To celebrate the recent launch of Planet Thunder Productions’ Indie Go Go fundraiser for their new time travel film, SHIFTER, The Cinematropolis will spend the month looking at time-travel films, starting with this edition of Underexposed.
When most people think of time travel, images of technological inventions, of whirring fans and flickering light, smoke and laser-like sound effects no doubt come to mind, be it the proto-steampunk device invented by the scientist hero in H.G. Wells’s seminal The Time Machine (a text which coined the term by which we all now identify a vehicle for traveling forwards or backwards in time), the titular traveler’s T.A.R.D.I.S in Doctor Who, or Doc Brown’s “luxury” DeLorean in the Back to the Future trilogy. But in fact, while not responsible for the concept of time travel, it was Charles Dickens who popularized the notion of a person traversing into both the past and the future, via his serialized novella A Christmas Carol.
As any Western individual with a TV knows by heart, on Christmas Eve, three spirits visit Ebenezer Scrooge—whom Dickens describes as “tight-fisted…a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”—and guide him through pivotal moments in his life, including events yet to come. BBC writer Samira Ahmed describes Scrooge’s first foray into quasi-physical defiance of linearity:
‘As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it was to be seen…’
No time machine, no fancy science, but this was the first time-travel jump in modern fiction…Scrooge is led by the Ghost of Christmas Past on a journey of Christian redemption to save his soul…
Yet the story still resonates in our more secular age because time travel opened up the exploration of both personal and social redemption.
The 1980 film Somewhere in Time, written by Richard Matheson and based on his novel Bid Time Return, carries on this Dickensian tradition of time travel, both in that the method of transportation relies not on “fancy science” or a physical vehicle of any sort, but rather via a combination of psychology and fantasy, and in that it concerns itself with the emotional ramifications of time travel, rather than external concerns like butterfly effects or paradoxes.
The story follows Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve, not long after becoming a megastar as Superman), a playwright who, despite his numerous successes, seems to feel empty and restless, as though there is something missing in his life. Moreover, a memory haunts him: eight years prior at college, while at a wrap party for one of his plays, a strange old woman (Susan French) approached him, handed him an elegant gold fob watch, and whispered, “Come back to me.” She left without saying another word.
Needing a getaway to clear his head, Richard sets out for his old stomping grounds in Michigan, but decides on a whim to spend the night at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. While strolling through the hotel’s Hall of History, he becomes transfixed by a portrait of a woman, whom he later learns was a famous actress, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), popular during the early 1900s. This fact astonishes Richard, an indication he feels he’s met her before, even though that would clearly be impossible. And yet, as his obsession with Elise mounts and he begins to research her life, he discovers that she was, in fact, the old woman who gave him the watch, which he still carries.
Remembering a philosophy class he took in college, Richard heads to his alma mater and tracks down the professor, Dr. Gerald Finney (George Voskovec), who explains that a person can travel into the past by entering an old building or home—one that would have existed long, long ago—surrounding themselves with items contemporary to the period they wish to travel, and then effectively hypnotizing themselves into believing they exist not in the present day, but in this other time altogether. Richard follows Finney’s directions, even going so far as to wear a period-appropriate suit (or so he thinks), and with a great and maddening effort, manages to transport himself back to the year 1912, when Elise and her domineering manager William Fawcett Robinson (Christopher Plummer) stayed at the Grand Hotel during a theatrical tour. Despite this amazing feat, Richard must still fight to be with Elise, and she for him, all while maintaining his psychic hold on the past—a matter that eventually turns to one of life and death.
You can’t think too long or hard about the method by which Richard disrupts the space-time continuum, but this is the case for pretty much all time travel narratives, since they deal with a subject that is technically impossible (and likely always will be). That said, this mental rather than technological mode of transportation makes as much sense as numerous other explanations concocted by writers of literature and films alike (in Back to the Future, for instance, all we ever learn about the Flux Capacitor is that it “makes time travel possible”). Though the film itself doesn’t explore this avenue, there are similarities between this hypnosis method and the concept of imprint or residual hauntings, also known as “stone tape” phenomena, which suggests that certain events are so charged with energy they “imprint” themselves into the very fabric of a space, and often “replay” to those sensitive to such energies. The idea of past lives, past life regression, and déjà vu also play a part here, especially the latter, since practically everyone experiences a sensation they’ve been in a place or experienced an event before at least once in their lives, if not more so.
It should be noted here that Matheson did not entirely come up with this theory on his own. He named the professor Finney after sci-fi writer Jack Finney (perhaps best known for Invasion of the Body Snatchers), whose novel Time and Again features a nearly identical means of time travel. However, both Matheson and Finney owe their ideas to author and aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne, who, according to Samira Ahmed, “wrote the bestselling book An Experiment With Time (1927), popularising the idea that all time existed already as a landscape that could be flown above, notably through dreams.” They are also indebted to the works of J.B. Priestley, especially his “Time Plays,” which also promote the idea that the past and present co-exist on the same continuum. More recent explorations of psychological (or at least, non-technological) time travel include Donnie Darko, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and the Twin Peaks revival from 2017.
But the specifics of this method, in the end, hardly matter. Matheson focuses his attention instead on fantasy, giving audiences a love story that knows not the boundaries of time and space—sometimes a bit sappy, true, but charming, engaging, and lovely nonetheless, even with its bittersweet ending. Director Jeannot Szwarc and cinematographer Isidore Mankofsky utilize soft focus throughout the film, giving the entire narrative a dream-like haze. Indeed, anything is possible in dreams and the imagination—including something as magical as going back in time.
Given that, again, we will likely never break linearity in the real world, it’s fair to argue that all time travel narratives belong in the realm of fantasy rather than science fiction, no matter how technologically-based a narrative may be. Still, this should not discount the potency of such stories. As Samira Ahmed writes, “Time travel might seem like a fantasy of escape, but at its best it is an exploration of consequences and an admission that the future is in our own hands.”
With this film, Matheson and Szwarc assure us that love, no matter the distance between lovers, nor how fanciful or impossible, can be obtained. If one simply believes and never gives up, love can be eternal, if not in the past or the present, then somewhere in time.
