The Time Traveler's Wife

The other movie I saw at White Flint in Maryland last month was The Time Traveler's Wife, which was August's entry into the now monthly genre releases of time travel movies.

As anyone who's read my previous entries knows, I've pretty much maxed out on the time travel theme in movies, and wish that Hollywood would give the concept a rest for a while. The reason is the same as I mentioned for magic in my last write-up about the Potter movies: it makes for lazy storytelling.

For much of The Time Traveler's Wife, I thought this might actually be an exception, and in the end, I thought it was one of the better time travel movies, but it's ultimate failure says a lot about why time travel as a concept has become a narrative loser.

The movie was written and directed by women, and has a feminine tear-jerker quality to it, which is perhaps why it gave a bit of freshness to the time travel concept. But it couldn't save it.

Why did it fail? It failed because although it provided a highly emotive roller-coaster ride of human interactions, of romantic and family love, utlimately the plot didn't make sense. Specifically, the movie felt deep while you were watching it, but afterwards, the more you think about it, the more the story simply doesn't make sense, until the entire thing just becomes one giant plot hole. This is essential problem with nearly all time travel movies, and here it felt as if the drama simply covered up the essential logical defects in the narrative.

This result was probably inescapable given the version of time travel in the story, which the "static" kind, in which the past and future seem to be completely determined, and we cannot escape fate. There is ultimately no free will in this particular narrative universe.

It makes for great scenes, in which the characters love and hate and love each again. But it simply doesn't make any sense. This might be enough if you're looking for a tear-jerker, but it ultimately leaves me unsatisfied because it doesn't say anything real about the human condition.

This is because the cause-and-effect relationships, which as Aristotle knew two thousands years ago to be essential to real pathos in tragedy, simply don't work on a human level. It creates emotions, but it can leave you feeling manipulated when you think about how these emotions were brought about. A superior movie should seem better the more you think about it, but time travel movies like these often fall apart when you analyze them afterwards.

One might complain: "well how then do you make a time travel movie without these problems?" I would reply, "What the hell? You want to make fantasy seem like reality? That's your problem?" In another words, you can't do it. You can only fake it long enough to tell a real human story that works on a human level.

The most interesting part about this movie, in the long run, is that besides being in the time travel genre, it is also in the category of movies that are secretly about the taboo subject of intergenerational love stories. As in the case of Benjamin Button, the fantasy was used as a cover to tell multiple layers of cross-generational relationships that would otherwise be prohibited by current Hollywood rules.

A story about a man in his thirties who courts a teenage girl is taboo, but if he is a time traveler who is going back to see his current/future wife as a young woman, well then, that is ok. Later it is the story of a woman in her thirties dating a younger man, a theme that is less taboo, but nevertheless would be thematically powerful on its own terms, if it were the premise of a non-fantasy story.

On one hand, this is case of why time travel is a powerful tool that should be used in stories. But like I said, ultimately the cause-and-effect relationships don't make sense, so the narrative fails. I would argue that really this is case for exploring stories that actually confront the taboos of narrative, rather than covering them up with fantasy.

Well there's always next month, and a new entry in the time travel movie derby.