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TIME AND REDEMPTION IN
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
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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 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 36th 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
popular series and films suggests a recurring fascination with the prospect of time in a neverending loop or stuck in a void, that terrible feeling, not unlike the mysterious author of Qoheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun and that we are destined to live in an eternal present. A variation on the theme is found in Stranger Things, another Netflix original, where a group of teenagers seek to escape the void of the so-called Upside Down, an imperfect and decaying copy of reality. Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough thriller Memento (2000) offers another variant via the noir drama of a widower suffering from amnesia and in search of his wife’s murderer. Destined to live in an eternal present, Leonard pieces together each clue through external notes and tattoos but is stalked by the uncertainty of never knowing how he found them. One of the most celebrated examples is the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s misanthropic weatherman endures the eponymous Pennsylvanian festival for what seems like eternity until the hope of a real connection with another human being redeems his purgatorial existence.
HAUNTOLOGY
Much of this pessimism has at least some of its intellectual roots in the idea of ‘hauntology’, a term first coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to describe how Marxist philosophy in a variety of ways haunts European culture and politics. The term has since been expanded (and perhaps even
The cast of Russian Doll attends the season premiere at Metrograph Theater, New York
further complicated!) to include the paradoxes of so-called postmodern culture, where retro aesthetics and older social forms of life continue to haunt. Derrida drew the idea from a famous line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where the titular character describes the feeling of “time out of joint”. From Groundhog Day to Russian Doll and beyond, we encounter a series of attempts to negotiate that feeling of being haunted by the past and the absence of a future.
RADICAL CLOSENESS
As Nadia’s story unfolds, she notices that while time may be out of joint, it might yet offer the gift of a future. The product of a dysfunctional upbringing, many of her experiences between deaths invoke the memory of her mother, Lenora, and the emotional instabilities of her childhood. Her present life is equally beset by emotional and spiritual instabilities. One of the most interesting aspects of Nadia’s character is her job as a software developer for a videogame company. The time loop of her life is not unlike the structure of a videogame. Like a game, death brings events back to the start rather than to an end. Her initial approach to the time loop is to treat it not unlike a game and figure out the glitch in the matrix. Her journey through the repeated loops, however, suggests that the logic of the game might only offer a partial understanding. At this stage viewers and readers might think of the story as a relatively facile allegory for the concept of reincarnation but midway through the series, Nadia encounters a man who is experiencing the same time loop in a different event. Charlie Barnett’s portrayal of Alan depicts a man experiencing the same situation but with a different response. While Nadia attempts to play and replay the system until she discovers the glitch, Alan settles into its predictability and welcomes its nihilistic yet reliable character. Driven by routine and structure, he plans to propose to his girlfriend only to discover that she has been having an affair. His loop revolves around this discovery and both he and Nadia appear to be the only people aware of these repeated passages of time. 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.
MEMORY AND HOPE
In The Principle of Hope, published in three volumes between 1954 and 1959, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch explored the concept of utopian hope and its roots in art, literature, political philosophy and religion. Arguing that human culture is dynamised by a passionate hope for the future that transcends the alienation of the present, his hermeneutics of hope were crucial to the emerging dialogue between Christianity and Marxism in the 20th century and equally influenced the emergence of a renewed theology of hope within the Christian tradition. In 1964, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann drew on Bloch’s insights to argue for the retrieval of the public and social dimensions of Christian hope. In his acclaimed Theology of Hope, Moltmann argued that while creation groans with suffering, it is also the arena, albeit laden with tension, where the “hope that draws the believer into the life of love” is equally “the mobilizing and driving force of faith’s thinking, of its knowledge of and reflections on human nature, history, and society.” This hope, as the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf illustrates, is firmly rooted in the present: “Christian hope,” he writes, “is about the promise that the wrongs of the past can be set aright and that the future need not be a mere repetition of the past.” To hope, he continues, “does not mean to dream ourselves into a different reality, but to embrace the promise that this reality, suffused with suffering, will be transformed.”
REDEMPTIVE TIME
Time loops are a recurring trope in fiction of many kinds. Often, they are dystopian loops that offer little hope of a future and thus symbolise a whole range of cultural and social anxieties about humanity’s inability to escape cycles of destruction, violence and despair. One of the most interesting dynamics in the first season of Russian Doll is its suggestion that the loop is neither inevitable nor eternal but open to change, transformation and even redemption. That rupture lies in the possibilities of selfless giving that might just give way to a more redemptive experience of time. Just as the theological category of hope might help us better understand the culture in which we live, move and have our being, so, too, might that culture reveal something of that dynamic of redeeming and passionate hope that nourishes the Christian imagination from Genesis to Apocalypse and beyond.
