Questions of Time

About a year ago, I wrote the beginning of what would be a personal, philosophical wonderment regarding the concept of time, that I would then tie to the “unprecedented moment” we have been living as a society through a handful of narratives that played with the concept as well. I hadn’t finished it, however, because much like time itself, it is forever expanding, so where to begin, and where to end?

Stories often have to cut a linear beginning-middle-and-end to effectively become a good one, but much like Josh Groban reminded Rebecca in "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" in a very hard-hitting song: “life doesn’t make narrative sense”. Of course, though, breaking down the messiness of life into narratives is a way to make sense of it, at times - to me anyhow - and I’d have to say that’s my motivation here. So, with a little more hindsight at my disposal, here are my existential thoughts and continuous questions regarding the construct of “time”, through some of today's narratives.

2020’s motif is time.

Now, I don’t just mean the year 2020. I mean the entire decade unfolding ahead of us. I suppose that is true for any calendar year or life-time-category. But now so more than ever, there is an unignorable ongoing clock running above our heads, rather, screaming its red digital stopwatch in our collective consciousness, isn’t there? Whether it’s the impending climate catastrophe and the 2030 goal to avert it, somehow. Whether it’s the sense that, in a lot of ways, history is repeating itself, unfortunately; all of those “never-agains”, or political backtracking of progress. Or maybe, its just my perspective as a 20-something young adult of my generation, paralyzed by innumerable possibilities for a long, surely not so easy, life ahead. I am more conscious now of the passage of time than ever before – my aging and new changes and chapters, noticing repeating patterns and cyclical themes in our modern society…

But a year ago I wrote myself the following:

«To me, it seems that when going gets tough, time taunts us with its own abstraction, and demands we pay attention to the very construct itself.

Like every new year, we thought of time. Resolutions, vacation plans, and what we want the year to bring. Then, the pandemic hit, and the world paused. Time seemed to stand still. Then, days morphed into a quarantined indistinguishable grey, and before we knew it, months flew by. The summer passed. One world shaking event after another made us look back at past actions, at how we got to where we are, as we suffer the consequences. Now, as September rolls through, it’s the future we are focused on. Elections, climate changes and catastrophes putting into question our futures and livelihoods, new phases of the same pandemic and the long wait for a vaccine or cure, whenever that may be, if ever.»

The good news for past-me is that not long after writing this more than one reliable vaccine was developed! Yay! And at the time of this current writing, I’m fully vaccinated. Yay again! Of course, many aren’t taking the vaccines we waited for at all, which is a whole other ordeal…

But moving on, it was in this messy time that I started to notice many recent narratives had doubled down on playing with time, just as we sat in our living rooms watching our time painstakingly fly by within 4 walls at all times:

"The Umbrella Academy"’s second season came out last year and had the Hargreeves siblings get dispersed through the ‘60s to prevent another apocalypse, only to end up in what surely will be a changed branch of time or alternate future. But all the while, questions of policing, security, and race boiled over in our reality. So, to have, in fiction, Allison and her siblings live through, firsthand, this monumental example of a time in our world’s history where injustice was still so heavily prevalent (really, it was only a few decades ago) and change fought so ardently for, was incredibly on-the-nose to watch.

Similarly, "Agents of Shield"’s final season ended in a very high note by having the team travel through Shield’s history across different decades of the 20th century, looping back to a “pre-snap” 2019 hail-Mary alternate timeline where everyone is saved to live the most deserved and fitting happily-ever-after written in a long time. Without leaning too hard on preachy social-activism undertones as others might easily do, the drama and action reflect how times change, how out of time our heroes were, and hammered an arrant “ripples, not waves” empathic philosophy into addressing history-affecting figures and problems.

"Brooklyn Nine-Nine"'s 7th season, if memory recalls correctly, zoomed past months humorously well, be it through Jake and Amy’s struggling baby-making efforts, or through a fresh, holidays-long take on the Halloween Heist. Written and shot before the pandemic, it is all the more harrowing to see some jokes land as prophetic commentary on its time of release. Boyle doppleganger Bill’s “tough march there, buddy?” look, Pimento’s giant tattoo reminder to buy toilet paper, and the season’s last words being “everyone wash your hands!” unpredictably hit the mark that slingshot its viewers back to reality’s pressing issues.

Meanwhile, the hit Hulu movie, “Palm Springs”, starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Millioti, had us stuck in a time loop in a Californian desert wedding scene, that refreshed the “Groundhog Day” formula into a fitting search for meaning. This, as many of us relived the same day in front of a screens, in our homes, in a mentally destabilizing routine. For this reason alone, the humor coupled with the existentially dark mood was a saving grace to us all in the same boat- er, pool float.

I’d also like to point out the Disney+ release of a stage-recording of the hit musical “Hamilton” by Lin-Manuel Miranda, which not only re-ignited listening to the masterful soundtrack for those who were already obsessed back in 2015-16, but also proved yet again how much of the play’s themes and commentary on legacy and history continue to resonate “today”, and gain further layers of meaning in accordance to the political issues at hand in “the present moment”.

Without getting lost in the Jearimy-Bearimy, timey-wimey of it all, however, 2021 has continued on with this trend, despite how many stories’ writing or production had started far before the pandemic’s preeminence of time began to be felt.

Marvel’s latest releases, leading up to the fourth phase regarding a “Multiverse of Madness”, such as “Wandavision”, “Loki”, “What if”, and others, have also gone on to play with different strands of time shaped by a Time Variance Authority, or by rogue lone-wolfs trying to set some form of equilibrium for themselves. I’m still catching up on these, so it is exciting to see how, exactly, time will be played with. But, if the underrated Shield’s years long efforts showed us anything about this cinematic universe, its that time has a massive effect on character development and world-building.

So, as a lover of time-travel stories, there is a lot to unpack in each given case. However, it is clear that most, if not all, of these examples came to be long before “time” became such a central, yet continuously elusive and vague, concept in our current era.

A year ago I had also written:

«It wasn’t on January 1st that marked this year (2020) so terribly. Many things weren’t necessarily a product of some action beginning this very year. Some things have been a long time coming. Truly, the pandemic simply exacerbated everything, became a catalyst for the sucky stuff to suck even more.

When you are holding a long jump-rope with someone on the other end, and you begin bouncing the string, you create a wave. Highs and lows in perpetual motion. Certain periods throughout our society, are on a high, then wave down to a low, and back up, and back down, and so on. Then each of us individually have our own personal highs and lows. Of course, this all depends on the perspective of who's telling history too. But, it seems to me that, collectively, we’ve been in a clear descent for a long time now, and this is the year of the crash. A crash. However, long before we hit this rock bottom, our artists have been noticing the descent. And our storytellers have been playing with time.

We can’t actually control time. Not physically. Not in our realistic realm. But, fiction has been a gift to explore these very temporal notions. Which is why I’m a big fan of time travel stories, and themes tied to destiny, fate or free-will.»

“Timeless” is a phenomenal example of just how dramatic messing with time, feeling it in every decision and action, can be, blending the discipline of History curiously within its narrative. Whatever happens today, or tomorrow, is a consequence of the past, oft long time coming. If given the chance, do we change it? Do we go back and accidentally become our own grandfather, like Philip J. Fry? Or try to assure us future betting money by stealing an almanac with every game result of the last 50 years, like Marty McFly? By talking to JFK before his assassination, or meeting Harriet Tubman, or stepping on the wrong leaf, what is the butterfly effect of anything we do? It can be daunting to go through our everyday life* stuck in this thought-pattern, let alone deciphering it on our own.

*Funnily, I can recall in great detail what my New Years stepping into 2020 was like; how it went down and how I felt. A year ago, I wrote about it:

«Its funny to look back and think of how certain I felt on New Years that 2020 would be a great year, a year of happiness and adventure. I can remember running with my friends to make it to the best spot to watch the fireworks in time for the clock to read midnight. The cold sea-front air pained us to our bones all night long, even when a crowd of young party-people jived all around us. Crazy to think how nonchalant we were about crowds way back in January! That night, I slept on a crowded couch with two of my best friends in the world and can still remember the utter peace and hope I felt in that warm living room. As dawn peaked between the blinds and I, with a numb foot, sat awake thinking of the passage of time, as my melancholic self does often, I couldn’t help but feel a certainty I don’t often allow myself to feel.

I feel cheated by that feeling now. By that hope; by that same calm that lulled me in the backseat of my parents’ car later on that New Years Day, as we drove home, watching the sunset in its pastel hues of blue, pink and orange, whilst listening to the radio’s recording Coldplay's "Everyday Life" concert performed in London just a few days before. I truly believed the year was “so golden and opportune”.

But its hard when, even if your personal life is pretty okay despite the current situations, humanity as a whole is in crisis. When too many people are dying, too many are fighting and shouting, too many are apathetic to the turmoil. So, it may be redundant to say, but there is not a single doubt that 2020 sucks. We’ve all thought it, we’ve all said it at least once by now. And everyday something new reminds us just how far the year can beat us down. I sense though that we are at the cusp of change. We have to. And we’re resilient as a species anyway. So, the takeaway shouldn’t be simply that 2020 sucks. It does. But it should also be, how can we prevent the coming future from sucking further? It should be a cautionary tale.»

The thing is, humanity is too large and too complex to be able to trace everything back to a single point, which is why the idea of threads, of webs, of streams is so interesting and so hot right now in storytelling. Its also why we try to make sense of it through History - it should be a cautionary tale, and its why we are taught it, albeit imperfectly and never 100% thoroughly, for there are vast variables and "times" and figures and perspectives to start from. But, in storytelling now, more than represent a decade or a given time in History, how much more challenging it is to go a step further and not only characterize one or more of those “times”, but to actually modify them, blend them, pastiche them into something else altogether, still recognizable, but scarily changed, manipulated into an unpredictable scenario? Is reality's “today” not a mesh of all that was before, anyhow?

And we, as individuals, often live-in multiple times at once. I, for one, can’t help but think of one moment without being in relation to one of the other two times – past, present and future. I can be here, but also “there”, mentally. And my stream of consciousness will cross and ellipse or parallel all other threads other people trace. History, time, memory, are all interconnected.

Which is also why “Dark” is such a genius take on the time-travelling genre. The inter-connectedness of time and “different worlds”, similar, but far apart, is expertly played in this German Netflix show. In the end, the triquetra collapses into one, in a mind-bending ending tied perfectly with a little bow and cherry on top. "The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning".

All in all, it may still feel as though we are in the “Darkest Timeline”. We joke that nothing has felt quite the same since 2012 – perhaps the world really did end that December like the Mayans predicted, and that all of this since has been purgatory. Or maybe its because, for a bit over a decade now, social media and our digital permanence has commanded so much more of our daily lives and capacity for societal organization than ever before. There is so much to be said about technology and changing media in society, whether to blame it or not, or our use of it - but for now I say its even more interesting to think of the stories that have bridged interactive media with narratives about time, like "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" or "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"’s mini playable movie on Netflix – each allowing for a different story to unfold according to the choices made.

But, for a moment of peace, and to conclude this prolonged existential dread, instead of rewinding to look back at which throw of the die went wrong, and continuously go wrong, in reality - since there are countless, inter-webbed throws - I say we take "Community" Abed Nadir’s simple and warming conclusion to heart:

“Chaos already dominates enough of our lives. The universe is an endless raging sea of randomness. Our job isn't to fight it, but to weather it together, on the raft of life. A raft held together by those few, rare, beautiful things that we know to be predictable: Us. It won't matter what happens to us as long as we stay honest and accepting of each other's flaws and virtues.”