Marx and The Final Cut

For this week I watched The Final Cut. I had never seen this movie before, but the story’s premise rally drew me in. It seems to take place in either the present or the near future. In the movie parents can purchase a Zoe implant for their child, which develops with their brain and stores all visual memories. These memories are storied on a hard drive, and after death they are used by cutters to craft a rememory. Rememories serve as a sort of literal memorial to the deceased. The footage of their life is cut down from years to create a short film immortalizing the deceased’s most formative and poignant memories.

I thought our reading from Marx’s Alienated Labor was most relevant to the themes of this film. In the reading from Marx, he argues that in a political economy (meaning the kind of society that forms the basis of our system and that of the movie) “the worker sinks to the level of a commodity” (XXII). In The Final Cut the very lives of those possessing a Zoe implant have become a sort of commodity. After death, so once the individual can no longer make use of his memories or trove of personal experience, these memories are rehashed for the consumption of those he left behind. These private experiences are put on display for public viewing. The rememories are catered to the desires of friends and family the dead have left behind.  That the rememories are put on for the benefit of those surviving and not actually for the memory of the dead is almost literally clear in viewing the rememories. Because all the footage is from a first-person perspective, the stars of each rememory are those that surround them. Even within one’s own rememory they appear only as a sort of voyeur because they are never pictured. The thoughts, emotions, and importance the Zoe user had attached to their memories was never apparent. And as the truth of the central character, Alan’s inner turmoil is revealed, the true memories rarely correspond perfectly to factual experience. So the memories of the Zoe are memories without meaning.

In the film the Zoe is incredibly popular. It is mentioned that one in every twenty people has a Zoe implant and their popularity continues to increase. In this world memory is a commodity and every experience, no matter how trivial, is bound to be on record. In this sense, The Final Cut expresses our current cultural dilemma between our growing ability and desire to record our experience and a growing paranoia that in light of technology, genuine experience is fading. Marx articulates this idea in economic terms: “The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects” (XXII). Those with Zoe implants quite literally put their life into their final product, which is their life’s footage. The more focus there is put on the importance of recording experience, the less each individual remembers for themself and less they experience for themself. Thus, the Zoe will lead of to what Marx would consider ultimate servitude: “…the worker becomes a servant of his object…The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.” (XXIII). In a way, Alan, at least before the revelation of his own Zoe, is a literal example of this living for others that Marx sees as the only possible product of this kind of culture. Alan is a cutter, and his life is his work. But his work is the lives of others. He has spent his adult life troweling through the experience of others. There is no room in this life for his own experience.

The Zoe’s success rides on the human desire to live on through our actions in the memory of others. The Zoe spokesperson even spells it out for us in explaining the benefits of the product: “What does that mean? Immoratlity.” He lingers on the word immortality, playing on our natural desire to dodge death’s oblivion, our fear that we lived and died for nothing. Oddly, but fittingly, Alan, who spent his life cutting, dies for the cause that will end the intellectual dark age of Zoe’s wake, and as Fletcher flips through the footage of Alan’s life and the movie fades out he says, “Your life will mean something I promise.” These closing words promise a future of genuine experience and genuine remembrance. 

Escaping Time: Changing the Past Through Memory

An impressive feat of both plotline and narrative technique alike, Memento crosses many boundaries normally imposed by linear methods of storytelling. By showing the story both going forward through time and in reverse (and eventually meeting in the middle), director Chris Nolan is able to take the viewer’s attention from the climax of the film (Teddy being shot) and instead make the most interesting and impressive part of the movie a piece of information that would have usually been included in the story’s exposition.

                Aside from its accomplishments in the film technique arena, Memento’s plotline provides a “real life” example of the concepts discussed in Chisholm and Taylor’s work “Making Things to Have Happened.” While during Memento the viewer quickly comprehends Leonard Shelby’s condition and his inability to remember most of his immediate actions, the viewer (along with Leonard) understands that time and cause and effect are still operating in a normal, apparently one-dimensional fashion. Leonard even goes as far as to point out that while he may not remember his actions, this doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant, and in fact to all people outside of himself his actions will carry a lasting, memorable effect. In the same fashion, any actions he takes in the future will not affect the outcomes already in the past.

                However, Chisholm and Taylor point out that while this view of the world in which cause necessitates effect is dominantly accepted by humans, it may very well be possible that actions taken now have the ability to affect the past, at least in the theoretical sense. If we consider an original cause creating an effect, and then that effect in turn having a second effect, one would usually view this in a linear, purely causal fashion. However, if we assume that the second effect was a direct result of the first, this allows us to believe that second effect would not exist without the first effect happening as well. By this viewpoint, it becomes easy to imagine that making the second effect to happen would in turn necessitate the existence of the first. However, due to an infinite variety of the “conditions” that cause effects, identifying this relationship is easier said than done.

                Luckily, Leonard Shelby has a more elegant solution to “making things to have happened” a reality, at least for himself. A man ravaged by grief, Leonard’s only consolation is in his quest to find the man that raped and murdered his wife. Unfortunately for Leonard, as we find out towards the end of the film, the only problem with making this quest his life goal is that such a quest doesn’t exist – his wife was never murdered in the first place.

                Not a man to be bothered by the limits of reality, and already a man living in a reality made mostly of information he gathers from photos, notes, and tattoos, Leonard essentially creates the faked maze of his wife’s murder and then uses his inability to remember the immediate past as a way to actually enter the very puzzle he’d created for himself. A true manifestation of Chisholm and Taylor’s idea of “making things to have happened” through actions taken in the present, Leonard is able (for the purposes of his own perception) to willingly create previous events and facts that will give his life meaning in the future. As the viewer learns at the end of the film, Leonard’s murder of Teddy was a setup – one that he set up himself.

                While Memento poses interesting questions about the life of someone with anterograde amnesia, it also draws interesting conclusions about our perception of time. Leonard mentions that “time doesn’t affect him” as his lack of memory doesn’t let him recall whether his wife “died” three months ago or three years ago. In this sense, Leonard has escaped time, and it’s through this escape that he’s able to “alter” his past as mentioned above.

                Just as Leonard can, for all intents and purposes, change the past through his current actions and then not realize having done so, it’s possible that we, too, have the ability to change the past through our current activities. After all, our memories are the only record we have of the past (taking into account that if the past was changed then all documentation/evidence of the past would have changed as well), and as Leonard’s extreme case points out, memory is unreliable. Who is to say that time, cause and effect aren’t connected in a much more “three dimensional” fashion than we perceive them to be, and that our perception of linear time and direct cause and effect is merely just the limit of our memories?

If you’re into having your mind further boggled, this video does a great job of intuitively explaining dimensions both within and outside of our perception:

Eternal Memory Loss

 Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind revolves around the concept of deleting memories, specifically deleting people from your memory. The movie centers on a couple, Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), who decide that they want to forget each other completely. The movie is beautifully portrayed as much the story unfolds as you see Joel’s memories of his past relationship with Clementine as they slowly get erased. Clementine, making a decision congruent with her spontaneous personality, decided to forget about Joel completely after they have a vicious fight. Joel goes to see her and realizes she remembers nothing about him, so he decides to retaliate. However, partway through the process, while he is unconscious, he realizes that he does not want to lose those memories. Eventually, after both their memories get erased, they end up meeting at the same place they first met, subconsciously drawn to retrace their steps because they do not have to the experience to change their ways.  

              The very concept of erasing someone from your memory raises a very intriguing set of problems. First of all, logistically, the holes in your memory, thought process, and very self would be astronomical. A person that you have spent that much time with clearly has had an effect on your personality and shaped in part who you are, everyone who you have interacted with shapes you in some way. Imagine for a second forgetting someone completely. The resulting gaps in your memory your brain would probably connect, like your brain connects images to make a dream. But it would also permanently damage your psyche. 

            Perhaps the biggest message that the movie sends about the dangers of such as a process is the inevitability of repeating those same mistakes. It is logical that without the past experience of having already experienced what to some sense you may be determined to experience, you are doomed to repeat your mistakes. Without the experience, you could not learn from that experience. This becomes clear when Joel and Clementine, after getting their memories’ erased, fall for each other again. The same thing occurs with Mary, a worker for the company that erases memories, falls for the doctor that runs the company again.   

            Another large problem that arises in the film is the question of whether anyone would actually want their memories erased. Joel, partway through the process of erasing Clementine from his memory, realizes that he does not want to continue, even though he cannot stop it. He desperately tries to save some memories, knowing that even though some of the memories hurt, he also was erasing many good memories, memories that shaped him. 

             In the end, the movie has a very negative view about erasing people from your memory, a view that I think makes logical sense in cases like Joel’s and Clementine’s where those were memories that had good along with bad and shaped who they were. Without those memories, they may be doomed to just repeat past mistakes. But I think the place of such a technique that could erase people from memories could actually have a place. Imagine instances of rape or molestation, where those memories were not the fault of the victim, little if anything could be learned from them, and they negatively effect the psyche of the victim.  

           Richard Taylor, in his essay “Space and Time”, discusses the various views of time and it’s relativity. He ends his discussion still mystified, “time remains hardly less puzzling than when St. Augustine tried, in vain, to comprehend it”. Despite this concession, he introduces some intriguing concepts. He states that “if every process were reversible, then there would be nothing to suggest any inherent direction of time”. The core concept ofEternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is that time can be reversed. Taylor says, that once you start going down that road where you can go backwards in time, time does not have to have any direction. That would have huge implications obviously. Could I already be affected and changed by the future? 

Time Travel, DeLoreans and Grandfathers

 Perhaps I am biased, but I see Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985) as one of the landmarks of American cinema, incorporating elements of science fiction, adventure, and comedy.  I have probably seen it 20 or 30 times during my life, and it is the movie that got me interested in science fiction, interested in playing guitar, and interested in movies in general.  The classic story follows teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), who is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time machine that mad scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) built out of a DeLorean.  In the year 1955, Marty runs into his parents and inadvertently prevents them from meeting, resulting in Marty’s mother (Lea Thompson) falling in love with Marty instead.  The rest of the film chronicles Marty’s quest to reintroduce his parents to each other, as well as find a way to get back to 1985.

            I think that my love for Back to the Future is apparent, but it is also important to note that the film requires a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience.  Plots driven by time travel are difficult, and even though Back to the Future is a clever and entertaining film, there are numerous paradoxes and plot holes.  I remember that when I was younger, I would always argue with my dad about how Back to the Future did time travel “wrong.”  The same points that my 7-year old self was trying to make are discussed much more eloquently in David Lewis’s essay “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”, particularly in reference to the famous Grandfather paradox.  Lewis considers a character named Tim, who wishes to kill his own grandfather.  However, Grandfather died peacefully in his bed in 1957 when Tim was a young boy, so Tim builds a time machine and travels to the year 1921 so he can kill Grandfather himself.  Tim practices with a rifle and waits for the ideal conditions to fire on Grandfather, but Lewis makes the argument that it is impossible for Tim to kill Grandfather.  This is because, “Grandfather lived, so to kill him would be to change the past.  But the events of a past moment are not subdivisible into temporal parts and therefore cannot change.” (497).  Tim grew up with his Grandfather alive and kicking, which would create a contradiction if Grandfather was murdered by an unknown sniper in 1921.  Therefore, for the story to be consistent, Tim must somehow fail to kill Grandfather.

            Back to the Future treats time travel in a way such that the past can be altered, evidenced by several scenes in 1955, as well as when Marty finally returns to the year 1985 at the end of the film.  One famous scene from the 1955 portion of the film involves Marty performing a rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” at his parents’ high school dance after he has successfully set them up together.  When another boy tries to dance with Marty’s mom, Marty begins to dramatically evaporate while he is trying to play the guitar.  Though this situation is obviously emphasized for theatrical effect, David Lewis would argue that this creates another logical contradiction.  In a given timeline, Marty can either exist or he cannot – it does not make sense for there to be a sort of “in-between” where he momentarily becomes a ghost.  When Marty returns to his proper time period, his family lives in the same place, but his house is completely transformed and his parents (particularly his father’s) personalities have totally changed.  Marty’s formerly unemployed siblings have steady office jobs and the formerly successful and arrogant Biff Tannen (Thomas Wilson) now makes his living washing cars.  At the end of “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”, Lewis maintains that the only way for this situation (as well as the Grandfather paradox) to be plausible would be if time travelers could create different branches, “separated not in time, and not in space, but in some other way.” (499).  Therefore, returning to the Grandfather example, there would be one branch of time where Grandfather lives and Tim does not appear in the year 1921, and there would be separate branch that diverts in 1921 when Tim arrives to kill Grandfather.  However, in this second branch where Tim succeeds, he has the potential to prevent his own birth.  Much like Back to the Future, depicting one branch of time where Marty’s parents are more successful than in another, at every point of Tim’s life there are two subsequent timelines, one where Grandfather lives and the other where Grandfather dies.  However, since the differing branches in this theory are not connected by space or time, this adds a whole new dimension to the concept of a time machine.  How would one be able to control which branch the time machine travels to?  Would one have to create an entirely new vessel to travel between branches?  In Back to the Future, it appears that the portrayal of time travel would have to be a lot less linear than it already is for the resulting plot to be logically feasible.  However, despite the paradoxes in the plotline, Back to the Future is extremely entertaining and my personal favorite film of all time, so I would obviously recommend it if you haven’t seen it.            

Erase Your Memory, Erase Your Past

“We'll start with your most recent memories and work backwards from there, more or less.”

So instructs Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), a memory-erasing specialist, describing both the process of the procedure and the structure of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) itself. Even the “more or less” qualifier lines up with the occasional digressions from the reverse chronology of the film. The plot seeks to question our notion of Temporal Direction, as discussed by Richard Taylor. “We think of time as having a fixed direction, like … a river that cannot be reversed” (486). The characters in Eternal Sunshine appear to briefly reverse that river, traveling backwards through memory to a past self. Ultimately, however, the film seems to support that old adage, “Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.” The fictional technology allows characters to swim against the chronology of their life, but when they wake up, they are in the same river, and it is still flowing in the direction of those erased events.

The premise of the film is largely familiar: Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) fall in love, grow unhappy, separate, and wish to forget any of it ever happened. Of course, the plot hinges on the fact that they can forget. With a relatively painless procedure, those unpleasant bits of the past are removed. It seems simple enough on the surface, but it causes a rift between your “personal time,” as David Lewis phrases it, and “external time” – moments that exist for others no longer exist for you. In the case of Joel, the time he and Clementine spent with other friends still exist for those friends, but they have vanished from his (and her) past.

Throughout the film, I kept being reminded of Locke and his definition of identity as a continuous string of memories. If this is true, does Joel change his identity by plucking Clementine out of his life? It's a tricky question, since he would still have some degree of continuity; his personal timeline (as it is perceived by him) would remain seamless – perhaps with minor questionable details, like the missing pages of his journal – but it would not line up with external time. Manipulation of memory is similar to manipulation of the past, if you consider all your past life experiences to have informed or caused your present to some degree. Of course, I realize that the events of the past are separate from an individual's recollection of those events, but there can be no causality from past to present on an individual scale without some knowledge of those events. If Joel and Clementine, as a pair, share a past that neither of them remembers, a past that in no way informs their present or influences their future, is it really still their past?

The resurfacing of the patient files near the close of the film suggests that it is still their past, since it has the ability to affect their future. Yet their re-meeting and re-connecting (unaware of the “re” prefix to either of the actions) suggests not. To return to Taylor's river metaphor, Joel and Clementine swam upstream to a time before their relationship, but when they stop swimming, they glide right back through it again. They are uninformed of their past and thus doomed to repeat it. Even after listening to the leaked tape recordings, they choose to try again. Their repeated relationship begins with the same speech from Clementine, and they are ultimately the same people that they were when they began their first go-round. So what is there to assume but that their relationship will follow the same general trajectory and end in the same disastrous falling out? Will they be caught in an endless loop of erasing their relationship and then repeating it again? Taylor speaks of our perception of time's linearity, saying that “the future is something necessarily lying ahead of us, and the past, behind us” (486), yet for Joel and Clementine, it appears as if their past and their future have become largely the same.

It is even more fascinating to consider this relationship between time and memory on a larger scale. If the memory technicians were able to wipe the memory of, say, World War II from every human on the planet and strike the records from all books, could it still be said to have happened? Yes, I know this is a very “if a tree fell in the forest and no one was around to hear it” type of inquiry, but it still bears consideration. In external time, WWII is a reality. But if the personal timeline of every thinking, reasoning person on the planet aligned in such a way that excluded the war, did the memory technicians responsible for such a drastic act essentially alter history? And if so, could this be considered a form of time travel? Would the removal of such a monumental event from the collective memory of humankind mean that it is bound to happen again? 

Leonard's Labor

“You know what? I think I'm gonna use you. I'm telling you now because I'll enjoy it so much more if I know that you could stop me if you weren't such a fucking freak!”

           

Leonard Shelby is a man stuck in a world of uncertainty, suffering from a full glass of paranoia and a thirst for revenge. In the film Memento (2000), Leonard Shelby is an ex-Insurance agent from San Francisco who is stranded in an undisclosed town searching for the man who took his life away. In this context, Leonard’s old life included a stable job, a wonderful wife, and a working memory. Now, his wife is dead, he is without a job, and he has a condition in which he can no longer maintain his short-term memory. He is covered in some “freaky tattoos” to help remind him of who he is, and who he is looking for to exact revenge upon.

            Throughout the film, Leonard interacts with individuals who in the beginning of the film appear to want to help Leonard catch the villain, but as time goes back, the audience realizes that each character have their own motivations to “help” Leonard, but are in fact exploiting Leonard by convincing a man with “a condition” to perform immoral and dangerous acts. All of which, as Marx analysis in the article “Estranged Labor” describes, gives Leonard an experience of estrangement from his fellow human beings. The cruel irony of Leonard’s estrangement is that due to his condition, Leonard cannot remember whether or not someone is using him rather than helping him. While he distrusts all of those around him, Leonard needs some form of help to find John G., and unfortunately his “help” is really a form of manipulation that places Leonard into awful situations that Leonard can never remember doing.

            In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx’s description of the dialectic process by which the worker’s labor and self become alienated is in fact similar to Leonard Shelby’s situation. If we can substitute the notion of a physical “act of production of labor” that the worker creates for the political economy as “Leonard’s efforts and investigations”, we will be able to see that, due to the nature of Leonard’s own illusory stories and Teddy and Natalie’s lies, Leonard is continuously giving more of himself away to “alien beings” who can control, and in some ways own, Leonard’s time as well as his efforts. If Leonard’s “object” or “product” is the vigilante mission that Leonard has developed for himself, it may become clearer that his relationship to Natalie, the manipulative bartender, and his relationship to Teddy, is relationships that Leonard has created for himself. These beings stand in the way of the truth of Leonard’s mission, and they capitalize on Leonard’s condition by directing him to perform arbitrary missions of violence.

            Nearly all of the violent acts Leonard performs do not benefit Leonard in any way but instead help someone else. Jimmy’s death is the idea of a bad cop who needs to “clean up the streets” and possibly gain a couple hundred thousand dollars, Dodd’s beating is a direct result of Natalie’s need for revenge, and as Teddy explains, Leonard has been repeating similar actions for a much longer time than Leonard can even try to imagine. There have been multiple John G.’s throughout the country, and there are bound to be many more. Leonard is a slave to his mission, but because he cannot form new memories, he will always be trying to exact revenge. His life will be nothing but revenge. If he were to try and forgive, or try to discover the truth behind his wife’s death, Leonard would have to completely disembody his illusions and investigations. His “products of labor” are a power beyond Leonard, because he is known as the man who will never stop searching for an illusion, Leonard is known as one who can be told to help anyone, so long as the person asking for help knows how to manipulate the term John G.. Leonard is too far down the rabbit hole to recognize that he has lost all realization of his own objectification. He is no longer a man, but instead is a never ceasing avenger.

            While Leonard is toyed with throughout the film, he is able to exact take some control over his manipulators by taking care of Teddy at the beginning of the film. The sad irony is that without Teddy, Leonard is going to be stuck searching for someone to take Teddy’s place. Leonard needs someone who has a working memory to direct him, for without the direction, Leonard’s life is going to become purposeless. 

Not Like Back to the Future

Time travel has long been thought about by pretty much everyone at some point in their life.  Whether it be due to wanting to change things in the past or gain insight into what the future holds, time travel is, in our nature, an interest.  Being able to achieve time travel would open humanity up to countless possibilities, ranging from a greater understanding of the past to gaining the knowledge of the future.  However, despite all this, there seem to be some inherent problems with time travel in general.

In the 1984 film, Back to the Future, the main character, Marty McFly, meets the eccentric scientist Dr. Emmett Brown, and travels back in time in a tampered with Delorean.  In the past Marty accidentally causes his mother to prefer him over his would-be father, and so he must find a way to get them back together so that he and his siblings can exist 'back in the future'.  While this makes an entertaining film, as far as theoretical 'actual time travel' goes, it, and including the simple theory behind the movie's version of time travel, are simply not viable.

The first problem many people interested in time travel become aware of is the simple question: "if time travel were possible, then why haven't we met any time travelers yet?"  People like to disprove this argument, saying things like "people in the future wouldn't be interested in coming back to our time," or "there might be laws against interfering in the past," but frankly these are childish excuses.  Given the ever stretching possibilities of the future, it just isn't reasonable to assume that if time travel was possible in it's pure form that we would have seen no signs of it by now.  All it takes is one lunatic getting hold of the technology for us to have future-men parading the streets with absurd technology from the future.  This would seem to disprove time travel with relative certainty, but fortunately for potential time travel, the nature of time is just not that simple.

Many scientists and other such thinkers are still convinced that time travel is, or at least 'should be' possible.  David Lewis, for example, opens up with the line "Time travel, I maintain, is possible," in his article "The Paradoxes of Time Travel."  Similarly, in Richard Taylor's "Space and Time," he also holds that time travel, that is, the moving away from a  point in time, and then 'later' returning to it, should logically be possible as well.  But how can these things be possible given the problem I stated above?  To move forward in my discussion at this point I will use evidence from these articles as well as information I have learned from a scientific class on the subject.

Time and space are inherently related.  It has been proven that at incredible speeds, time will actually slow down.  While this is only significant for near-light speeds, it nonetheless proves that the two are eternally linked, and that we can think of time is a similar way to space, much as E=mc^2 proved that mass and energy are interchangeable.  So this means that if we were to be able to go at near-light speeds and come out alive, we could slow the time around us, while the rest of the world goes at normal speeds.  In this way, we could travel for, say, a year, but in the meantime the Earth could move ahead 10, 20, or any other amount of years depending on the speed.  Thus, when we returned to the Earth, we would have effectively traveled into the future.  While this method provides for no means to move into the past, it at least proves that moving along the timeline separately from our local world is possible.  We would just need a greater understanding of the nature of time to discover a way to move in the opposite direction.  Perhaps this could be done through great distances, in which we have seen that the velocity of an object, if moving towards or away from another object, slightly shifts the 'present moment' in which a person standing at either location would say is happening 'now' (this bit of science is wildly hard to get your mind around, so you'll just have to bear with me for the moment).  So then by moving away from Earth from many light years away, we could shift the 'present moment' into the past, and if we were then to cross the distance back to Earth while maintaining the same velocity (only possible due to the theoretical wormhole given our current understanding- remember, nothing can move faster than light speed) then we could arrive back any amount of years in the past.

So simple!

But this still does address the problem I previously mentioned, the "why haven't we met time-travelers" problem.  Scientists have come to the conclusion that assuming the forth dimension is time, then moving one step up from that, the fifth dimension would be alternate realities.  So then we would be in a timeline that is 'yet to discover time travel.'  Our timeline would move up to the point of finding a way to move.  Then, should someone go back in time, they would create a branching reality in which time travelers do exist, and things would move forward parallel to our current, no-time traveler universe.  Without this way of thinking, time traveling encounters the paradox that Back to the Future touches on, that if you changed the 'present' in the past, then the present you might have never existed to change it, or just never have had any reason to time travel in the first place.  The movie just lets the Marty, who is faced with not being born, start to fade out, to cease to exist.  While this works for the film's purposes, it is not reasonable for reality.

But I digress.  I myself believe that time travel is possible, it is simply now a question of application of our theories, which we currently do not possess the proper technology.

Loops and Loopholes in Time Travel

Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985) displays an interesting interpretation of time travel. Throughout the film there are interactions with the idea of time, and traveling between time, causing inconsistencies to arise in the plot. Using Taylor’s ideas of space and time in comparison with Lewis’ theories of time travel, I will diagnose specifically what happened in the film.

In the film a young man, Marty (Michael J. Fox), is sent from the year 1985 to 1955, and becomes entangled in his parents’ lives, threatening his own existence. Due to the story being laid out in Marty’s personal time, we must first acknowledge that the beginning of the movie is the start and the end of the film is… well, the end. Throughout Marty’s personal time of about a week, Marty experiences character growth and ends up right where he left off in 1985 to pick up as if he had never left. This is hardly the point of concern. Where things get messy is the idea that 1955 is in the past, and then all of a sudden in the present (of Marty’s personal time) giving him control over his perception of what actually happened, since he never personally experienced 1955 himself.

            One thing we can all agree on is that at the end of the film, Marty’s life is back to normal, minus negligible changes considering the fragility of the space-time continuum. Sure he has a different car and his brother has a real job. Yea, his dad is slightly cooler than he was before, but ultimately it can be argued that the 1985 that we experienced with Marty is the 1985 that had happened anyways (before his travel).

            This can be reinforced by looking at several “loops” as Lewis calls them. Loops are essentially events caused by time travel whose explanation is explained only by time travel. This would be like if I go back in time and give myself a blue ribbon… only to give it to myself again and again and again. Several of these loops include Marty’s name, the African American man running for mayor, and Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode. The fact that these loops exist in Marty’s life much prior to (in his personal time) his travel to 1955 doesn’t prove the continuity of this time travel absolutely. Chrisholm and Taylor would argue that his interference with time is sufficient but not necessary to these events taking place. Something could have happened to cause these things to happen regardless of whether or not Marty got involved. The loop that ultimately comes together to prove Marty’s impact on the past is that Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) takes Marty’s advice in 1955 to wear a bulletproof vest. While it is still only sufficient, Doc hints that Marty’s letter had something to do with it.

Throughout the film, there are arguments to back up the possibility of a branching away from the “normal” timeline and reconnecting; however, there are several inconsistencies. While I will continue to ignore the changes after Marty’s return to 1985, I want to address a few issues. While Doc continues to refuse knowledge of his future due to the space-time continuum and how it can change the events that are to come, he did make a time machine. He also knows, because of Marty’s video, that he will live at least until 1985 at the point in which the video is made, yet he is afraid of falling from the clock tower. As a matter of fact, he shouldn’t care much about his future, because it is still uncertain to him, aside from his assured existence for the next 30 years. The only logical reason for him to care about changing the events of his future is because these events could interfere with what Marty and us would consider the normal chain of events. This all gets muddy, however he is slightly right in agreeing with both Lewis, Chrisholm and Taylor. Past events will remain past events and future events will remain future events, mainly because they are in someone’s past, even if that person exists in the future (Marty and us).

The most consistent aspect of the film is perhaps that Marty did not change, oddly enough. After his return to 1985 Marty’s life around him had changed, maybe only slightly. Still, would one not expect Marty to be different having been raised by such different parents? His brother and sister changed. Maybe his experience going back in time developed a change in his character. Maybe he learned some sort of lesson. Maybe this is exactly what the director intended! In dealing with such unknown and unexplored subjects such as space-time, time travel, and the understood continuum, could one expect the film to “get it right” without cracking the code of time travel itself? It is precisely these paradoxes and inconsistencies that make the idea of a time machine so difficult and foreign. After all, we had a time traveling experience of our own (cheesily enough). In the year 2013, we got to enter the world of 1985, then 1985’s interpretation of 1955, then 1985 again, and ultimately right back in our own present… our infinitesimally small concept of present.

Going Back to the Future with David Lewis

David Lewis in his essay The Paradox of Time Travel exclaims that ‘time travel is possible” (492). Before talking about the 1984 film Back to the Future featuring Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, and a cast of other great actors and actresses, I want to discuss Lewis’s thoughts on time travel and his philosophy that time travel is not an impossible notion. Lewis claims that if, “he can defend the consistency of some science fiction stories of time travel, then he supposes parallel defenses might be given of some controversial physical hypothesis” (492). In other words, Lewis knows that by defending the idea of time travel being possible he is also allowing other hypotheses to be possible, but Lewis exclaims that time travel should not be held as a scientific myth. The explanation of what time travel is precisely is a discrepancy between time and time. He explains this idea further that the “time travelers” world is much like ours, but is a four-dimensional manifold of events, meaning that time is one dimension of the four and there are differences between various time-like dimensions and various space-like dimensions (493).

Hopefully I have no confused you all too much… So where does this leave Back to the Future?

First, a quick description of Back the Future. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a normal 1980s teenager (what does that mean you ask? Faded jeans, skateboards, and ugly colored vests), who is sent back to 1955 by the crazy Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) in a plutonium fueled DeLorean. Not only is he sent back thirty years, but when he is there he has to ensure his parents hit it off so the future Marty as well as his brother and sister can exist in the future. Not to mention while he is there he also creates the future “sound” at the school dance by playing “Jonny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.

Basically Marty needs to ensure that his actions in the past do not erase the reality of himself in the future. As Lewis describes, “a time traveler, like anyone else, is a streak through the manifold of space-time, a whole composed of stages located at various times and places” (493). As Marty travels back in the past his streak is a zig-zag doubling back on himself, actually so far back on himself that it is before he was born. Lewis explains, “you cannot change a present of future event from what it was originally to what it is after you change it. What you can do it change the present of future from the unactualized way they would have been without some action of yours to the way the actually are” (497). This quote ties in directly with Back to the Future because it explains the desire to want to go back and change something in your past to more readily set up your future. Although Marty does not intentionally go back to the future to change something, he has to make sure his parents do in fact end up together so that his life and his brother and sisters lives can be saved.

Now it is time for some personal reflection… Do you think that time exists in this four dimensional sense? If time travel did/does exist and you could travel back to a point in your past would you? Would it be ethical?? My first response is YES I want to go back but then I realize that all the reasons I would want to return are purely motivated by greed or some other poor emotion. Do you think the past is what makes us who we are today? If we could change that past then would we be risking changing who we are for the worst? What do you think other philosophers would say to potential ability to change our pasts?

If you have not yet seen this movie… I highly suggest it and I am hoping that most, if not all, of you have seen it. This was probably my millionth time watching this film. It comes on TV all the time if I am not mistaken. So watch it!