Time Travel

I spend a lot of time thinking about time travel. I wonder if other people do.

I'm working on this idea for a screenplay -- I haven't started writing it yet, I've just been kicking around ideas for it. Pre-writing, I call it. Structuring, contemplating, figuring out what the characters are like and how to show that. This one screenplay in particular centers around a man who's moving backwards in time rather than forward. When you and I go to bed each night, we'll wake up on tomorrow, and in Groundhog's Day, Bill Murry goes to bed each night and wakes up on today...the main character of my screenplay goes to bed each night and wakes up yesterday.

So, I was kicking around ideas for this particular script today, and I'm thinking, one of the inherent problems with a script like this is that we don't care about the problems of any of the characters except the main character. As the audience, we're following him, so we move through time with him. So how do I make this man's wife like-able? Generally speaking, if you want the audience to relate to a character, you give them an obstacle and let them overcome it. But the wife of my main character can't do that. She's aging in reverse. All of her problems are already solved.

So then, in my head, I wrote out this scene. Where the wife comes home with this huge problem. I'm not sure what it is, but she's upset by it and she doesn't know what to do about it. So she vents to her husband -- a man who is not only literally from the future, but has gone through this exact scenario once already. He was there the first time she came home crying about it. He was there to share her pain and help her make a decision on how to react to it. He was there to see the outcome of her response firsthand. And he was there to see the person she grew into as a result of all of it.

The way this scene plays out in my head -- she comes home upset and he listens for a while before finally saying, "Look! I don't care! I've been through this. Do you want to know what you do? You do this. The response is this! Go do it. I know you're upset now, but you get through this. I've seen it. I was there." Now, of course, I'm writing a screenplay here, so the husband can't be perfect and wonderful...he has to be a little insensitive at first, so that he has room to grow by the end of the film. But...it got me thinking. About the nature of God.

In High School, the only novel I was required to read outside of an English class was called Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. It was for Geometry. But to be honest, I think the only reason our teach had us read it is because she was a Christian and she could pretend like the tiny amount of geometry contained in the book was an excuse for us to read a thinly veiled metaphor for humanity's failure to grasp God.

The book follows the life of a circle and explains the 2 dimensional world he lives in, how things work and what it's like to live in a world of only two dimensions. Basically, he sees things only as lines and is unable to fathom the possibility of a third dimension. Until one day he is transported to a 1 dimensional world. Here, he is only able to see things as dots...or rather, one dot on either side of him. Imagine if you lived on a line...what would you see? A dot. This is the one dimensional world. Imagine if you lived on a sheet of paper and could not see above or below the paper -- only towards the contents of the paper. You would see everything as lines of various lengths that would change as you got closer to or further away from them. This is the two dimensional world. Toward the end of the book, the circle is transported to our world and is able to see in three dimensions for the first time and is utterly amazed. Of course he goes home and tells all of his friends about this and they simply believe that he is crazy...as the inhabitants of the 1 dimensional world felt about his world of 2 dimensions.

Like I said...it's a thinly veiled metaphor for our inability to comprehend God.

Many people believe that time is the fourth dimension, as we are only able to travel it in one direction and we have no ability to perceive it or control it. I am inclined to think this is the case, but I'm certainly no expert.

I've heard oh so many sermons and Sunday school lessons on the nature of time and how God exists outside of time. Of course, people are just hypothesizing, but it makes sense. God knows how things were, how they are, and how they will be. Either he can predict the future or He simply exists outside of time. There are so many implications for this, but one that just clicked for me today is this:

If God exists outside of time or knows the future, then holy crap, we must sound so stupid when we get worried about ANYTHING.

Imagine this for a second. You're a time traveller...and not just any time traveller, but one who has already been traveling for quite a long time. You've been through your whole life once already and now you're going back through it again for fun. You've been to the end of your life and you've been to the beginning of it. You've been to the end of your spouse's life and the beginning of it. You've even observed them and walked with them from childhood, just to get to know them a little better. You know the end of their story and your own as well as your mutual story. And you've been through your children's lives and their children (your grandchildren) and on and on for generations. You've seen the end of the world. You've seen all the new technologies rise up and then be replaced. You've seen the future. And now you're back here in the present. And your spouse comes home one day and is freaking out about what to do over some dilemma. Let's say it's even a pretty major dilemma -- their mother has just died and as a result, in order to settle the debt she was in at the time of her death (which was substantial), they are going to take away your home. So you're spouse, with good reason, is kind of freaking out. Now, if you've already seen how this thing plays out, doesn't that seem trivial? For them, it's a question of what's going to happen. Will my life continue? Will I lose everything? For you...it's just part of the story.

You know how on House or Grey's Anatomy or every other medical show ever invented, the patients have these bizarro, crazy illnesses? Or something ridiculously bad happens to them -- the kinds of things that never happen in real life? They do that because they want it to feel dramatic for you. And if something is realistic on television, it will never compare to the drama felt in your own life. Because we've watched enough TV and movies to know...it all works out in the end. Always. Even if it's a "sad ending" it's always tied up in a neat little bow. Unless it's the Coen Brothers. And we've gotten used to that, and the only way to trick us into thinking otherwise is to raise those stakes to ridiculous levels.

When you know the end of the story already, the middle never seems as scary or dramatic. No horror flick is as scary the second time you watch it.

So when I whine or complain or struggle to understand what the heck is going on in my life, I just look like an idiot...because I'm whining and complaining and worrying to someone who's not only seen this movie already, He's capable of fathoming the results of every single possibility I could possibly try out. It's not just like having already read the book. The book is a choose your own adventure and he's read up on every single possibility.

My life seems pretty small right now. And I hope I continue to feel that way. I'm stupid most of the time. And narcissistic and petty and shallow. I want success. I want it now. And I'm frustrated that I haven't found it yet.

Jesus said to observe the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and to be like them. Because they don't worry about the future. He said to let tomorrow worry about itself.

The Sunscreen Song says: "Don't worry. Or know that worrying is about as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum."

There's no use worrying. Tomorrow might not even happen. There's only one person that does know for sure. And I for one am going to do my best to stop looking like quite such an epic idiot when I talk to Him.

Back to the Future

Terry Rouche once told me that being a writer means that you have permission to steal anything from anyone at any time. Someone says something witty -- you are perfectly within your rights to put that into a script you're working on. Or perhaps you are privy to the particularly nasty falling apart of a couple who was once deeply in love. That story is now yours. You may write about it. It may be as factual or fictitious as you like. Doesn't matter. It's yours now. Whatever. Anything anytime, anywhere. Because all the bests artists know that being a great artist simply means that you are the best at stealing. You can steal so well that people thought you had an original idea at some point.

So when I watch movies, sometimes I like to imagine how I might remake them. How I might steal some particular element from this movie and turn it into something unrecognizable. Or, how I might take the entire plot and make one little change -- enabling all new possibilities for themes and messages and totally altering the tone of the original.

This is what was happening when I was watching Back to the Future the other day. Now, Back to the Future, is a great movie -- one that I've seen probably dozens of times. And who could blame me? It's a classic. Honestly, I think of it as being sort of a live-action Pixar movie. Everything is there. Picture perfect casting. Mastery of nearly every single shot. Tension in every single scene. A lovable main character, who discovers a fairly obvious moral that everyone in the audience already believes -- and several goofy, larger than life supporting characters. No seriously, it's a Pixar movie. And like Pixar movies, it's absolutely flawlessly made. It tells the story it sets about to tell perfectly -- in a way that could never be topped.

Which is why it's such a problem that I suddenly want to remake it.

I'm gonna back up and tell you a bit about my family life now. My mother was a junior (I believe) in college when she met my dad in a bar. I don't know exactly how they started dating, but I imagine he bought her a drink or something and asked her out...the usual. They were married fairly quickly I guess. Actually, I'm gonna be honest and say I'm not really sure when my parents met or how long they dated. I know that she was married her junior year of college. And pregnant within a year of being married. My mom was my dad's second wife. I am told that he married his first wife because she got pregnant, but later miscarried. I don't know how long they were married, just that his family loved her, and were slightly less keen on my mother.

My brother is a year and a half younger than me, and my parents were fully divorced not long after he was born. I'm under the impression they were already separated when my mother was giving birth to him. Not long after that, my mom moved back home to Sumter. I know of one half brother, Tyler, who was born less than a month after Trevor (my full brother) and I am told that there was another illegitimate child born during the approximately three year marriage between my mother and father. That is...in three years, my father managed to cheat so much (with multiple women) that he fathered two illegitimate children.

My mother and father hate each other. My mother has become a hardened, bitter, independent woman. She never remarried, and I feel like she would probably consider that to be weak. She spits venom every time my dad is mentioned and used to get in a foul mood for days if my brother and I would return from visiting him having actually had fun. My father equally hates my mother, though he doesn't make it as obvious. He is currently on his fifth divorce. I have watched him over the years, and I am starting to believe that he truly doesn't understand what's going on. He believes he is picking awful women and can't believe his dumb luck. Every once in a while, I will catch glimpses of my father that make me feel pity for him in his situation with women. But most of the time I just think he's a womanizer.

My father's life since then has spiraled out of control. And the marriage to my father caused my mother to harden herself against the outside world -- never to allow herself to be hurt like that again.

And as I was watching Back to the Future a few weeks ago -- though I've watched it dozens of times -- this was the very first time I thought "What would I do in that situation."

Marty's family is far from ideal (at the beginning of the movie) but they are all together. They more or less love each other. There was no adultery or divorce or abuse or jail time or child molestation. And that makes for a better little story -- a more Pixar, family friendly story. But I don't think that's a representation of America anymore. And what about those of us who grew up around terrible things, or saw our parents terribly damaged over the events of a failed (or continuing) marriage. What would we do in Marty's shoes.

It's easy enough to leave it all alone -- just let what is going to happen happen. But Marty accidentally throws things out of whack. By pushing his father out of the way of an oncoming car, he causes his mother to fall for him instead of his father. So he has to FIX their relationship in order to make sure he is born. Later in the movie, he has not yet successfully fixed their relationship, and he actually begins disappearing.

So, to those of you with awful home lives -- those of you who's parents hurt each other in ways that seem unfixable. What would you do in Marty's shoes. Do you play matchmaker to two people who you know with absolute certainty will never work out? Or do you die? Not even die -- cease to exist. Do you do it? Because what Marty has to go through to get his parents together is a lot of hard work. He does it without hesitation because he must if he is to survive. I think some of us might hesitate. I would. Ultimately, I don't know what I would choose to do. But I like to think I would quietly disappear knowing that there was some slight possibility that I'd saved my parents that pain and that perhaps they might have a chance to be happier this way.

But, honestly, I don't know. And the likelihood of my hopping into a Delorian and time traveling back to the day my parents met is probably pretty slim. But this is what was on my mind today, so I thought I'd share.