Friday Night Writes: Time Travel Pair-of-Docs

[NOTE: This post will contain significant SPOILERS regarding the films The Time Machine and Back to the Future. Also, possibly Primer...I haven't decided yet on that one. If you wish to see these films unspoiled, please go watch them this week and then come back and read.]

The two docs being referred to in the title are Dr. Emmett Brown of Back to the Future and Dr. Alex Hartdegen of The Time Machine. I'm sure Stephen Hawking has discovered about 17 different types of time travel, each one more confusing than the last. However, for those of us that are less enlightened, there are two main branches of time travel. There is linear time travel and non-linear time travel which utilizes string theory. For those of you that aren't taking astrophysics, I will explain these through the use of two movies that correlate to the different varieties of time travel.

The first of these is the Warner Brothers and Dreamworks film The Time Machine starring Guy Pearce. I know that it was also an H.G. Wells book but I'm going to be using the movie to help me illustrate. And since I don't remember character names I will be referring to them by the actor's name. The film starts out with Guy Pearce strolling around town with his sweetheart Sienna Guillory (Jill from the Resident Evil movies). However, they are held up by a mugger who shoots Sienna and she dies in his arms.

Distraught by his lover's death, Guy Pearce decides that he's so smart that he will build a time machine to go back and save her from this horrendous fate. So four years later it's done. Bada-Boom-Bada-Bing...he goes back four years and diverts her path so that they will not run into the mugger. However, now she steps away for a second and is run over by a horse and carriage. He can't figure out what happened so he keeps trying and she keeps dying. Realizing that he might need somebody to drop some knowledge on him regarding time travel in order for him to effectively save his woman, Guy travels 130 years into the future. He goes to the public library and asks how the whole time travel thing works. He is informed by the hologram of a librarian that there is no such thing as time travel and that there never will be. Talk about being ahead of his time. This guy invented something over 130 years before anybody else was even close to conceiving it.

However, Guy, being the optimist that he is, thinks this means that humans are only a few years away. So rather than shooting another hundred years into the future he thinks seven years ought to do it. Still no dice. But this time he is able to witness humans explode the moon. Which knocks him unconscious mid-time travel and he doesn't wake up until 802,201AD. So they've got to have invented time travel by now, right? No, apparently. When we blew up the moon civilization actually reverted. Who would have thought? So now that I'm thoroughly off-track...Guy meets with the uber-Morlock Jeremy Irons, who explains to him that he can never save his girlfriend. This is because in our linear time if he were to go back and save her, his past self would never have any reason to invent the time machine and thus it would be creating a time paradox. He has an Oscar, we have to believe him. If you subscribe to this version of time travel it means that while you can alter the past...you can not never go back with specific intentions on altering the past. It has to happen organically outside of your intent.

This brings me to my second movie. I am of course referring to Robert Zemeckis' classic Back to the Future trilogy. These characters I know, so I won't be referring to them as Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, and Leah Thompson. In this utterly-80s trilogy Doctor Emmitt Brown invents a time machine that is also a car. How practical! Also, it's a DeLorean. How bad ass! It is powered by weapons grade plutonium. Now getting less practical! And this plutonium powers the flux capacitor...which will take the occupant of the DeLorean to his or her desired point in time when the DeLorean reaches 88 miles per hour. This is a wise move because speeding tickets increase exponentially at 25 miles over the speed limit. So you don't want to be clocked going 90 on the highway and with this bad boy you never will be.

So anyway...Doc Brown gets shot by some angry Libyan terrorists and Marty uses the DeLorean as his getaway vehicle. He guns it and ends up in 1955. He inadvertently gets his own mother to fall in love with him making this the second classic PG series to feature incestuous undertones. Anyway, because his mother is now not on track to hook up with his father he risks the obvious consequence that he will cease to exist. By this point in the movie H.G. Wells is rolling over in his grave because of the numerous time paradoxes and cosmic wormholes that this would create. Luckily, Marty fixes his parents back up, the crisis is averted, and we don't have to hurt our heads with the scientific malfeasance of this plot. But the paradox that H.G. Wells wrote about still lingers in the mind of the curious movie-goer. These are the same people who wonder what will happen if Pinocchio tells you that his nose is going to grow. A paradox is created and his face will probably explode.

However, Zemeckis and the wonderful people at Universal Pictures decide to confront this conundrum head-on in the sequel. Marty accidentally clues Grandpa Biff into the fact that it would be a great idea to take a year 2015 Sports almanac back a few decades and watch the Benjamins pile up. So needless to say, Biff does this and when Doc and Marty go back to 1985...it's not the 1985 they remember. This is because Grandpa Biff took the Almanac back to 1955 and gave it to cocky high school bully Biff. So Marty recommends going back to 2015 and stopping this from happening. The only problem is that it's too late for this. Doc informs him that if they jet back to 2015 it will be drastically different because they are now in a parallel time line. He then explains this by busting out some multiple universe theory and some Junior String Theory physics which makes a lot of sense. And then I'm pretty sure he moons H.G. Wells and all of the haters in the Physics community who criticized the first movie and tells them to suck on that explanation. They then have to go back to 1955 to fix the root of the problem because that is where the time lines diverge to form parallel time lines. Therefore, you can go back in time to change the past. You'll just be changing it for yourself and any fellow time traveling companions because there are multiple yous living multiple different lives on a possibly infinite number of time lines. And BOOM! goes the dynamite.

So the question here is:

How do you like your time travel? 

Do you subscribe to H.G. Well's theory of time travel or are you a Doc Brown kind of guy/gal? There are pros and cons to each. As humans we like to believe that we have control over our destinies and the thought of changing our pasts is very alluring. However, this variety of time travel also forces you to believe that you are even more insignificant because there are tons of other parallel universes and in many of those people are suffering because Hitler won World War II, polio and small pox are still running rampant, and they canceled LOST after two seasons because the ratings didn't justify the cost. And nobody wants to be a German-speaking, crippled person forced to watch crappy TV. However, unlike Back to the Future suggests for the year 2015, in none of these possibly infinite parallel universes do the Cubs ever win a World Series. That is one thing that all time and space can agree on. Basically, when you go back in time to make things better...you're really only making things better for the current version of yourself and the universe that you spun off. Your previous universe and all of your friends therein are still fucked.

So, it's time for me to weigh in. This is a tough call. I love Back to the Future and I love the thought of controlling my destiny both in the future and in the past, but I have to side with H.G. Wells here. I know that a lot of you Michael J. Fox fans are upset with me. I also know that a lot of you think that I'm an idiot and you think that time travel doesn't exist. Of course it does. Whenever, I mix whiskey and tequila I always wake up around three days in the future in my magical time-traveling dumpster. It might not be a flux capacitor but it gets me where I need to go. And look at worm holes. Those things have to go somewhere. However, I don't believe that you can change the past. If you could there would be a shitload of people from the future running around fixing everything...and you don't see that do you. And even if they're sneaky it means that they did come back and fix a bunch of shit and this was the best they could do, and you know I don't believe that. Total rubbish. So while I will buy into time travel I can't put my stamp of approval on altering the past. But please weigh in. I would LOVE to hear your opinions.