Time travel is a fascinating lie. Not everyone is a fan of science fiction as far as it concerns spaceships and rayguns, but at one stage or another we have all fantasised about travelling in time. Whether it is the desire to return to first year and spend less time in the bar and more time in books, to return to 1970 and use your hindsight powers to ‘discover’ punk before Iggy Pop, or even to zip forward to the 2016 Olympics so you can come back and make a killing at the bookies, we all love to travel time in our minds. As impossible as we know it in our hearts to be, science books like A Brief History Of Time need only suggest that it could happen in order to become instant best sellers, flying off the shelves to sate our imaginations.
Time travel in modern popular culture begins with two classic late nineteenth century novels, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and H.G Well’s The Time Machine. This is convenient because they also represent the two essential time travel groups, respectively: comedies about going back in time, and tragedies of visiting the future. In Mark Twain’s novel we have a satirical account of a nineteenth century American waking up in Medieval England, wowing the inhabitants of the era with his modern technology and knowledge of ‘future’ events. Similarly, films in which we travel to the past often hinge on the comic potential within the clash of old and new, and the caricature of historical figures. Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) presented Napoleon as a giggling moron obsessed with puppet shows; Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure(1989) portrays Genghis Khan as a dumb rock-star cliché, surrounded by groupies and susceptible to Twinkies; the Austin Powers (1997-2002) films satirise the free-spirit culture of 1960s Britain by bringing it face-to-face with the ‘boring’ modern values of monogamy and social conservatism.
Conversely, H.G Wells took us into the distant future, where the world was engaged in class-war of tribal feudalism. In the same vein, time travel films about the future most often serve as warnings of what will happen if we don’t set things right. This makes sense – we might as well laugh at the past, as we can’t change it, while we like to visit future dystopias so we know how to avoid them. The Terminator (1984) brings Michael Biehn back in time from a machine-ruled nightmare to try and save a society whose overreliance on technology will have disastrous consequences when the computers start thinking for themselves. Mike Judge’s Idiocracy(2006), though superficially a comedy about a man who wakes up in a future populated by idiots, has at its core the darker assessment that our dumbed-down Kardashian culture is not a far cry from a world where we water our crops with sports drinks and the US president is a pro-wrestler.
This summer’s critically acclaimed Looper (2012) brought us a future where time travel exists but is illegal. In this future world, state security makes it difficult to carry out murder, and so criminal gangs use time travel to send their enemies into the past to be assassinated and disposed of by special assassins there. These assassins are well paid, but they carry out their work knowing that at any point in time their future self may also be sent back for them to terminate. These are people who would literally kill their future selves in exchange for the money to finance their youthful hedonism, who would rather a brief existence of non-stop drinking and partying. Here we are being warned not so much about the future of mankind as a whole, but rather of the life we bestow upon our future selves when thinking only of the instant gratification offered by alcohol, nicotine and narcotics. It follows a long line of time travel films of critical social commentary.
Looper is also just one of many time travel action films that continue a trend begun in the 1980s. Before this, time travel plots had one essential problem: the headache of overcoming the paradoxes that plight any story in which people change the past. Thus, the concept was mostly reserved for low-key philosophical films in the serious Solaris vein of sci-fi, such as Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), or Chris Marker’s La Jetée(1962). It wasn’t until the success of Back to the Future (1985) and The Terminator in the late 1980s when filmmakers realised that if the story was entertaining enough, the multiplex audience was willing to take the plot-holes with a pinch of salt and a shovelful of popcorn.
Nowadays, cinemas have room for time travel both as food for thought and fuel for comedy or car-chases. It is everywhere, providing the backbone for everything from American teen-comedies (Hot Tub Time Machine(2010)) to Korean existentialist romances (2046 (2004)). Why all the fuss? I would argue that its greatest appeal lies in its affirmation that we are able to control our own destiny; all of that business with butterflies amounts to the wonderfully comforting thought that every action we take, however minor, can and will make a difference in the long term. As sci-fi critic and writer Sean Raymond once beautifully summarised:
“If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out.”
1 Redmond, Sean (editor). Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press, 2004.↩
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