It feels a little silly to talk about time travel fear in the context of Back to the Future. True enough, it gets pretty tense at times when Marty is attempting to set things right and keep himself and his siblings corporeal, but there is always a sense that anything that is broken can be fixed. Doc’s death at the beginning is avoided by a note from Marty handed off in the past. And by the end of the film, with Doc’s advancements of the DeLorean to make it run on garbage instead of plutonium, worries of being able to fuel the travel back and forth at will are sufficiently handled[1].
My fear of time travel likely stems from a Ray Bradbury story, “A Sound of Thunder.” (The story was also adapted into a film, if you’re not much of a reader. But as usual, the story is better. A synopsis follows here, so if you plan to read or watch, please do so before reading on.) In this story, time travel has been implemented and controlled, and time travel tourism has become a popular thing for the rich to do. The particular time travel trip in the story regards a group going back in time to prehistory to hunt and kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex. In order to avoid the possibility of changing time, a scout goes back in time first and marks out location and time coordinates where a Tyrannosaurus Rex is just about to die a natural death. This will enable the group to travel back and kill the animal just before it would have died on its own, thus leaving the timeline intact and not introducing any changes. The hunters will walk on a levitating path to avoid disturbing anything else and potentially creating catastrophic change in the timeline. One of the hunters, however, loses his nerve when the time comes to kill the dinosaur. He returns to the time machine, but on the way, he steps off the path and stumbles into the forest. When the group returns to the present, there are subtle but noticeable changes to the timeline. People speak differently and the recent election result is different, with the Fascist candidate having won. The hunter notices a crushed butterfly on his boot, and he returns to the safari group to explain that his accidental killing of the butterfly has created drastic consequences. He begs to go back to fix the damage, but this is not allowed as it could create time paradoxes.
Bradbury’s story is an example of the butterfly effect, the idea that any small change, including the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, could have drastic consequences. This is a rabbit hole that it’s easy for me to go down anyway. Not just in terms of time travel, but in general. For example, if your parents had not conceived you at exactly the time they did, you might not exist in your current form. Every distinct event of your life shapes who you are as a person. Every choice you make leads you away from a totally different life you might have had. It’s enough to make an already slightly anxious person like myself fully neurotic.
Of course, there’s yet another form of time travel that I haven’t hit on, and that’s the time travel that results from faster than light travel and relativity. Interstellar explores this rather handily, but if you only have a few minutes, you could also listen to the Queen song “’39.” Believe it or not, the movie and the song go over pretty much exactly the same ground[2]. Simply put, a group of astronauts uses faster than light travel to search for a new world to colonize. While time passes normally back on earth, the astronauts end up skipping over time. This leads to a scenario where the returning astronauts have only aged a few years, while earth has marched on much farther, creating a situation where the astronaut’s children and grandchildren are actually older than the astronaut at this point. It’s a great sacrifice on the part of the astronauts to remove themselves from the normal timeline in order to try to save earth through colonization. Honorable, but again, terrifying to me. So even without introducing treks back to the past, time travel finds a way to worry me again.
I hope most people are more like John and can enjoy the idea of time travel without a side of anxiety! But at the same time, the scary side of time travel makes for some imaginative and exciting stories. I guess I’ll have to take the bad with the good, and find a way to stay comfy regardless.
[1] Although this ease of travel is cleverly subverted in the third film when Marty travels back to the 1800s and runs out of gas, which prevents the car from hitting the required 88 miles per hour necessary to engage the flux capacitor.
[2] Wait, really? Yes. Remember, Brian May is both a phenomenal lead guitarist and an astrophysicist. He even kind of looks like Isaac Newton. (Talk about an overachiever.) May wrote “’39” to explore the idea of relativity and time travel, and Interstellar does exactly the same thing in the same way.
Comfort Films Episode 6: Back to the Future (Released November 12, 2021)
