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TIME AND REDEMPTION IN NETFLIX’S RUSSIAN DOLL THE POPULAR SERIES PRESENTS A CHARACTER CAUGHT IN A TIME LOOP BUT YEARNING FOR CONNECTION AND A FUTURE BY PAUL CLOGHER TIME AND THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION Time and its strangeness preoccupy the Christian imagination. In the Hebrew myths of humanity’s first emergence, the rapid passage of days in Genesis 1 gives way to humanity’s long sojourn from, and yearning for, a lost paradise. The remainder of the Torah is, among many things, both a struggle with time and a search for home. In the Exodus, Moses and the Israelites endure a long wandering in a four-decade desert, a journey characterised by impatience, impetuousness and idolatry. The idol always emerges from an attempt to control the divine, the mysterious, and the Other and this urge, at least in part, is rooted in humanity’s inability to bend time to our will. In a latter episode of the Hebrew Bible, the problem of time in a loop haunts the life of Job, that patron saint of undue hardship, as he endures the consequences of his refusal to curse the God of his ancestors. In Christianity’s creative sequel, otherwise known as the New Testament, Jesus’ street arguments with the unfortunate Pharisees often invoke that lost 24 REALITY JULY/AUGUST 2022
Edenic home, where the first earthlings emerged from the dust, communed, and became one flesh. The loss of Eden, which is more a state of mind than any physical location, and the search for authentic communion animates both the Christian and wider human story. The Christian response to this loss emerges in
TIME OUT OF JOINT The experience of time is simultaneously intimate and alien. We live and move within time but, by the same token, can never grasp, own or control it. Season one of Russian Doll, a recent entry in Netflix’s ever expanding ‘canon’ of scripture, plays on these themes in the story
When they finally meet, both characters sense that the reason for their predicament may well be to save one another from a life of repeated despair and destruction. The idea of time never-ending is ruptured by encounter, by connection, by a kind of radical closeness and the hope that the loop may yet be ruptured. the dynamic of kenosis, where following Christ becomes a selfemptying that becomes the fertile ground for a renewed culture of encounter with both God and others. In this reflection, I would like to explore how these dynamics remain not only present but vibrant and even popular in contemporary media culture.
of Nadia, played by Natasha Lyonne, who is caught in a time loop as the guest of honour at her seemingly inescapable 36 th birthday party in New York city. She dies repeatedly, always restarting at the same moment and at the same party. As she dies over and over again, she becomes more familiar with the repeated
structure of events and suspects that some kind of glitch in the system is preventing her from either dying permanently or continuing to live the life she had. What follows is a concoction of science fiction, comedy and no small amount of spirituality that asks questions about the nature of time, the universe, human being and human becoming. While Russian Doll was first produced in 2019, its focus on a displaced relationship with time and space seems, in retrospect, vaguely prophetic. Media culture, in its ever more complex and layered forms, shapes and forms us like the ground that holds the roots of a tree, but in that reservoir there is often much more at play, and this is nothing new for the Christian mind and heart. In the incarnation, the presence of the divine tinges all culture and while many have sought to shape and bend that otherness to their own purposes, there is always an element of the unexpected that emerges and re-emerges in the images and stories we encounter, and which encounter us. A cursory scan through a variety of
