MOVIES, TENET, TIME TRAVEL
Why I Hate Time Travel Stories
With the release of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, time travel is on our minds. Perhaps it was already on our minds given the string of calamities that’s been 2020, with some comedians remarking that time travelers must have been constantly going back in time to fix 2020’s problems — like murder hornets — only to cause far worse problems via the butterfly effect.
But I digress. Why exactly do I hate time travel stories so much? It’s quite simple, really. It’s because of the Grandfather Paradox. Yes, the same Grandfather Paradox that Tenet so nicely lays out — but then fails to reconcile.
To sum it up, if your 20-year-old self goes back in time and kills Hitler to prevent the Holocaust, then by the time your 19-year-old self turns 20, Hitler will be a nobody — since he died in the past without murdering 6 million Jews — which means that your 20-year-old self will never have any reason to go back in time to kill Hitler. This means that your 20-year-old self will not go back in time, because in your timeline there was never a Holocaust. Since your 20-year-old self never goes back in time, Hitler will still exist as a monster and will still bring about the Holocaust.
Confused yet?
Let me try to clarify. Put very simply: You can’t change the past. The very fact of the past’s existence proves that it has already and irrevocably happened by the time you set out to change it. History is set, no matter what. What this means is that there is absolutely no fucking point in anything that happens in time travel stories. Nothing in the story can ever result in any changes to the past, since the past is already written. So…who cares?
In Tenet, there’s a moment where John David Washington’s protagonist and Robert Pattinson’s Neil discuss this idea, and whether the fact that they’re still alive proves that they already succeeded in their time travel mission to the past. The answer, of course, is yes, they already succeeded. And that means there’s no point in anything that happens in the movie.
Let me explain why. Since our heroes “already succeeded,” that means 100% of all decisions they make from that point on will necessarily result in their success. No matter what. This includes if they decide to do nothing at all. They could sit on their butts, get drunk and sing limericks for the next 100 years and they will still succeed in their mission. Why? Because they already succeeded.
This also renders the villain’s storyline pointless. The villain knows he has failed in his plot to destroy the world by destroying the past. How? The fact that he’s still alive during a series of days which would be erased from history if his evil plot succeeds proves that his plot failed. If his plot had succeeded, his future self would not exist to go back in time to kill the past. So why does he go on with a mission that he knows he has already failed to complete?
Okay, let’s eject from the Grandfather Paradox for a little bit. No movie has ever truly reconciled the Grandfather Paradox, much to my annoyance, so there’s no point in me whining about it forever. There’s only one way out of the Grandfather Paradox — something Tenet also mentions. The way out of the paradox is by using parallel universes.
Parallel universes are even more fucking annoying than the Grandfather Paradox.
Why?
I’ll sum it up succinctly. Let’s say in Universe #1 you find out that an apocalypse is coming and all your friends and family are going to die. So you go back in time and change something. Then you come back to your own time period and everything is hunky-dory. No apocalypse. Yay! Everything’s great! Right?
Wrong.
The only thing that actually happened was that, after changing things in the past, you shifted yourself out of Universe #1 and into Universe #2. All your friends and family in Universe #1 still died. The people you cared about so much that you went back in time to save them? They all died. You’re now living with a completely different set of people in Universe #2 — clones of the people you loved. These new versions might be radically different due to whatever changes you made to the past. They might be assholes. Either way, you failed to save the actual people that you love.
I’ll wrap up my rant by saying that, in my book, the be-all-end-all of time travel stories is Robert A. Heinlein’s “— All You Zombies — ”. Spoilers ahead after the three dots.
Still here? Okay. Spoilers for “ — All You Zombies — ” and its film adaptation, Predestination, will now commence:
In the story, the protagonist is his own mother and his own father through time travel shenanigans — and a sex change operation along the way.
Huh? What the fuck?
Exactly. Heinlein’s short story does not reconcile the Grandfather Paradox, nor does it rely on parallel universes. It instead shines a lantern on how time travel stories, by their very nature, cannot ever make sense and cannot ever result in a good outcome unless you switch off your brain and stop thinking about it.
Since it’s never a good idea to switch off your brain, you could say that “— All You Zombies — ” is a great big middle finger to time travel stories as a genre.
A well-deserved middle finger, in my opinion.
