Time Travel on TV

Life in the institution was not only different from the outside, time was too.  Standing by the window and looking into the forest I knew that if I had been there, sitting under a tree and looking over at these buildings time would have been barely noticeable, I would have drifted as lightly through the day as the clouds across the sky, whereas inside the institution and looking out, time was much heavier, almost claylike, as though here it met obstacles and was always being forced to take detours, like a river traversing a plain before joining the sea, one might imagine, winding its way in countless labyrinthine, meandering bends.

--Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, v. 5, Archipelago Books 2016 (translated by Don Bartlett)

I have always been intrigued by time travel, though I have had little trouble doing it.  If I want to go back to the early 20^th C. I read Maugham, Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and to the 19^th C. I like Trollope and Dickens.  For visiting the 18^th C. I read Smollet and Richardson and for the 17^th I read Milton and Cervantes.  For the 14^th C. there is Chaucer and back to the 8^th C. B.C. for Homer.  And, of course, there is art from almost every period in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan in New York. 

According to James Gleik (Time Travel, 2016) the idea of literal time travel began with H.G.. Wells and his novel The Time Machine in 1895.  Gleik does a good job covering the literature (Nabokov, Borges, Asimov, Finney) and the science of time travel (Einstein, Hawking) but neglects the romantic and emotional appeal of loving someone in another time period or going back to prevent the death of a loved one.  This has been important in popular culture and I will just mention some of the recent TV shows that have explored this subject.

Simon Barrys "Continuum" is a Canadian show that ran for several seasons on the SyFy channel.  Some political activists go back in time to prevent the rise of a totalitarian corporate state and a law enforcement officer named Keira gets sucked in with them.  She tries to stop the activists, who went from 2077 to 2012, while trying to get back to her husband and child.  "Continuum" – much like the other time travel shows – works out its own way of dealing with the time travel paradoxes, as more than one version of some of the protagonists appear and even meet each other.  Keira finally does get back to her own time where, of course, everything has changed.

In "Outlander", which has had two seasons on Starz so far, a woman falls asleep in Scotland at the end of WW II and is mysteriously transported (there is no time machine) to the 18^th C. , where she aids the Scots against the English, marries a Scot (even though she has a husband in the 20^th C), and even attempts to stop the Jacobite rebellion, in order to save Scotland.  This series was put together by Ronald D. Moore, who had worked on Star Trek and Battleship Galactica shows.  The first season has impressive location shooting, though the second series gets somewhat stuck in a studio Paris. Costume design and music are reasonably authentic.  The show is based on a series of historical novels by Diana Gabaldon and is effectively both romantic and didactic.

"Frequency" is a TV series developed by Jeremy Carver from the movie by Gregory Hoblit (2000)and has just finished its first season on CW.  In this interesting variation on time travel only HAM radio waves travel through time.  Detective Raimy Sullivan accidentally contacts her father by radio –who is back in 1996--and is able to prevent his death that year.  By preventing his death, however, she changed the timeline so that her mother was killed by a serial killer.  In order to get her mother back she has to help her father, twenty years in the past, to catch the serial killer before her mother is killed. As events change in 1996, with Raimy’s help, it affects things in 2016.  It all makes some sense, in a dizzying logical way.  Like many recent Time Travel tales, "Frequency" is influenced by Ray Bradbury’s short story "Sound of Thunder "(1952), where a butterfly killed by a time traveler during the period of the dinosaurs changes things in the present.

"Timeless"just ended its first season on NBC.  This series, created by Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan, includes two time machines, one of which is stolen by a man who wants to track down the conspirators who killed his wife and son.  A government team follows him to the Alamo, The French and Indian War, and the Chicago of Al Capone, among other places.  One of the government operatives loses her sister because she changes things when she tries to stop the destruction of the Hindenberg.  Another of the government operatives tries to prevent the murderer of his wife from ever being born and accidentally kills the wrong relative when he goes back to the seventies. The show perhaps tries to do too much in too many different eras, though it does effectively portray Stephen King’s concept (in 11/22/63) that when you try to change time, time pushes back.  The production values are unusually high for a network show, with one of the government operatives in charge of making sure they have correct clothes for each historical period they go to.

Channel 13

In the 70’s, before there was cable TV in New York, one would often hear people say “the only TV I watch is channel 13.”   Thirteen showed Masterpiece Theatre and occasionally foreign films, as well as opera and, sometimes, ballet.  Then along came cable, with its uncensored dramas and films on AMC, IFC and Sundance that were uncut and commercial-free.  Now the only station I watch on cable is Turner Classic Movies, the other channels having succumbed to mostly schlock and commercials.  Films that once might have been on cable are now more often found on channel 13 –which has stayed true to itself –especially in the Independent Lens and American Masters series.  Recently channel 13 showed in the latter series films about Loretta Lynn, movingly directed by Vikram Jayanti, and a film about Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese’s 2005 film "No Direction Home" follows Dylan up to 1966 and includes lots of early footage of his performances and interviews, as well as lengthy excerpts from an interview of Dylan by his manager Jeff Rosen, in which Dylan talks about his work in a relative straightforward way.  Some of us who lived through Dylan’s progress from political folksinger to rock ‘n roll still have strong feelings about the changes, with some feeling betrayed (there were cries of “Judas” at his concerts) and others feeling that an artist has to pursue his vision in his own way, the explicit political songs being a dead end.  Scorsese covers it all in illuminating detail, including interviews with Dave Van Ronk, Pete Seeger and Allen Ginsberg.

On Independent Lens channel 13 showed "Birth of a Movement" recently, directed by Bestor Cramer and Susan Gray and focusing on African-American journalist William Monroe Trotter and his attempt to stop D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece Birth of a Nation in 1915.  He failed at stopping the film but his efforts did lead to an increase in awareness of the role of the black man in America.  Griffith himself was aghast that anyone could consider him a bigot and made the magisterial Intolerance in 1916.  Also recently on Independent Lens was Keith Maitland’s "Tower".  This extraordinary film depicts the shootings at the University of Texas in 1966, mostly from the point of view of the victims. I have always disliked so-called re-enactments of crimes and other events and Maitland has instead used rotoscoping, animation based on actual film footage.  This produces an effect of immediacy while still maintaining a proper distance, not attempting (as re-enactments typically try to do) to be realistic, while still capturing a depiction of reality.

Philip Roth on Donald Trump

I was pleased to see that Philip Roth may have read my 10/22/16 post about the Presidential debates, in which I quoted Melville’s The Confidence-Man.  Here is what Roth said in the Jan. 30, 2017 “The New Yorker:”

Trump is just a con artist.  The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel – Melville’s last – that could just as well have been called The Art of the Scam…. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.  But whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is:  ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.