Greetings to you, fellow time voyagers! Let’s not dawdle and miss the train, uh, the coffee house instead. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s not twiddle our thumbs and instead, let me take you on a wild journey through the ever so interesting world of narratives in time voyages over the past fifty years. Certainly, nobody would ever have thought that Monday mornings in 1985 would come with the craving for adventures filled with harsh neon lights and layered with paradoxes that could stretch over three sequels, let alone the future that was destined to meet Marty McFly. They certainly wouldn’t have been able to guarantee that the marvelous creators of Back to the Future would be strutting around in 2022 dressed like outrageous tobacconists.
A soothing voice often comes to my mind proclaiming that in the 1980s, the time travel focused narrators had a particular phrase – butterfly effects. You see, differently than most of us, they placed the focus around the events that could lead up to severe consequences, like for example, me and my peers choosing not to step off a bus or go as far as putting on a hat. Like other works of fiction, our stories followed a premise termed “what if” but were really about the joy they experienced while bending the rules of time travel and the hilarity that would ensue when they rolled back into the time at the end.
My, how things have changed! If you press forward, or backward rather, towards today’s time travel stories, you will see they have taken a more complex and, perhaps, sophisticated approach to our ‘what if.’ A show like Dark, for instance, forces us to not just wonder about the workings of time but also endeavor how time makes meaning of us as an individual. In a way, it looks like the genre had a collective decision to zoom in, opting out of the more intimate portrayal of time messing with our memories, our destinies, and even identity for the flashbacks and the flashy car chases through different timelines.
It is interesting to observe how time travel has transitioned away from trying to solve puzzles. Now, as we engage with a time travel story, we ask what the characters learn about themselves from their journeys to the past. The narrative asks, “What does the past mean to who we are today?” These stories reveal something more than simply a change in art form. More importantly, they reveal deeper meanings about culture. In fiction or reality, storytelling allows us to make sense of life while weighing the ideas of memory, fate, and hope.
And don’t worry since I will be diving into detail later on. For now, let’s sit tight as we take this journey through space and time. Again with the belt analogy, this is bound to be a rollercoaster ride. I think this is more like a capsule ride through the universe where we catch glimpses of our favorite time-travel tropes along with those other unique “gotcha” moments time travel fans debate about.
The Evolution of Time Travel — From Puzzles to Personal Adventures
Now, let’s discuss how time travel stories have changed over the decades. If you try to imagine traveling in time in the 1980s, it seems impossible not to think of the famous DeLorean speeding across the screen while leaving behind fiery tire tracks as it… well, you know, time traveled. Back to the Future was not only a prominent movie; it was a phenomenon. It was so much fun to watch that it left the vast majority of people laughing out loud while some people were deep in their thoughts. The type of plot that the more you gave it some pondering, the more twists and turns it seemed to have, but also managed to be lighthearted enough to feel almost homey.
You wonder if a time travel plot can be cozy, but you reconsider and then remember that cozy feels perfect for a time travel plot, and the story in Back to the Future surely has that feeling.
Yet, it was not only Back to the Future that has tackled the issue of time travel in the ‘80s. The year 1984 saw the release of The Terminator, which took a much darker approach to time travel. This was a movie where the survival of humanity was at stake. But, in this story darker in tone, conflict was centered around questions that seemed to be lifted out of the pages of H.G. Wells novels. Is it possible to alter the future, or is the future set in stone?
In the ‘90s, there was a move towards more complex approaches to time travel fiction. One could argue that these tales began to remove the instant gratification offered by the genre and instead explore a deeper narrative. Consider, for example, the film “12 Monkeys,” which took the concept of a time loop and transformed it into a commentary on memory, insanity, and fate. Suddenly, time travel was divorced from the sheer notion of adventure and instead became a device to examine human life. Bruce Willis and other actors would age on one side of the equation while the world existed on the other.
Let’s check how things have changed after jumping to the 2000s. For instance, there is a movie from 2004 called The Butterfly Effect. The film takes the old age paradox, stretches it, darkens it, and makes it personal with a twist. Ashton’s character is stuck in a time loop but what makes matters worse is he is also imprisoned in an eerie alternate version of Odysseus’ world where a man suffers from multi-layered self-contained worlds. It gets worse, he ends up defeating a monstrosity that poses a threat to the entire world but is left with a hidden personal cost (will elaborate on this in a second). What a time to be alive, right?
The decade of 2010’s had a new type of time traveling format for stories. Unlike previously in the past, where the focus was mainly on, narrative construction and show how time travel can have a bizarrely weird and convoluted rearrangement of events such as are found in “Dark” series of Netflix or in the “Looper” movie. Recent works have focused more on character psychology and identity self, fate, and free will like “dark” on Netflix and in the movie “Looper”. One of the leading reasons for such an approach is that time travel stories often meet at a different point in time. This brings up the question of self identity, what does it mean to be the same person as oneself, because given our circumstances appearance and do change over time.
Seeing the older Joe meeting his younger self in ‘Looper’ makes a lot of sense with how the movie portrays the ‘old counterpart’ problem. In the truly insane version of Looper, how time travel is done is forcefully personal. There seem to be no edges to the tentacles that make up the concepts plot in ‘Dark’. It jumps far ahead by throwing multiple generations on top of each other with extreme levels of determinism. Do burst timelines ring a bell? Viewers were literally preparing themselves to be “consumed”. Just imagine realizing that time travel has being conceived to such extremes that people are giving birth to their traveling counterparts. Mind-Numbingly insane. But also incredibly ordinary.
‘Dark’ vents grief, cycles of trauma, and the sheer complexity that befalls a family like a curse that promises to be entertaining or bring sinister goodies hovering inside the world behind the ‘Dark’ scenario guarded by paradoxes. Next on the list is Arrival (2016), which does not directly deal with time travel but is worth discussing for its unique take on time. It’s based on a short story called Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which presents an idea that explores language as a means of time control. When the protagonist, played by Amy Adams, finally comprehends time travel on a multidimensional scale, the audience is given a chance to reflect on matters of memory, loss, and the utter sadness felt by choices made while fully aware of the phenomenon of time. The narrative is certainly gut-wrenching yet beautiful at the same time, causing some internal shift pointless of how complex or straightforward one feels about the film medium, and deeply penetrates emotional sentiments, which Arrival exists to depict.
Arrival does not expect viewers to buy into the commonplace or universal paradox, or even consider how quite the opposite exists in the single cylinder of film within a camera. Rather, it calls on us to consider time as a work of art; a fabric torn with intention, love, and pain.
In the new stories, time travel seems to be less important and more of a story telling device. We seem to be asking more profound questions such as ”What do we regard as death?” “How do we perceive the flow of time?” Many characters in these stories struggle with issues of personal identity and how their experiences in life have caused them to be shaped. It’s like there is a shift from understanding time’s constancy and reality, when compared to the older stories where people tried to influence parts of history. Time travel has become less about going back and changing events.
In contrast to today, the time-travel sagas from the past presented a very nostalgic version of the world, where setting one wrong thing right made everything else fall into place. Although, we are not simply playing with time anymore; we are grappling with it. This makes the world around us feel much less certain. What is captivating about contemporary time-travel stories is that they seem to crystallize hope of breaking free from all the cycles by simply comprehending one’s past, the way one has always wanted to.
Okay, science fiction lovers, let’s dig into why the changes in time travel tales matter so much. It is not so much the plot seems to have gotten more complex or that the characters are more multifaceted, which they are. No, the real rub was how, over the last 50 years, we have taken to telling time travel stories more and more sophisticated. It reflects the changing beliefs of society regarding time, memory, and even destiny. It is one thing to fantasize about rectifying the past. It is something manifestly different to be comfortable with what we have gone through as part of the revealing of our personal timelines.
In the 1980s, time travel stories were usually about escaping the present. They were linked to fantasies centered on escaping the present and fixing something, so that characters could set things right. In turn, they went to the past, changed some events in the course of history, and returned to the modified future. As far as classics go, Back to the Future is surely at the top. It captured time travel perfectly. Marty McFly traveled to the past to ensure that his parents fell in love because if they didn’t, he wouldn’t be born. But surely he could have not been so cringe inducing during the lip-sync contest and instead of teaching his father to sing ‘Johnny B’ just pushed a few bits of ‘Earth Angel.
Once we steered into the 1990s and after, our stories started to have a different relationship with time, one that looks messier and not rather well organized with trying to fix things but rather focuses on understanding our contexts in history. There seems to be a perfect parallel to our own more contemporary relationships with history – both on personal level as well as on societal level. Having understood and incorporated the nature of the past into our present, our stories now tell a different kind of multi- temporal reality in which time travel can, and does, happen.
Imagine a television series “Dark” that puts no smile on your face at the end of the show. Instead, it gives a closer look on how the past affect us, how traumas are persistent through different ages, and how difficult it actually is to escape from what we tend to term as inevitable cycles. The storyline of “Dark” at times feels like a metaphorical ‘timestream’ which explores family trees and the multi-layered secret to which every family is bound to. All the grief, hurt, and inertia resides within and these choices dictate the beholder’s life even when they no longer exist. These narratives draw from the ‘moment’ of the contemporary world where a significant number of people are trying to figure out how the past has impacted their reality.
Sure, Dark has that intricately interwoven storyline that keeps compelling you to watch more to understand the big picture.
Moving on to Arrival. This film’s idea of time is in sharp contrast with the time paradoxes that were the themes of stories from the past decades. Here, it’s not a matter of preventing a calamity or trying to change the future. Rather, it is about accepting time and whatever joys and heartbreaks it comes with. The linguistics-centered idea it employs—you can construct a language that would allow you to perceive time differently, or even non-linearly—serves as a splendid metaphor for memories. Memories are often considered as events that are experienced in a linear manner. However, time is actually a series of “events” where every single moment coexists. What actually happens is that your brain processes the recollections of those events alongside the passage of time, which is much more complex than the simple act of remembering.
Therefore, the premise of the tale in Arrival, which is linguistically inclined, speaks more about what we hope to experience in the time to come rather than everything that has been experienced until now.
I think these stories resonate with us because they encapsulate a deeper shift in our perception of time. If we think about how many years we have been around, we are not actually gliding over the surface of water like a breeze while the sun rises and sets. It is true that time ‘feels’ like a river, but it is full of burdens made up of choices we did not take, the people we have lost and so many more. Overall, us today seem to not only struggle to construct a concrete version of the past, but also have a very hard time predicting the future and formulating an understanding of it.
So many of our time travel stories none the less seem to relish the thought of ‘screwing up’ time for malevolent reasons; LOL (and also shudder) at all of the half-baked time travel stories out there.
Also, the shift in our relationship with technology and science also molded these stories. For instance, time travel was often packaged with a new piece of technology during the 80s, such as a DeLorean or a time traveling telephone booth. The phrase ‘better science, better world’ was bolded. But now, with technology’s ethical conundrums and existential quandaries coming to light, time traveling seems to express our uncertainty towards science and its more modern developments.
Dark and The OA (which isn’t really time travel, but strives to manipulate reality and dimensions in a way with scratches the same itch) are, unlike their predecessors, more intelligent and understanding of their world and that shows in the stories they tell. What amazed me about this evolution is that they actually make time travel feel realistic. These are not cool scientific ideas to consider, but our very human understanding of time itself. They are tales about hopes, regrets, and the makes-sense-of-a-world-that-is-always-upside-down situations that we, as people, find ourselves in. And the characters in every story gets us to consider them as our plot devices like time travel into our lives. Let us be honest, have you ever thought about a decision you made and wished that you could use a time machine to change certain aspects of your life timeline? Or even imagined stepping into a reality where you made a decision (whether it’s great or bad) and having the courage to face the consequences?
In these present day stories, the theme of time travel does not heavily revolve around escaping the past, but rather coming to terms with the understanding of self-acceptance in the present. Humans deal with tragic, beautiful messiness day-to-day and “time” is one of those concepts we’ve never fully understood properly—and most likely because a lot of it confuses us.
Regardless, modern narratives still have characters (whether they are passengers, protons or baffling hybrids of both) attempting to come to terms with the inconceivable, and moving, if not towards something close to acceptance, then towards some astounding theories.
What is your personal take on this? What is your favorite narrative regarding time travel, and how does it fit within the complex web of timelines and characters we have shared? In what ways have these stories shaped your view of time? After all, in sci-fi, the best traveled stories are the ones that are traveled together, right? And from the discussions we have, we can only be clearer as to those countless possibilities, one timeline at a time.
