A Case of Jet Lag with Time Travel Movies

By now, most of you know that I am a movie fanatic.  This weekend I took my son to see the movie “Looper”.  The film stars Joseph Gordon Levitt as an assassin who is tasked with eliminating an assortment of targets sent to him from the future.  He is taken aback when one of his targets turns out to be an older version of himself, played by Bruce Willis.

Ah, time travel.  Thou art a fickle plot device designed to mess with the heads of audiences time and time again.  Or is it just me?

I started thinking about all the movies I have seen throughout my life that featured time travel as a plot device, and was surprised at the length of the list.  One of the first I remember was “Somewhere in Time”, in which Christopher Reeve travels back in time to romance Jane Seymour.  In the beginning of the film, she approaches him as an old lady and urges him to “come back to me”.  He does this by dressing up in antique clothing, removing all traces of modern day artifacts from his person, lays down on a bed in a hotel and wills himself to travel back in time.  Wow, how lucky can you get?  No time travel machine like H.G. Wells, no special powers like the main character in “The Time Traveler’s Wife”.  He just thinks his way back.  Here’s where it starts to mess with my head.  If old Jane Seymour had not implored him to “come back to me” at the beginning of the film, how would he have known to travel back to see her when she was young and hot?  And if he hadn’t traveled back to see her when she was young and hot, he wouldn’t have run into her when she was old and craggy.  This type of thinking literally makes my brain hurt.

In James Cameron’s “The Terminator”, the character of Kyle Reese travels back in time to protect Sarah Connor from being killed by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.  You see, her unborn son, John Connor, sends his best buddy back in time to protect her.  In the process, Kyle impregnates Sarah.  With John Connor.  Ouch!  That’s my brain trying to figure out the logistics of that.  If John hadn’t sent Kyle back in time, he would have never existed.  At one point towards the end of the film, Sarah muses on this paradox saying, “A person could go crazy thinking about all this.”  Yes Sarah, and that crazy person is ME!

These films remind me of my failed attempt to read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”.  In the book, Hawking takes complex topics such as the origins of the universe, black holes, gravity and the nature of time and explains them in basic terms that those of us not blessed with brilliance can understand.  Unfortunately, Mr. Hawking didn’t dumb it down enough for me.  I found myself re-reading the same paragraphs over and over again, unable to grasp even the simplified explanations.  With a Homer Simpson “Doh”, I finally gave up.  So please, don’t let me think about an ever-expanding universe unless you want to see smoke leaking from the top of my head.

“Back to the Future” was a film that helped me understand time travel a little more easily.  As Michael J. Fox inadvertently makes changes to the past, the present-day photo he carries of his brother and sister changes as well.  First his brother’s head disappears, then the rest of his body, then his sister.  It is only when he sets the course of history back on the right track that the photo is restored to its proper image.  This was much easier to grasp than the book and film for “The Time Traveler’s Wife”, about a man with a genetic deficiency that causes him to bounce all over time.  He’s like Willy Wonka’s elevator in that he goes forward and backward and sideways and all other ways.  The only way I could read the book was to just let all the time travel references wash over me and not get too bogged down in the “where’s” and “when’s”.  My two friends who came to see the movie were not as lucky.  I swear I saw smoke coming out of their heads as we left the theater.

This is akin to the feeling I had when I watched “Inception” for the first time.  It took about five or six subsequent viewings for me to finally grasp the finer points of the “dream within a dream within a dream” scenario.  At least I think I understood it. I’m not completely sure.

Getting back to “Looper”.   I left the theater with a slight throbbing between my ears.  This only increased during the ride home as my son tried to explain the logistics of the film, complete with parallel universes and multiple realities.  It all made sense to him, but I had to ask him to stop talking before my head exploded. 

Perhaps time travel will be invented in my lifetime. If that happens, maybe I will finally grasp the intricacies of it.  By then the novelty will have worn off and Hollywood will stop using it as a plot point.  And when that day arrives, I’ll travel back in time to today and rewrite this column.

In the meantime, please excuse me while I pop a few Advil.