Have You Tried Not Worrying About It? (The Trouble With Time Travel)

We went back... to Back to the Future!

In this brave new world of quarantine-land, we as a species are looking for ways to kill time as we wait for our respective governments to solve this problem or, more realistically, for COVID-19 to get bored and go away. It is in that spirit that I turn to this post, and it is that same spirit that my 13 year-old daughter Gabby has decided she wants to watch the Back to the Future trilogy.

My wife Jaime and I have returned to a number of our favorite older movies while sheltering-in-place here in Brooklyn, NYC. I'm happy to report that Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Birdcage both hold up and you should revisit (or visit) them ASAP. Back to the Future also holds up.

And then there's Back to the Future Part II.

Yikes.

Back to the Future Part II is kind of a mess, and side note: all of the old-age make-up is horrifying. Everyone in the movie's version of 2015 looks like a Dark Crystal character or one of those creepy battery people from the old Duracell ad campaign.

Oh man.

Puppet-faces aside, though, I have to admit that by the end of our viewing? I was on board. By the time credits rolled on Part II I couldn't help but smile at the extremes to which the film had embraced time travel and all of the baggage that comes with it. By baggage I am referring, of course, to time paradoxes: the continuity-shattering realities of writing a story in which the chronological order of events no longer has any meaning.
Back to the Future takes place in two times (1985 and 1955) and establishes for itself a pretty straightforward time rule based on the well-known Grandfather paradox: if you go back in time to kill your grandfather then you'll never be born to go back in time and kill your grandfather. In the first film, protagonist Marty McFly is sent back in time 30 years to 1955, where he accidentally interferes in his parents meeting for the first time and has to remedy that over the course of one week lest he end up fading from existence. If he traveled back in time and kept his parents from falling in love, then how was he ever born to travel back in time? Grandfather paradox. Even this relatively simple plot leads to paradoxes on top of paradoxes. For example: if Marty keeps his parents from meeting then why did he slowly fade from existence over a week instead of instantly disappearing? The answer, obviously, is because storytelling. In stories, countdown timers are more interesting than abrupt endings.

This still owns, though.

Back to the Future Part II, though, makes the first film seem like a slow-moving period drama by comparison. Part II sends Marty and Doc through 1985, 2015, an alternate 1985, back to 1955 and the events of the first movie, and then to top if off Doc gets hit by lighting while in the DeLorean and ends up in 1885 (although we, the audience, won't get to join him there until Part III.) This second film in the trilogy is busy as all hell, and if you're not somebody who has already spent a chunk of your life thinking about time travel (for example, my wife) you're probably going to have trouble following along with the story.

The key to understanding fictional time travel, I've found, is to stop trying to understand it. This is very difficult for some of us in a canon-obsessed audience, particularly for those of us raised on comic books, where every story across a publisher's line of books has "happened" in the same universe and the events of one effects the events of another. Characters revisiting their past or visiting their future is simply too ripe a storytelling opportunity to avoid picking from time to time, and the simple truth is that unless the time travel rules of a particular fictional universe are established as being the linear rules of time travel (that is, what happens happened, and what happened happens, and time travelers can't change the future or past but simply observe it from a different point of view) then the moment characters are sent forwards or backwards in time narrative paradoxes are going to pop up. It is inevitable.

Back to the Future Part II contradicts itself in a number of ways. Marty and Doc have to change events in the past to travel forward to a new future, but when old Biff changes events in the past he then returns to a 2015 that seemingly hasn't changed to reflect the drastically different new future his actions created. This chapter in the series leans HARD into characters jumping around through the time stream to effect change, but those changes only seem to occur when appropriate for the narrative.

Which is, of course, the best way to do that if you're trying to tell a good story.

Time travel in fiction is the perfect example of a valuable rule of story consumption that I think we've come to forget in a post-MCU world: exposition makes bad storytelling, so sometimes you have to let go of the background minutiae and just enjoy a story for what it is. Contradictions are going to occur in fiction, almost always. If that's something that bothers you, the simplest solution to ensure that you're able to continue enjoying your stories, time travel or otherwise, is to stop thinking so much about them.

At least they never tried to explain how this thing works.

P.S. - My favorite use of time travel in fiction is in Douglas Adams' novel Mostly Harmless, part of the Hitchhiker's Guide series, in which the inevitable millions of time paradoxes generated by easily available commercial time travel have led the universe to the brink of collapse because nothing within it makes sense anymore. I just love the conceit of a series of books that leans hard into time travel while at the same time acknowledging that time travel is straight narrative nonsense.

P.P.S. - My LEAST favorite use of time travel in fiction is in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage play sequel to the Harry Potter series. Cursed Child relies heavily on Back to the Future Part II style time-travel to drive its plot, when it was clearly established in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that time travel in the Harry Potter universe is linear in nature and grandfather paradoxes are NOT possible within it. Cursed Child ignores that rule in total, even though the same exact sort of magical talisman (the time turner) is used to time-travel in both the book and the play. Seriously, it's best not to think too hard about this stuff.