Time-travel films

replaying time, choice, and action

pp. 47-64

in: Rebecca Bushnell, Tragic time in drama, film, and videogames, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

This chapter follows resistance to the tragic narrative in the medium of film, exemplified in those films that involve travel through time, when the protagonist pursues a desire to see a story undone by revisiting a past tragic choice or event. These films play on or with that impulse to resist the script's authority inherent in acts of adaptation, and they translate it into a character's defiance of social or political authority in a quest to right a wrong, to prevent a future disaster, or recover what has been lost. The script's authority is identified with a sense of the inexorable nature of time, which film itself has the power to undermine it. The first part considers films (including La Jétee, 12 Monkeys, Déjà Vu, and Looper) that set time travel in an socio-political framework, in which a male time traveler must disobey the authorities that send him back in time. These models are then contrasted with Run Lola Run and Céline and Julie Go Boating, films that feature female protagonists who use a time-loop or game-like structure to transform a tragic outcome into a comic ending. Time travel thus lends itself to the conversion of narrative into a game, when the linearity of time is twisted through recursion and repetition.