References in Popular Culture
- Eternal return is the central theme of the movie Groundhog Day - the main character, played by Bill Murray, wakes up each morning to find it is the same date and everything which he does not influence repeats endlessly until he has perfected himself in a kind of transmigration of the soul.
- In the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the polytheistic religion of the humans of the Twelve Colonies is centered on the belief of eternal recurrence, and the religious elements of the show frequently incorporate this idea with the scriptural phrase "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." The monotheistic Cylons also adhere to this doctrine and repeat the phrase as often as the humans.
- Michael Ende's 1979 novel, The Never Ending Story, muses on themes of eternal return, with the Old Man of Wandering Mountain and the Childlike Empress being two opposing and unified figures caught in The Circle of Eternal Return. (p. 195)
- Jim Morrison, who was familiar with Nietzsche's works, spoke about the idea of eternal recurrence. "Well, we’re all in the cosmic movie, you know that! That means the day you die, you gotta watch your whole life recurring eternally forever, in CinemaScope, 3-D. So you better have some good incidents happenin’ in there... and a fitting climax" - The End of "Light my Fire" (18:52) on Disc 2 of The Doors: Live in Detroit.
- The 2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner for drama, Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsay-Abaire, touches on the concept of eternal recurrence. A short story written by one of the play's characters describes a child who jumps through black holes, or rabbit holes, to access these alternate realities where his dead father is still alive.
- Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman embodies an instance of eternal recurrence, with the protagonist being entrapped in a circular hell.
- The anime Zegapain is set in a virtual reality which must reset all history and memories to the initial state of the simulated time frame every 150 days.
- In the sixth part of the manga JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, this is crucial to Enrico Pucci's plans to purge humanity of horror and sorrow, by accelerating the next cycle of existence without human spirits actually dying, so they will have subconscious awareness about the totality of the future.
- The plot of the episode "The Late Philip J. Fry" of the television show Futurama revolves around circular time travel.
- Eternal return is a key feature of the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
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