Back to the Eternal Return

So Back to the Future makes a two fold supposition about time travel; every moment leaves a physical imprint on time's infinite wake, and all events are predestined. This 1985 crown jewel of summer blockbusters past is obviously a lot more fun (Libyan terrorists!) in that it's about non-science and the ensuing chaos so much more than the why or how, but for a movie that took $350 million worldwide, it is 116 minutes of time/space discourse that would make Vonnegut crave a Pall Mall.

It's simple enough I guess. Doc Brown invents (?) the Flux Capacitor, installs it in a DeLorean (which was already an ironic 80's reference), steals plutonium from some terrorists (probably easier to get than a DeLorean), and then gets a high school kid to videotape the launch, held discreetly in a mall parking lot. Seamless. When this goes invariably wrong, Marty McFly is whisked away to the past. Record scratch. I love you Hollywood...and I'm perfectly okay with all of this, but...where is there to visit? What exactly is this physical plain to go to that can prop up a human being? This notion of a tangible past to visit in some way indicates that all moments, significance notwithstanding, repeat themselves ceaselessly, verbatim, across time and space.

Every passive yawn, every that person you banged that one time, every day you wish could last forever, stitched inexorably into time's fabric. Mr. Baines' car colliding into George McFly over and over again for all time. In some ways this is a tremendous relief. Take the loss of love from your life; if there was ever an utterance of love from that person, that love is forever because, in theory, that moment is always occurring. That same luxury is also the obvious downside. The hurtful moments of life aside, the inanity and the insufferable ennui and the moments wasted would never cease to be. The clock at 4:55 PM ad infinitum. I want part of myself to indulge in those joyous seconds forever, but not more than I would burden the worst of myself to eternal struggle. But what of the altered past? The moment when George is moved from the front of Mr Baines' car by Marty, interrupting the eternal procession, is the crux of the issue.

This is not a movie about changing the future. This is a movie about making sure that the future (or the present as it were....gears in gears here, bro) stays the same. The only real change is George McFly and Biff Tannen's relationship, otherwise Marty was fighting to keep time's predestined path in place. Saying time is predestined might be a bit strongish, but it's portrayed as an extremely accurate scenario builder. I'm gonna go Back to the Future II for a second. Based on the theoretical model here, to go forward in time implies that events are fixed in time. The future must be happening in order to create a physical manifestation that can be visited. So when Doc Brown rushes in at the end of BttF with news of future peril involving Marty and Jennifer's kids, time, as a scenario builder, has already taken immediate criteria and created a self-perpetuating future. There is no circumstance that will change the outcome of this future, except awareness of said future. Eerie.

Let's get a little weird here. Time travel creates the ability to change outcomes. Whether it is manipulation of the past to alter current events, or knowledge of the future to redirect current events, the manipulator is an intrinsic part of that moment. It is impossible to say that once an individual has handled the past or the future, that they were not a part of that moment for all of that moments life. If time is infinite, and all that will ever happen is forever occurring on her expanse, these moments could not have existed at different moments, much less without each other. Marty's visit to 1955 has always happened.

Thus, the Chuck Berry Dictum; or the theory that all time travel is impossible, because if all moments always occur, the time travel in question was and always is a part of that moment. In a key scene at the end of Back to the Future, Marty McFly plays Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" at the school dance. This video is terrible, and destined to go down any second, but if you go the 1:42 mark, something miraculous happens. Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck to share this wild rock and roll sound. If the implication here is that Chuck Berry learned how to rock by listening to Marty, who had grown up in a world where the legend Chuck Berry taught him how to rock, that snake eats its own tail. The moments can't exist without each other. Marty might not have been aware of this until it came up in his life's chronology, but his awareness notwithstanding, the moment had happened, just not in his life yet.

Personally...(sigh)...I hope that none of this is true. I mean, I want to kill baby Hitler (or whatever...)as much as the next guy, but not to the point that I would trade in my humanity. Our actions and ourselves dissolve into the void for a reason, the immovable past is the stuff of human experience. Forgiveness and evolution and affirmation grow from these closed books. Furthermore, the undecided future is the only line of control we have in our lives. If we're on a trajectory to a fixed point, what's all the damn fuss? We make plans and approximate outcomes, but the things larger than us are too savvy to let those designs proceed uninterrupted. That is excruciating humanness, otherwise, we'd live in a phony edifice of our un-made mistakes. As many times as I've watched inferior versions of Back to the Future re-cut for cable, I'm hard pressed to believe the best life is tagged with the disclaimer:

"The following has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen, to run in the time allotted, and edited for content."