Why Time Travel Films So Fascinate Us

Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox make time travel
look easy. All you need is a tricked out DeLorean.

What do 12 Monkeys, Back to the Future, Terminator, Peggy Sue Got Married and Midnight in Paris all have in common? The title of this blog post is your revealer. Each is a Hollywood film that involves time travel. Three involve people in the present being transported to the past. Two (12 Monkeys and Terminator) involve intrusions from the future.

Time travel isn't just a Hollywood thing. H.G. Wells took readers for a ride in The Time Machine, Mark Twain transported us in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Arthur C. Clarke, in a short story titled Time's Arrow, carried readers back to the era of dinosaurs. Oh, and Stephen King used a time portal to see if his character Jake Epping might somehow stop the Kennedy assassination.

The stories are imaginative and vary widely, yet delve into fascinating philosophical conundrums. In both Back to the Future and Clarke's sci-fi story, characters discover the law of unintended consequences and the dangers of tampering with the past. 

In Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) falls in love with an idealized past--Paris during the period of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, etc.--only meet a woman there whose discontentment with her present makes her yearn for a more exciting, earlier time. The solution to our disillusionment with present circumstances cannot be found by embracing nostalgic fantasies. The film is witty and fun while effectively making its point. 

The Terminator films are also wildly inventive but terrifying, a cautionary tale about unchecked technology, the future of robots and AI. Despite their efforts, the past is left unchanged. 12 Monkeys and King's 11/22/63, both propose that the past can't be altered. We can wish it, these stories suggest, but altering or revamping history is not something mere mortals have the power to accomplish.

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When it comes to imaginative philosophical stories, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)  is one of my favorites. He, too, has a variation on the time travel theme. In his rendition, a short story called "The Other," Borges sits down on a park bench in New England and becomes aware that a younger man seated further down is his younger self. He finds the encounter exceedingly disturbing. It's written as if it really happened, and is quite a compelling read. It begins like this:

The incident occurred in February 1969, in Cambridge, north of Boston. I didn't write about it then because my foremost objective at the time was to put it out of my mind, so as not to go insane. Now, in 1972, it strikes me that if I do write about what happened, people will read it as a story and in time I, too, may be able to see it as one.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Time travel stories are also an excellent way to explore "what if" scenarios. My own story "An Unremembered History of the World," is an exploration of this sort. What if there had never been any wars these past 250 years? How could that have happened? How would things have been different? (You can find this story in my first collection of stories titled Unremembered Histories.)

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For more:

"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889) and "The Time Machine" (1895) by H.G. Wells