Abstract
This chapter follows resistance to the tragic narrative in the medium of film, exemplified in those films that involve travel through time, when the protagonist pursues a desire to see a story undone by revisiting a past tragic choice or event. These films play on or with that impulse to resist the script’s authority inherent in acts of adaptation, and they translate it into a character’s defiance of social or political authority in a quest to right a wrong, to prevent a future disaster, or recover what has been lost. The script’s authority is identified with a sense of the inexorable nature of time, which film itself has the power to undermine it. The first part considers films (including La Jétee, 12 Monkeys, Déjà Vu, and Looper) that set time travel in an socio-political framework, in which a male time traveler must disobey the authorities that send him back in time. These models are then contrasted with Run Lola Run and Céline and Julie Go Boating, films that feature female protagonists who use a time-loop or game-like structure to transform a tragic outcome into a comic ending. Time travel thus lends itself to the conversion of narrative into a game, when the linearity of time is twisted through recursion and repetition.
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- 1.
On time-travel films and “undoing,” see Gallagher, who suggests that this “enlarged sense of temporal possibility correlates with a newly activist, even interventionist, relation to our collective past” (12) (Gallagher 2002).
- 2.
See Wachhorst: “The fundamental components of the time-travel romance are (1) a male time traveler who encounters (2) a female inhabitant of another time” (341) (Wachhorst 1984).
- 3.
Penley notes how, in turn, in The Terminator and Back to the Future Part 1, traveling in time is connected with the “primal scene,” where the object of desire also stands in for the mother. See also Wachhorst (1984).
- 4.
Cardwell qualifies this point herself in stating that “the film image is not inherently present, it is inherently tenseless” (88) (Cardwell 2003).
- 5.
See Deren on how cinematic time can be manipulated, slowed down, or reversed (149) (Deren 2011).
- 6.
- 7.
There are exceptions: for example, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits needs no machine because it has religion; similarly, the replaying of time in Run Lola Run appears to happen solely through the force of Lola’s will and her love for Manni.
- 8.
See Wittenberg, who also notes that “we might consider time travel in film a multiplex surveillance of fabular lines, and therefore continuous with the thematic linking of film-viewing and surveillance technology that has preoccupied mainstream cinema from Hitchcock’s Rear Window through a recent spate of hyperbolic world-viewing fantasies such as Déjà Vu, Enemy of the State, Source Code, and The Adjustment Bureau” (199) (Wittenberg 2013).
- 9.
See Del Rio on the omnipresent use of technology and surveillance in 12 Monkeys (387–8) (Del Rio 2001). In that film video dominates the world of the past as well: a television screen plays in the mental hospital where Cole first finds himself; the televisions mostly play cartoons and movie clips that would be seen as coming from the “past” (e.g., the Marx Brothers movies and old time-travel cartoons) to the “present” of film’s audience in 1995.
- 10.
Looper begins with the voice of young Joe conjugating the French verb avoir, which can be both the present tense of the verb “to have” but also the beginning of the passé composé: he then offers the temporally contradictory statement: “Time travel has not yet been invented but 30 years from now it will have been.”
- 11.
See Bordwell on films with “forking paths” plots, including Sliding Doors, Blind Chance, Run Lola Run, and Too Many Ways to be Number 1. The plot of Donnie Darko depends on our understanding that there is a “primary universe” and a “tangent universe,” created by an unexplained, accidental cosmic anomaly. See also Gallagher on what she calls “Y” plots. (Gallagher 2002)
- 12.
The positing of alternate or parallel universes does often turn on the notion that a chance occurrence of a moment in time can set off a tangled chain of circumstances. In Blind Chance, catching a train—or not—triggers three different versions of a man’s life. But in all of these cases, no moral choice or decision triggers the different narrative; it is just an accident of timing. Sliding Doors adapts the concept of Blind Chance: there the life of the protagonist Helen takes two paths, depending on whether or not she catches a train on the London underground railway. The two stories then run simultaneously, alternating between the two “universes”the one which appears to be the comic version ends suddenly and tragically, with her death; the other “dramatic” one ends with her survival and the implication of the happy ending.
- 13.
See Matz, “Aesthetic/Prosthetic” on the ways in which Source Code also offers an idea of “prosthetic” time (Matz 2016).
- 14.
In his introduction to the Criterion DVD, Jonathan Romney calls it a “time travel adventure.”
- 15.
On concepts of “women’s time” in feminist theory, see Apter (2010)
- 16.
In its exploration of games as a structure for narrative, Céline and Julie also echoes Jean Resnais’s Last Year At Marienbad, which also radically distorts temporality, while playing out a potentially tragic love story. See Bordwell and Thompson on how the whole structure of Marienbad is “a play with logic, space, and time which does not offer us a single, complete story as a prize for winning this ‘game.’ […] But Marienbad broke with conventional expectations by suggesting, perhaps for the first time in film history, that a narrative film could base itself entirely on a game-like structure of causal, spatial, and temporal ambiguity, refusing to specify explicit meanings and teasing the viewer with hints about elusive implicit meanings” (396) (Bordwell and Thompson 1992).
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Bushnell, R. (2016). Time-Travel Films: Replaying Time, Choice, and Action. In: Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58526-4_3
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