Time Travel Ain’t What It Used To Be

The original Back To The Future movie is celebrating it’s twenty fifth birthday this year. In 1985, the idea of using a flux capacitor inside a car as a time machine was a pretty radical one, especially given the fact that the DeLorean Motor Company went out of business three years prior to the release of the movie. Back To The Future quickly went on to be a smash hit movie and started to bring time travel from the realms of science fiction into a much more mainstream arena.

Since then, we’ve seen a myriad of time travel shows and movies in which we’ve seen the past, the future and alternate version of the present day. Though the conceit of time travel itself isn’t by any means an original one, and it far predates the first Back To The Future movie, the means by which the time travel aspect of the story is performed can vary wildly.

In the past twenty five years, we’ve seen time travel being achieved with DeLoreans, phone booths, wormholes, Stargates, alien spaceships, time displacement machinery, slingshot effects, a TARDIS, a TURDIS, remote controls, cryogenic freezing chambers and even a time travel-code printed on a rub on tattoo on Philip J. Fry’s butt. The latest addition to the stable of time travel devices is…..a hot tub time machine.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that if a television show or movie is aimed at a wider, more mainstream audience, then the device used in the narrative to facilitate the time travel aspect of the story can be almost anything in sight. In The Butterfly Effect, simply reading a childhood story transported Ashton Kutcher’s character into his own past. In Click, Adam Sandler travels forward and back in his own life using a multimedia remote control. All that Eric Bana had in The Time Traveller’s Wife was an errant gene that caused him to travel though time. Neither diary pages nor remote controls have huge marketing potential for movie souvenirs or props, and the logistical difficulties associated with putting an errant gene into a glass display case are too huge to surmount.

Hot tubs and DeLoreans are both capable of sending people through time, and both manage to do so in movies featuring Crispin Glover, but a replica of a hot tub will never sell well in a toy store or a comic shop. DeLorean replicas sell very well, and in fact they sell so well that it’s possible to buy a replica from any one of the three Back to The Future movies with packaging appropriate to each particular movie.

In the late seventies and early eighties, after the release of Star Wars, it became very apparent very quickly that nerds like merchandise. A huge part of what makes sci-fi so popular is that it has great gadgets and gadgets lend themselves very well to time-travel. The Stargate, the TARDIS., the DeLorean are all vital parts of the narrative of their respective shows and movies. As well as being a tool to get the protagonists from one setting to another, they’re also characters in their own right.

Movies like Hot Tub Time Machine aim for a broader, more mainstream audience and only use the time travel device as an instrument to set up the story or the next gag. Any effort, and all too often that effort is minimal, that goes into explaining the mechanics of time travel involved in the movie are there as a matter of necessity in order to make the story plausible or to bring the characters back to their own time and give the tale a nice emotional ending where everyone learns something about themselves only to find when they return home that their actions in the past have made their present-day lives infinitely better. Sometimes this is achieved simply by putting a wig on a character and throwing in some sight gags

Generation X is the first generation that has had full time exposure to television and movies since birth. Generation X has had more disposable income, more free time and more access to technology than any generation that came before it. The whole generation has grown up surrounded by a million different stories and it’s meant that that generation has become savvy to story telling tropes. What used to be hard to grasp is now par for the course. Even characters like Gregory House can confidently tell us “luckily, it’s been well established that time is not a fixed construct” without fear of losing the understanding of the audience. Personal timelines and narrative timelines don’t have to run side by side. Characters from different points in their own timeline can be introduced for the first time more than once.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the longest running Sci-Fi show in the world is using this plot device to great effect. A couple of years ago, the Doctor met a woman named River Song for the very first time. But in her own timeline, she had already met the Doctor in her past. Time travel stories make such things possible and easily acceptable, creating character dynamics that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Even Marty McFly had a similar experience when he met his good friend Doc Brown thirty years in the past, long before Doc Brown ever met Marty.

Time travel movies and shows tell us that there’s an infinite amount of time, but we’ve learned from a life time of viewing that there isn’t an infinite amount of ideas. And in the end, time travel movies usually boil down to one of two types. Either they’re about using the timeline for personal gain, or the plot involves trying to restore or maintain the integrity of the timeline. Folks in mainstream movies who time travel in a hot tub give lip service to maintaining the integrity of the timeline but ultimately they’re out for themselves and end up doing whatever they feel is best for them. Soldiers and scientists who travel through Stargates in sci-fi movies with a narrower appeal work purely to restore the timeline to the way it should be. Back To The Future manages to be the ultimate crossover movie in that it mixes a very clear intent to restore the timeline with the unintended benefit of improving lives. Marty’s mission in the movie becomes clear very quickly; he has to restore future history to the way it originally unfolded and in attempting to do that, he manages to change the future slightly, and almost entirely for the better. His family was happier, healthier and Biff Tannen had been put in his place. Though environmentalist probably weren’t happy when Marty returned to 1985 only to find out that Twin Pines Mall had changed to Lone Pines Mall.

It’s not unusual that nature sometimes has to suffer for science, but that may change. Just give it some time…

–Simon Fitzgerald

Comments: None