Looping Minds: Reclaiming Agency beyond a Normative Chronology

Abstract This essay focuses on time loop films featuring a protagonist with a mental illness, arguing for these films’ cultural-political potential for reframing how viewers perceive neuro-non-normative subjectivities. To do so, the author introduces the concept of normative chronology that describes both narrative conventions in cinematic storytelling and culturally mediated narratives of mental illness. The narrative frameworks of loop and mental illness narratives presuppose a linear teleology by focusing on a character's efforts to overcome their non-normativity—be it a temporal loop or mental illness—to rejoin a shared timeline. Drawing from temporalities of resistance, the author illustrates how the time loop films analyzed in this essay resist this call for a normative chronology through character- and viewer-based agency. First, the author shows how the protagonists of John Maybury's The Jacket (2005) and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001) embrace the temporal loop as a means to imagine (and potentially bring about) a different future. Second, and with the help of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995), the article illustrates how characters may fail at challenging the underlying normative chronology, which invites viewers to create their own meaning beyond a linear teleology.