Time-Travel Romance on Film: Archetypes and Structures WYN WACHHORST • We are indebted to H. G. Wells not only for the notion of voluntary time travel but also for the image hy which we conceive it: a sunny, Edwardian gentleman perched on an ornate steam-age contraption that moves through time in much the same manner that a streetcar moves across town. This spatialized view of time, along with its Newtonian catechism, has in- creasingly gone the way of howler hats and high hutton shoes in the new world of Einstein and quantum physics. The accelerating paradigm shift in Western culture—the "reenchantment of the world," as some call it—has created a parascientific twilight zone that encroaches on hoth the natural and supernatural, making it ever more difficult to distinguish hetween fan- tasy and reality, let alone fantasy and science fiction. To what extent, for example, does a film like Our Town or The Ghost and Mrs. Muir imply time travel? Searching for critical essays on time travel in science fiction is something like Leonardo da Vinci getting together a bibliography on air transporta- tion. One finds a half dozen pieces which are little more than short, anno- tated reading lists or exercises on the logic of time travel. The situation is worse for discussions of film, there heing only two items that extend heyond a passing reference, and these are no more than scant filmographies grouped into arbitrary categories.' Although the offhand treatment of the suhject reflects the state of science fiction film criticism in general, time travel has only recently become a frequent cinematic theme, having in- creased by more than fifty percent relative to the rise in total science fiction films during the past decade.^ Using various criteria, which form the suhject of another essay, I nar- rowed the 207 entries in my near-exhaustive time-travel filmography to 51 340 Time-Travel Romance on Film items that I considered solid treatments of the theme. In a sentence, my definition required that the film explore the implications of the theme itself as a major aspect of plot and character development. The 51 films that qualify under these rather rigid conditions fall into two obvious categories: contact with the past and contact with the future. The psychological appeal of the two is so different that they have more in common with other science fiction themes than with one another. Thus the narrowing of the discussion to the couple of dozen items that iVe called the time-travel romance, a form dating at least from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King A rthur 's Court, written in 1889 and filmed five times to date. It is the structure of the time-travel romance, I will argue, that is archetypal to all tales of encounter with the past. The Archetypes of the Time-Travel Romance The fundamental components of the time-travel romance are (1) a male time traveler who encounters (2) a female inhabitant of another time. Usu- ally the male belongs to the present and the female to the past, though there are variations—notably Time After Time (1979) and The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), which are less successful as a result, and The Time Machine (I960), which owes much of its appeal to the fact that Weena is encountered in an Edenic setting associated with paradise lost. It is interest- ing that even in Quest For Love (1971) where the hero moves sideways in time into a parallel universe,^ the incongruities of the alternate world still suggest the innocence of the past - a more feminine world, where Everest and the moon remain unconquered and heart surgery is unknown—a world, that is, with less compulsion to violate the heart or displace God, one where Kennedy is still president, Vietnam still an obscure country, and the last bit of innocence was not lost in the sixties. Archetypal to the time-travel romance, then, is an innocent, feminine world invaded by the omnipotent male time traveler. The limited knowl- edge and provinciality of past society itself reinforces the aura of innocence as does the pastoral emphasis in the films. But almost without exception, the heroine herself projects a wistful innocence, even ingenuousness. The ravishing beauty who has never heard of a kiss has always been a science fiction staple; but pristine naivet6 is particularly common to time-travel romance. "Where is this Con-nec-ti-cut?" asks Alisande in Connecticut Yankee (1948), eyes blinking in dumb-blonde fashion. "I do not under- stand you, but I believe you," says Weena to Wells's time traveler, speaking always in short, simple sentences. The heroine's innocence also implies the archetypal role of Daughter, enhancing the hero's paternal masculinity. In Somewhere in Time (1980), EHse's Svengali-like manager reinforces her daughter image. And Jennie is a little girl when she first appears to the painter in Portrait of Jennie (1949). 341 Wyn Wachhorst Paradoxically, however, the heroine is also the Mother. Her innocence and her Edenic milieu suggest a childhood universe in which her transcend- ent mystique can then imply Motherhood. Her attunement to the hero's inner being—her unconditional love- reinforces this image. Helen's sensi- tivity transcends the shallow sophistication of her aristocratic family in Berkeley Square {\93>^). She empathizes with the time traveler's apparent confusion and defends him against the others, who fear his strange manner. When the Connecticut Yankee is condemned as an ogre, Alisande protests, sensing innocence in his eyes. And it is Fiona who finally welcomes Tommy to Brigadoon after all the others have shunned him. in Star Trek's "City On the Edge of Forever" (1967), Edith Keeler functions like a Reverend Mother, serving free meals in her mission, preaching world peace, shelter- ing Kirk and Spock, and treating them like mischievous boys. When the time traveler in La Jetee (1962) searches for his childhood memory of the girl on the jetty, he at first gets only fleeting glimpses of her—like small- child memories of mother; and in the end he asks to be returned "to the world of his childhood, and the woman who perhaps awaited him." And in Somewhere in Time, as Collier enters the 1912 hotel in search of Elise, the orchestra is playing—no joke—"1 Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad." The image of the omniscient Mother is aided by the aura of mystery and transcendence surrounding the women encountered by time travelers. In Berkeley Square, allusions to Helen's psychic ability are borne out when she views twentieth-century images by looking into Peter's eyes. There is often a sense that the heroine's deeper self (perhaps the archetypal Feminine—Nature, the Great Mother, or the communal oneness of all)'' somehow "knows" that he is a time traveler without her individual con- sciousness knowing that she knows. Alisande has "a strange forboding" that she will not see the Connecticut Yankee again. In Twilight Zone\ "No Time Like the Past" (1963), Abby says, "Why do I get this feeling that you are on the outside looking in, or just passing by. Who are you, Paul Driscoll, and where are you from?" And EUse's soliloquy on stage in Somewhere in Time implies a suspicion that Richard is not really there. Some films go a step beyond psychic awareness and suggest that the girl's vision encompasses worlds beyond the reach of even the time traveler. Fi- ona harbors the secret of Brigadoon (1954) into the second half of the film. In Somewhere in Time, when the girt meets the hero by the lake in 1912, having triggered his time trip as an old woman in 1972, she whispers, "Is it you?" Similarly, in "Poor Butterfly," a segment of Journey into Midnight (1969), the hero finds himself at a mysterious costume party, circa 1929, where he is approached by a girl who says, "I was afraid you wouldn't come." The girl in Portrait of Jennie, who hears the stars come out, is 342 Time-Travel Romance on Film herself the mystery from the first moment she appears out of the mist in Central Park singing her nonsense rhyme: "Where I come from nobody knows, and where I'm going everything goes." But the classic tale of a time traveler encountering a girl whose powers transcend his own is Twilight Zone's "The Trouble With Templeton" (1960), about a disillusioned man. Booth Templeton, whose only happy memories are of his wife, Laura, who died in her youth. Finding himself suddenly back in 1927, he encounters her in a speakeasy but finds her dif- ferent: flirtatious, vulgar, and self-centered. At one point she slaps him and says, "Why don't you go back where you came from? We don't want you here!" His idyllic memories destroyed, he rushes out the door. The moment he exits, the raucous music, loud conversation, and laughter immediately cease, and all is silent and still. The smoke which had suggested gaiety a moment before now seems ghostly, while Laura's expression reflects her true nature: intelligent, full of sorrow and longing. Back in the present. Booth discovers that he has inadvertently pocketed some papers with which Laura had been fanning herself. It is a script entitled "What To Do When Booth Comes Back."' Laura had chosen the ultimate maternal sacri- fice, risking all that remained of herself—her image in his memory—to destroy his obsession with the past. He thus picks up his life with new commitment. The autocentric aspect of this vision is important.