I Love Time Travel – Part 2 – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

First of all, the Harry Potter books and films are absolutely wonderful.  I was lucky enough to experience all of them while my kids were growing up and it was such a fun time, with a work of fiction that was so imaginative and well done.  I particularly enjoyed how Rowling used her magical world to overcome writing obstacles.  Have a series of books where the entire world is seen through Harry’s eyes, yet you need flashbacks?  Invent the pensieve.  Don’t want modern phones and computers in use to send messages?  Use owls.  Want to throw a little time travel wrinkle in the third book?  Use the time turner.

Normally, the Single String time travel loops usually drive me nuts.  Sometimes, however, they make for fun drama and I have a tough time critiquing anything in this series.  I will refer to the events in the film, because they were a little more concise.  Harry, Ron and Hermione experience a series of events leading up to the climax of the film.  A meeting at Hagrid’s; chasing Ron’s rat to the Willow and eventually to the Shrieking Shack to find Sirius Black.  Black’s true identity is revealed, as is the rat’s, and then the full moon appears causing Lupin to change into a werewolf.  The werewolf runs off, and Harry tries to rescue a downed Sirius from the Dementors, and is saved by a patronus.  (Imagine reading all that and not know anything about Harry Potter.)

Okay, exciting enough.  What happens next is the time travel twist.  Hermione was in possession of a time turner for the entire school year.  She was using it responsibly and quite nerdily, to double-up on her magical course load.  She takes Harry back to the original meeting at Hagrid’s, now as on-lookers, and through the course of events already experienced, they interact and sometimes cause the original events themselves.  Harry is the cause of the patronus that saved himself.  Hermione distracted the werewolf to spare Sirius.

You get the picture.  This is a time loop.  Loops are used in a lot of time travel films and I think work really well with comedy.  I just don’t buy them as practical time travel because they interfere with our notions of free will.  This is the time travel of preordained events.  It is fate.  There is no room for any changes of mind or hesitation for the time traveler.  If you caused it to happen because of traveling back in time, when you actually make the journey you will cause it to happen, no matter what.  I wrote about this a few years ago and I still like my example:

Say I travel into the future a month from now. I see my family and myself from the bushes. I’m spying on myself to see what was going on. Same old Jim typing on the computer. Lame ass. I sneak in the house, I check my bank statements. I check my mail. Same life.

I go to the liquor store and I see the list of lottery numbers from the past few weeks. I make a mental note of the numbers and the date they won.  I may even write them all down on a slip of paper. With my new found numbers, I travel back to the minute I left, on month earlier. In time travel terms, pretty simple.

According to Single String theory, I can’t play those numbers and win. There is NO way. For the full month that I could buy the ticket that will win the $147 million jackpot, I’ll never get to the store and I’ll never buy a ticket and win.  Loop time travel says that there is no way I can get to the store in a solid month and change the future I witnessed.

See?  It makes no sense to me.  The future me was not a millionaire, so according to loop time travel, there’s no way I would be able to play the lottery.  But why not?  I have the numbers and I have a full week to go down to the 7-11, buy some jerky and win 147 million dollars.

So that is a trip to the future in the Single String world.  How about the past?  It also negates free will.  I go back in time to try to stop myself from getting into a car accident.  I get there hours before the former me even gets in the car.  Single String theory says there is nothing I can do to stop him, because not only did I get in an accident, this older version of me traveled back and did nothing.  What? There’s dozens of things I could do!  Lose my keys.  Slash a tire or two.  Siphon gas.  Make myself intentionally late to miss the oncoming Subaru Outback…

Back to Hogwarts.  The time turner is magical so I give it a pass as a plot device.  (Plus, I just love these movies.) I wanted to use this as an example of the other theory of time travel working just fine in a good film.  It can truly be anything a writer decides; as long as it works in the film itself.  I think Rowling took just the right angle, in just the amount of story time, to make a successful episode in the series.

-jim

A Eulogy For My 80G iPod Classic. A Friend To Me Since 2006.

“This eulogy is in preparation for the eventual sad departure of my iPod.  He is nearly seven years old, and in Apple years, he is 113. The screen is smudged and his rubber case is battered and worn. There is a sticky film on the outer shell, comprised of God-knows-what.  He survived half a dozen falls and four system restores.  But this guy…this guy saved my ass so many times, I don’t know what I would have done without him.

Years ago I had a job.  This job was one of those soul-crushing gigs where you doubt every decision you’ve ever made upon walking through the front door every day.  It was less of a job than a prison sentence; a certain hell for people prone to depression and low self-esteem.   I sat there among the cubes, along with about 100 other suckers, trying to fill in the intellectual void and pass the time.  At first, I was only armed with a tiny Mp3 player, my first purchase of such a device.  It held half a gigabyte of memory.  Yikes.  I could listen to about 100 songs, and luckily it picked up the radio. 

That just was not enough to keep the tedium demons at bay.

My mother apparently heard my pleas and bought me an 80g iPod Classic for Christmas.  Slick, black, with 160 times the amount of storage space as that pack of Tic-Tacs I was using.  I quickly loaded about 3000 songs or so. I made playlists, I threw on a bunch of comedy albums.  I had plenty of tracks to listen to, but just like a fat American, it wasn’t enough.  That’s when I stumbled across podcasts.

I listened to the Adam Carolla radio show on my tiny mp3 player, and I wanted to continue on my new iPod.  I discovered that some nerdball maniac recorded the radio show and cut it into commercial-free mp3 chunks to download as a podcast.  Eventually, I found other (and better) shows to listen to over the next few months and soon I had free content that was updated every single day. I listened to interview shows, improvised comedy, idle chit chat, political talk, sports talk, and Bill Burr. I had interesting people to listen to while I droned away at my uninteresting job.

Sure it’s a little sad.  I managed to meet a few human beings in the same situation, each with their own escape technology at their desks.  But for the most part I needed the voices of other humans, particularly funny ones, to keep me company while I figured out what the hell I wanted to do with my life.  I took this iPod on daily walks, both at work and home.  He’s the main reason I didn’t gain 80 pounds of office-job weight.  He was with me for boring chores; like washing pans or weeding the backyard.  Never a complaint.  Always with something new to share.

I’ll have to replace him, but with what?  Do they make those anymore?  And for how long?  My phone can’t hold 900 podcasts at once.  Do I have to seriously learn about using the cloud? 

I’ll have to break down and get something new.  Some shinier new device with new features and some new fonts that nobody really gives a crap about.  But somehow it will never be the same.  There was really only one guy by my side during those dark, dark days. Only one little black rectangle of technology that made my days bearable. Once an inseparable part of my daily life; now, he’s an unrecyclable paperweight.”

I Love Time Travel –Part 1 - Back to the Future

        

            I have to begin with my favorite.        

            I was in love with everything about Back to the Future when it came out in 1985.  It was the perfect movie at the perfect age.  The year before, I had tried with much failure to write my first two short stories, and they were both time travel stories.  One was three pages long and the other I lost interest in after I ran out of notebook paper.  It the movie of my childhood, even staying neck and neck with Star Wars.  With one exception.  BTTF occurred on Earth, the same year it released.  Marty McFly wore red Nike hightops and dreamed of owning a Toyota 4x4 (?).  It seemed, with my adolescent brain, that this time travel stuff could actually happen.  I knew a light saber couldn’t really exist, but I knew DeLoreans existed.   All you would need is a flux capacitor and some plutonium, right?

            No one needs the plot retold.  That’s what watching the movies and using Wikipedia is for.  Doc invents a time machine, Marty goes back to 1955, meets his parents, hijinks ensue.  Part II is a trip to the future and then the past.  Part III is a trip to 100 years in the past, the Old West, and hey, there’s a train.

            The time travel in BTTF is what I refer to as First Person, or Multi-String time travel.  (Remember, my rules, my nomenclature.) Marty McFly alters the course of his own history by what he does in 1955.  His dad gets confidence, Biff gets knocked down a peg, and the Twin Pines Mall is now the Lone Pine Mall.  This format is how I always thought time travel would be.  This is the time travel where you can go back and save Lincoln and when you came back you’d see a world where Lincoln was not assassinated.  Other films, and I’ll cover a few at another time, are more like time loops, or Single String time travel.  Basically, you can’t go back in time to save Lincoln because Lincoln would have never died if you accomplished your goal. 

            BTTF is an action/fantasy/comedy that truly came out of nowhere. There really was nothing like a summertime popcorn movie with this type of plot and a popular TV star at the helm.  (Sorry, Eric Stoltz)  Because it was Speilberg produced, Zemeckis directed and rated PG, the film was intended for the whole family.  It would have been so easy to have a magic closet or a wish on a coin dropped in a well to induce the time travel elements in the movie.  Instead , to serve as the time machine, they used a stainless steel car.  A car that had to go fast enough to have a fucking nuclear lightning explosion that would blast the car into another time!  Damn!

            What thirteen-year-old boy doesn’t think that’s the shit? This wasn’t some cabinet spinning or some blurry dream sequence.  This was a car.  A car that really was out there in the world, suped-up with gadgets and doo-hickeys that hauled ass into the future.  By the way, for good measure, they eventually made it fly.

The conflicts came from Marty as the time traveler, not Doc Brown the inventor, and his complete misunderstanding of what was happening.  Let’s face it; Marty was a straight C student at Hill Valley High.  He needed the 1955 version of Doc Brown to explain to him the time travel conundrum that Marty himself experienced and the young Doc only theorized.  As far as the film goes, it succeeded because we bought the characters. Nice script, great actors. The sci-fi elements are classic because it was a story of a science experiment gone wrong.  No one truly knows  if time travel is possible, so why wouldn’t a flashing illuminated wishbone labeled ‘flux capacitor’ work?

The rules are set early.  You change something in the past, it could change the future.  Nice and simple.  Marty goofs up and his parents don’t meet.  Oh shit.  As the likelihood of them meeting and falling in love fades, so does the picture of the guy who played Jimmy Olsen and Wendi Jo Sperber.  Eventually, he has to right the ship or he will be erased…from existence.  I personally forgive any glitches in the time travel details.  It’s unlikely that the happy, successful version of the McFly’s would still live in that house, new furnishings or not.  And, at pointed out to me once, there is a noticeable slip up in the third installment.  For you nerds:  The ravine Clara fell into was called Clayton Ravine.  The only way she could have erected a tombstone for Doc is if Doc saved her from the ravine, because she would have died before he was killed.  But, it was only when Marty showed up in 1885 that Doc saved her. According to the rules, no dice.  Clara could fall in the ravine and Doc could get killed, but they never would have met nor had the chance for a tombstone dedication.

Ok?

The point is that the rules are established and respected.  There are no last minute changes to add a plot twist, and most of the obstacles are overcome scientifically.  They need the lightning to change the DeLorean to go back to 1985, they need the train to barrel through a non-existent bridge, etc.  Also, there is little reliance on fate.  The coincidences are acceptable within the world, and since the time travel is first person, Marty is our impetus for change, not the nature of time travel itself.

This is the greatest time travel story on film because it’s fun.  Marty is a fun hero you root for and it all shakes out in the end, just like a summer movie should. They also covered all the bases in the series.  The sports almanac that was brought back from the future, the regrets of creating the time machine in the first, and the destruction of the DeLorean in the end. Answering the ethical question: “Just because we can, should we?” is one of the jobs of fiction.  Yeah, it’s cool to travel back in time and witness history is great and all, but you can really do some damage.

If you haven’t seen these movies there is something wrong with you and we also can’t hang out together.  See them.  They are also the basis for my love of all time travel fiction, and when the rules stray too far from Back to the Future, I tend to get squirmy. 

-jim

Hi there. Again.

             Hello. My name is Jim Mercurio and I write.  Now that we have that biographical information taken care of, I can get on with the task at hand.

 I am starting a new blog about the things I love to talk, think, and write about. I am doing this without knowing if anyone reads blogs anymore.  Also, I don’t really care.  Like a very wise young man once described to me: “I have a lot of thoughts in my head and they get me excited”. It was that way twenty years ago, and it is that way now.

            For blogs you need a focus.  You should have a theme or an ideological slant or lots of pictures of cute stuff so people will read it.  This blog is about all things in the American culture that I feel like thinking about.  The standard movie, TV, books, music, and internet stuff for sure.  But I’d like to also include the worlds of food, humanities, and even sports.  It may not seem focused, but I have a well-defined eye for these things around me.  I guess it’s a deconstructionist view.  What are we looking at?  Is it ridiculous?  I’m not so much interested in review, as I am in meaning.  Let me put it this way:  I don’t care about artistic or historical significance as much as emotional reaction. 

            Oh yeah, and I only care about finding the humor in all of this. 

            I’m funnier than I am a gifted writer. I’m sillier than I am a serious thinker.  I am goofier than I am a qualified critic. 

            Boring the shit out of you already?  I’ll move on.

            Two more pieces of info.  I absolutely love time travel.  So much so, that I thought that this blog would solely be a discussion of time travel in all media.  But I know myself and I have just too many interests, so there will be regular breakdowns of all things time travel on this site.  That will be my reward to myself.

            Also, I’d love to have guest writers on this thing.  If anyone wants to contribute something you can email me at jamesm620@gmail.com and submit.  I guess that would be friends with something on their minds at first.  I’d open up to interested contributors of any stripe, really, unless you are an asshole. (And maybe not even that would be a problem.)  Feel free to contact me.

            Enjoy,
            jim