Released at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the eerily timely comedy Palm Springs may seem like a fun-but-fleeting hour and a half of cinema, but in Joe Levin’s reading, the Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti-led “time-loop” picture belongs to a genre of storytelling as old as the tale of Sisyphus. Levin demonstrates the mise-en-scene and storytelling techniques that Palm Springs uses to locate itself within the “time-loop” genre, and how it treats that genre as a site to explore the nature of actions and consequences.