take it from the top
repeat performance (1947)
In 2022, I was supposed to review a recently re-discovered and re-released noir called Repeat Performance. But I never filed it for reasons no one remembers. Since Repeat Performance is now on the Criterion Channel, I thought I’d dust off what I had written…. Enjoy! It’s in a kind of different register than what’s usually on here, I guess.
I’ve written about time loops a couple times before. Once for Commonweal and once for the Hedgehog Review. If threatened I may even do it again.
If you could do it again, would you? Like living forever, this is one of those scenarios that exists to be endlessly bandied about; after all, none of us will ever get the chance. If you could relive the last year, the last five years, if you could go back to when you were six, if you could…. You wouldn’t make those mistakes, you would buy shares in Zoom, you would be kinder to the person you knew was going to die, you’d warn your friend off from the ex who abused them, you wouldn’t take that job, you would take that other job—the list of choices you’d make the other way, now that you know how it went, is endless.
But this is a deal I’ve never been inclined much to take, myself. Not because I have no regrets—as the song says, I have a few. Still if the great wizard of the time loop appeared before me, there would be some hesitations. I don’t know what I’d lose through making other choices, for one thing: few mistakes, however regretted, bear only bitter fruit. Would refraining from a choice mean giving up somebody I love, or a discovery that’s helped me? In the lifetime where I make some choices and not others, do I miss the serendipity that brought me this dear friend or my dog? It never quite seems worth it—I’d be trading one form of regret for another.
Also, I suspect I’d make a lot of the same mistakes in a new way. Some of what we do and what happens to us is pure luck, the unanticipated and unanticipatable, but some of it also has to do with who we are, with grooves in our character and aspects of our desires that aren’t so easily fixed by making a different choice one time. The single piano that falls from the sky is easy to avoid in hindsight—take a left and not a right—but not so easy if for some reason you’re always wandering under pianos, past the signs telling you that pianos are being hoisted in the area, and lingering in their shade.
Consider Oedipus. A certain kind of smart-aleck, confronted with his story, raises their hand and says: If you know two things, and they’re that you’re fated to kill your father and marry your mother, isn’t it simple just to vow not to kill anybody and not to marry a widow? Granted that Oedipus doesn’t know that he doesn’t know who his parents are, and all the rest—still, to be on the safe side, wasn’t all this pretty easy to avoid? To this remark there are a number of responses, one of which is that character and fate are intertwined; you could even say that the character of Oedipus’s parents, whose response to hearing his prophesied fate was to abandon him to die, was intertwined with their fate of being destroyed by a child that did not know them. Their mutual lack of recognition stemmed as much from their fates as his.
