| FOUR |
THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES: TIME TRAVEL AND THE PRIMAL SCENE |
Science fiction is in essence a time travel genre. Events either open in the altered past, the transformed present or the possible future, transporting the reader or viewer to another age, place, dimension or world. Or: events involve time travel devices and technologies that take people backwards and forwards across time, and through time and space, often at near unimaginable speeds, as the narrative progresses. When science fiction film time travels one truly knows that one is in a science fiction movie because time travel provides not only the futuristic narrative dynamic needed for the genre but the diegetic space for the use of astonishing special effects. In time travel scenarios, the sky splits open, clouds dissolve, and precision-engineered shimmering spacecrafts emerge, smothered in pyrotechnics and lights, from infinite space to engulf the screen, and the audience in turn.
But the time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individual feels alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out. If the modern world is dislocated, chaotic and disenfranchises a large number of people then time travel allows the individual to (finally) bring order to the chaos of the cosmos. Time travel, then, becomes both a civilising process and one that is also built on the hero myth, because when one time travels one finds that history is made in one’s own image. If the modern world produces a particularly acute identity crisis and existential schizophrenia, then time travel allows one to come face to face with one’s own doppelgänger, alter ego, or mirror reflection.
When one time travels one is searching for wholeness, for metaphysical answers to the confusion at the core of the self and to the terrifying plight of the human condition. When one time travels one returns to the primal scene or to the origins of one’s own conception in the vain hope that one can be whole again.
Andrew Gordon notes that since 1979 a greater number of time travel-based science fiction films have been made because there is ‘a pervasive uneasiness about our present and uncertainty about our future, along with a concurrent nostalgia about our past’. What Gordon is suggesting here is that there is a close correspondence between the political and economic crises that shaped this decade and the flight or evacuation mentality that characterised a range of science fiction films of the time. However, Gordon also argues, focusing on Back to the Future, that the time travel film resonates in terms of the Oedipal scenario. Back to the Future is ‘the first science fiction film to make explicit the incestuous possibilities that have always been at the heart of our fascination with time travel. Time travel is an unnatural act which is frequently used to allow the fulfilment of Oedipal fantasies or family romance.’ In this scenario, the character Marty thus becomes a ‘teenage Oedipus’ and the DeLorean time machine the ‘primary symbol of ‘phallic’ power’.
Constance Penley examines the time travel and time-loop paradox of The Terminator both in terms of its critical dystopia and its Oedipal trajectory. According to Penley, the film interrogates the ideological implications of the machine aesthetic in the contemporary age, suggesting that in terms of The Terminator’s diegesis ‘if technology can go wrong or be abused, it will’. In terms of the film’s primal scene, Penley examines the way psychosexual crises produces a desire or yearning to return ‘home’. In this context, The Terminator’s displaced John Connor ‘is the child who orchestrates his own primal scene, one inflected by a family romance, because he is able to choose his own Father, singling out Kyle from the other soldiers. That such a fantasy is an end-run around Oedipus is also obvious: John Connor can identify with his Father, can even be his Father in the scene of parental intercourse, and also conveintly dispose of him in order to go off with (in) his Mother’.
Jonathan Bignell examines the 1960 film version of The Time Machine in terms of its relationship to modernity, subjectivity and the difference ‘between the virtual and the real’, a difference that he argues mirrors the machinery of cinema and the spatial transformations that occurred with industrialisation. Bignell argues that ‘time travellers and cinema spectators are displaced from the reality of their own present and their own real location in order to be transported to an imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary elsewhen’.
Caron Schwartz Ellis looks at time travel in terms of the figure of the benevolent visiting alien who ‘originate(s) in the sky, evoking the archetypal symbolism of the sky and the figure of the sky God’. Ellis argues that the Sky God is often humanoid in form and personifies ‘our deepest fears about technology and answers spiritual questions about our destiny’. The Sky God film provides the audience with ‘a mythic experience; through watching space alien films we are getting in touch with our roots, exploring the secret, sacred dimension of our scientific worldview’.
