This weekend my girlfriend and I watched the movie "Donnie Darko". I had never seen it and she had been bugging me to watch it. Without giving away too much of the plot, suffice it to say that the movie dealt in some way with the ever-popular concept of TIME TRAVEL.
Donnie, the main character, is visited by someone from the future. Donnie later discovers a book called "The Philosophy of Time Travel" and discovers that he must correct a mistake in the convergence of the "primary universe" and a "tangent universe." I won't even attempt to unravel the possible meanings of "Donnie Darko" (that would be an entire post on its own). What I immediately thought 15 minutes into the movie was: "Sweet, time travel."
Some topics just seem to grab our attention more than others. What I've realized for me is that if time travel is involved (and as long as its rooted in some kind of scientific possibility), I'm in. Season 4 of "Lost" got heavy into time travel as the island "skipped" through time (check out this site, which was entirely devoted to the concept of time travel and how it related to the show). Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" is about a war veteran unstuck in time. A Google search of "time travel" reveals 953,000,000 results. And in no ways is this a new obsession. H.G. Wells' famous novel "The Time Machine" was written in 1895!
So what is it about time travel that so captures our imagination? Part of it must be that it technically can be done. Although it never has been (as far as we know...), it is theoretically possible. See this recent interview that Steven Hawking gave PARADE magazine. That nugget of possibility, no matter how small, gets people interested and excited.
As far as storytelling goes, time travel is a fantastic plot device because it automatically creates some kind of mystery. It leaves you wondering how everything is going to fit together, how these different time lines converge, how someone being at two places at the same time works out in the grand scheme of the story. A book that illustrates this is "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger (don't see the movie, read the book). The main character Henry randomly jumps through time throughout his life and he has no control over it. He ends up meeting himself, giving himself tips and even witnessing his own death. It becomes almost incomprehensible because we're so used to thinking of time linearly, like a simple, hassle-free time line. But with time travel, things are not so straightforward. There could be multiple time lines that intersect or multiple universes like in "Donnie Darko." Either way, we're hooked as readers and viewers.
There is something deeper going on too. How many people would not relish in the opportunity to time travel? Our time we are allotted living is brief in comparison to the huge breadth of time. We only really get one chance at anything: one opportunity in one specific moment with specific conditions. We may have created clocks, but we did not create time. Time moves forward persistently and consistently. How many people would not want to go back or forward? To see what life will be like in 100 years. To live during the '60s. To see the wonders of ancient times. Or even simply to take back something you said or did that you now regret. Because you can never actually take anything back. Whatever happened, happened. Unless we could move freely in time...
Time is out of our control. And that is the source of the simultaneous infatuation and frustration. In our ever-persistent quest to control everything, it makes sense that people are drawn to the idea of manipulating time.
At the same time, it's probably a good thing that we can't time travel. The only way you really learn things is from making mistakes. We are probably better off living in the present, learning from life as it comes to us, one second at a time. Time travel stories may sell books and movies, but we know that we'll probably never see it happen in our lifetimes and that we're even better off living the way we are.
Still, it would be pretty damn cool...
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