoning and games
As for why the protagonist enters the time loop, "Groundhog Day" does not give a reasonable answer. If you want to come up with a convincing explanation and make this setting self-explanatory, the story often moves in the direction of science fiction. The answer given in the movie Source Code is "science" – scientists use special instruments that Colt can repeatedly "traverse" into the bodies of the dead killed in the train bombing, only to return to the 8 minutes before the explosion each time.
Since the "Groundhog Sun Ring" is a process of constant exploration, discovery, and problem solving, the narrative becomes like an interactive puzzle, making this setting particularly suitable for speculative works. Yasuhiko Nishizawa's "The Man Who Died Seven Times" is such a setting, because "I" can cycle nine times, and Grandpa dies seven times over and over again in these nine times, so "I" must find a way to keep Grandpa alive. In the domestic reasoning works, Zhang Xiaocat's "Reverse Time Investigation Group" also adopts a similar setting - the protagonist has the ability to repeatedly experience the same day five times from time to time, and he relies on this ability to return to the pre-crime investigation again and again, repeatedly cracking serious cases, and in the eyes of others, if there is divine help. These practices can also be incorporated into the "new nature". The logic of classic speculative fiction has been used for more than a hundred years, and using time loops such as special logic from science fiction and fantasy works to replace or update traditional routines has also injected new vitality into speculative fiction.
If Benguet reasoning pursues the ultimate in logic, the focus of social reasoning is, of course, to expound social issues. From "The Beginning", we can see that as the cycle occurs again and again, the identities of each minor character are also unlocked one by one, they have their own experience background, are in a specific social class, and are linked to certain social events, and this sci-fi reasoning story has more social elements. In addition to the identity of the secondary characters, the male protagonists themselves who enter the cycle again and again are also changing, such as beginning to reflect on whether the aesthetics of violence they advocate are harmful to society.
Don't forget, the male protagonist of "Beginnings" is a game architect! "Groundhog Sun Ring" not only appears in novels and film and television dramas, but is also extremely closely related to games. From a character's point of view, any saved game can be seen as a manually activated "groundhog sun ring" by the player, after all, they have to repeat it over and over again, learning to explore in the same story until they have done the right thing to pass the level. It's no wonder that the protagonists of The Beginning always compare the experience of entering the loop to the game.
03 The Philosophy of Time
The "Groundhog Sun Ring" seems to be using time to play, but behind it are different concepts of time at work.
Many cultures in the world have traces of the cycle of time – buddhism has a theory of reincarnation; there is a similar view in traditional Chinese culture, some Chinese thinkers believe that the universe is a circulating life, death means rebirth, which is also reflected in the cycle of four seasons; ancient Westerners also realized similar laws from the cyclical movement of stars.
Christians believe that time is linear and that history develops toward a definite goal, which is called teleos (ultimate goal). In modern industrial society, the time of clocks and watches is cut by a uniform standard - 1 hour for 60 minutes - which can be accurately calculated, and time is considered homogeneous and irreversible. It may be speculated that the reason why the Forbidden City has a special watch hall is also related to the fact that clocks and watches entered China and were adopted in the Common Era, Chinese the traditional concept of time has undergone earth-shaking changes.
One of Nietzsche's most famous ideas is eternal reincarnation, and for Heidegger the problem of eternal reincarnation is "the most onerous thoughts," perhaps "the thoughts of thought." Nietzsche rejects the linear conception of time, arguing that man does not go to another place after death, that we are actually reliving life over and over again; that we have experienced the life we have lived countless times in the past and will experience it countless times in the future.
This idea sounds as if it will lead us into a kind of nothingness, just like the contemporary society workers do the same work day after day, year after year, watching the soap operas with repeated routines, listening to the internet divine comedy of repeated routines, there have been many waits and hopes, but in the end nothing has happened. In Nietzsche's case, eternal reincarnation is not the case. Contrary to Christians who expect salvation in the afterlife, Nietzsche did not believe that there was a more important time and world than in this life. He advocated the restoration of the ancient conception of time, and since the cycle of time repeats, "every pain, every pleasure, every thought, every sigh, and every indescribable little thing or event" in our lives must return to itself in the same order, and then we must wonder whether we desire it to happen again and again, which means that even moments are incomparably important, that is, life in this life is everything.
Resources:
The History of Ideas: From Fire to Freud by Peter Watson by Hu Cui'e Translated by Yilin Publishing House, 2018
A Brief History of World Philosophy [Beauty] Robert M. C. Solomon by Mei Lan Translated by Houlang 丨 Jiangxi People's Publishing House 2017
Christopher Hooton: Groundhog Day is 25 years old but fittingly eternal
Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Gamesby (Editor),(Editor)McFarland & Company (March 13, 2015)