STINC #3 — The (other) one about Time Travel
This is the third entry in a series of “first chapters” I call, Shit Things I Never Completed. You can find out more about them here.
“Ok, Time Travel movies. Go”, said Paul.
“Back to the Future”, jumped in Lucy and John at the same time, “Number 3. I said it first!”, Lucy added poking her tongue out at John.
“Whatever, the original is the best by a wiiiide margin”, John retorted.
Before Lucy could argue the point, Lachy jumped in, “You’re both mad. Bruce Willis in Looper”.
“Nice”, Sarah chimed in, “but I think Predestination does a much better job of a similar story”
“Never heard of it”, said Paul, “doesn’t count. Drink!”.
“What? Since when is that a rule?”
“Hang on, is that the one with the guy from …umm… that… that…. Gah! You know the Winona Ryder movie?”, asked Lucy.
“Nice. That really narrows it down”, said John.
“Uggh! With Zoolander… shit, what’s his name”, said Lucy clicking her fingers.
“You mean Ben Stiller?”, said John
“Ben Stiller is in a time travel movie?”, laughed Lachy, “I don’t remember seeing that one!”
“No, Ben Stiller was in a movie with Winona Ryder and the guy from Predestination”, said Lucy.
“Reality Bites?”, said David.
“Yes! That’s the one! What’s the other guy's name!?”, said Lucy.
“Dunno”, said David
“Goddamnit!”, said Lucy
“Oh my god guys, Ethan Hawke!”, said Sarah
“YES!!!”, said Lucy
“Glad we solved that. Still, don’t know it, doesn’t count!”, judged Paul.
“Newp, me neither”, said John.
“Uggh! This game sucks. You guys suck!”, said Sarah as she downed her shot of tequila.
“Ok, my turn. Three words. Bill. And. Ted”, said Paul
“Be excellent to each other”, said Lucy, high fiving him.
“Your turn David”, said Paul, “should be easy, this is your domain of expertise after all”
The group all looked expectantly at David.
“It’s gonna be something super nerdy like Primer or something”, snorted John.
“Is that the one where you need like a fucking diagram to understand it?”, asked Lachy, taking a gulp of his beer.
“That’s the one, great movie… but I have no idea what the fuck happened at all, at like any time, from start to end”
“You were probably stoned which wouldn’t help”
“No way! At least I don’t think…”
“It’s gotta be Hot tub time machine!”, shouted Lucy. Everyone laughed. David just rolled his eyes.
David put his beer down, sat back and cracked his knuckles, “Groundhog Day”.
“You what?! That’s not time travel! I call bullshit!”, yelled Paul.
John added, “Just because he relives the same day does not make it time travel. He’s not going back in time, he’s just reliving the same day! It’s not sci-fi, it’s more like some sort of Buddhist reincarnation thing. Live a better life and all that.”
“Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow? Is that time travel?”, said David.
“Err, yeah I guess, cos there’s some big Alien that hits the reset button isn’t there?”
“Same thing then”
“Ha! You think the hidden subplot of Groundhog Day is that there’s a gigantic alien in a secret facility somewhere nearby and Bill Murray relives Groundhog Day until he saves the world?”, scoffed John.
“No, but in terms of possible methods of time travel, Groundhog Day is actually the most accurate. Which means, sadly, Edge of Tomorrow is probably not too far from the truth either”, said David
“I’ll regret this, but do you wanna elaborate on that?”, asked Sarah
“Well, you know about time travel paradoxes, right? Like how if you go back and kill your own grandfather before he has kids, how could you have even been born to go back and kill yourself? Or if you went back and gave Mozart his complete works before he wrote them, then who actually wrote them? It’s why Back to the Future makes no sense. Solving the problem means they had no reason to go back to the past in the first place.”
“Yeah… though I never really paid as much thought to it as you, clearly”, laughed John
“I’m learning quantum mechanics this semester, it’s what I do”
“Okay, so Back to the Future is bullshit. Disappearing photos and all that”, continued John, “What’s Mozart’s problem?”
“Ok, so most movies treat time like there is one timeline, like Back to the future, and that if you go back in time you can somehow change the future. Make sure your parents get married, kill Hitler and prevent a war, that kind of thing”
“Oh my god! We forgot Terminator!!”, interrupted Lachy.
“Yes, like Terminator”
“Dum, duuuum, dum dum, duuumm”, said Lachy sticking his thumb in the air.
“So anyway, all these movies assume that you can go back in time and affect your version of the future. Such that when you return to the present, everything’s gold. The problem with this is that you could, in theory, go back in time and hand Mozart everything he ever wrote.”
“Yes, we got that, how’s that a problem?”, asked Sarah.
“Well, if you’ve given Mozart a bunch of sheet music, and he goes off and learns it, and presumably then publishes it…in the future, the music Mozart wrote was actually given to him, he didn’t write it. So, if ‘our’ Mozart didn’t write it, who did? It’s a paradox”
“But Mozart did write it, you just said”, said Lucy.
“Yes, but if there’s only one timeline, there’s only one Mozart and we know he didn’t write it, because we handed it to him. The fact that we’re holding his sheet music is impossible if you believe there is only a single timeline.”
“So, there can’t be a single timeline if time travel is possible? Or is it the other way round?”, queried Paul.
“Well, only one of the things can be true at the same time. If there is only a single timeline, time travel must not be possible because of all sorts of causality rules. And if time travel is possible, then there must be multiple timelines, otherwise, there are all sorts of unsolvable paradoxes. And physics doesn’t like paradoxes.”
“The harbour has a pair of dockses”, Lachy added unhelpfully.
Sarah rolled her eyes and continued, “Ok, and so same goes for Hitler right… if you killed Hitler, you’d never have reason to go back and kill him. I get it.”
“Ok so this doesn’t explain Groundhog Day, isn’t that a single timeline?”, asked Paul.
“Well possibly. The important thing is that it doesn’t exclude the possibility of there being multiple. We never conclusively see outside the bounds of the day itself. It’s a little different to Edge of Tomorrow, because in that movie they confirm that it’s a time ‘reset’. It’s the same timeline because the Alien thing is able to rewind time when it doesn’t like the outcome. That makes the Alien fixed inside a particular timeline, in effect, it’s hitting the rewind button on the DVD from outside time itself”.
“And Groundhog Day is different from that how?”
“Because we don’t know why it resets. There’s no explanation, which means there are many possibilities. Tom Cruise gets some blood on him and as a result lives outside the timeline like the Alien, but Bill Murray as Phil?… we don’t know. When Tom Cruise dies, we know he doesn’t actually die, because the timeline resets. They tell us this explicitly. It’s a self-defence mechanism of the alien doing its job”, said David.
“aaaaand…?”, said Paul
“The removal of an external influence in Groundhog raises the possibility of multiple timelines. When Bill Murray drives off a cliff, we don’t know if that’s the end of that timeline. Maybe that timeline continues on without him and a copy of his consciousness wakes up in a new timeline. We don’t know. I’m just saying instead of a Loop, it’s possibly a branch. Each new day is a new universe. He goes through the day as if there are no consequences, but we don’t know that is actually what happens, it’s just that he doesn’t observe the consequences. In actual fact, time doesn’t even reset for everybody else when he dies, just for Phil! Everyone else goes on living… that means each day is a unique branch of the timeline!”
“Sounds like a stretch to me, Dave”, said John sceptically.
“Ok, look. There are several scenes in the movie where we see stuff happening after Bill Murray dies.”
“Are there?”
“Yes, when he steals a pickup truck and drives it off a cliff, we see his co-workers, Larry and Rita, on the cliff-top in shock at his death. In another scene, we see them identify his body in a morgue. This proves conclusively, that each of these days continues after Phil’s death. Unlike Edge of Tomorrow, Groundhog Day’s timeline does not start and end with Phil’s life and is therefore possibly not a single timeline. If it were the same, you’d never see any post-Phil-death scenes, because it’d reset, as it does in Edge of Tomorrow.”
“Ok then…so what about the times he doesn’t die?”, asked Lucy.
“Exactly my point. We know life continues after Phil’s death, so that suggests that all the thousands of timelines where Phil doesn’t die, continue with him alive and well. His consciousness goes back in time, but Phil himself, the body, the physical being, the bundle of nerves, blood and muscle, stays where it was. It’s purely the information, if you will, that makes up his memories that go back in time. And that, my friends, is the only way time travel can work.”
“Holy shit guys, you know what this means?”, gasped Lachy.
“What?”, asked John.
“Dave has finally lost his mind”, said Lachy and began laughing hysterically, “I’m grabbing another beer, anyone else?”
This was the original first chapter of STINC #2, but I realised I suck at dialogue. I think I was trying to write a screenplay instead of a novel. So I ditched this talk-heavy chapter for the action focused starting point.
