(no subject)
Aug. 27th, 2009 02:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWe saw The Time Traveler's Wife last week. I hallucinated something into the plot. If you've seen it or aren't likely to:
Toward the end the time traveler, whose ability is congenital and ill-controlled, realizes he is going to die soon, having a) noticed he never runs into future selves past c. age 45, b) been told so by his daughter, who time travels in from the future, c) observed himself lying on the floor bleeding and naked. (Why naked? Because it's patently absurd to think your clothes would time travel with you, of course.)
A moment comes when he pops away, and then some other version of him eventually pops in - shivering, naked, on the floor. Next scene he's in the hospital, where mention is made of hypothermia. He recovers, is in a wheelchair, explains that he was being chased in the snow by two men and hopped onto a train or something and was saved by suddenly time traveling.
My mistaken assumption was that the hypothermia was a complication of the shooting. This turns out to be a second incident, though: he's fatally wounded by a hunter, I believe his father-in-law, when he time travels into the forest at his wife's childhood home. As we never see that other scene with the train and there are two hunters (and it's snowy out so there's every reason for hypothermia to have happened, esp. to someone bleeding heavily), when this scene finally comes and then we're suddenly at his funeral I become very confused. He was in a wheelchair from this very injury, I think, so how can he be dead?
Here's where I briefly hallucinate: Ah! He's been dead the whole time--this wheelchair thing was a fakery. One of his past selves must have stepped in shortly before his own death, plausibly falsified the fatal injury with some less extreme version on his own person, gotten rid of his future corpse, and convinced his wife he was going to live--she'd been getting understandably agitated about all those signs of his imminent death. So he faked his own life out of love for her, in order to soften the blow or give them more time together or both or some other reason.
That is a kickass plot twist, all suffusive with logically confusing but tragic romanciness of the kind the movie was trying for, and I guess I have copyright to it? The crippling but non-fatal incident is a red herring but (unless extensive cuts were made) it didn't seem intended to foster my particular misreading. Maybe someone who's read the book can correct me, though.
Julie, trying to follow my explanation but who had correctly picked up that his death would occur on the floor, objected, But he was at the hospital! I counterobjected, They took him there--it's not like he can't travel through space.
The movie is silly enough that you do tend to forget he can travel through space.
Toward the end the time traveler, whose ability is congenital and ill-controlled, realizes he is going to die soon, having a) noticed he never runs into future selves past c. age 45, b) been told so by his daughter, who time travels in from the future, c) observed himself lying on the floor bleeding and naked. (Why naked? Because it's patently absurd to think your clothes would time travel with you, of course.)
A moment comes when he pops away, and then some other version of him eventually pops in - shivering, naked, on the floor. Next scene he's in the hospital, where mention is made of hypothermia. He recovers, is in a wheelchair, explains that he was being chased in the snow by two men and hopped onto a train or something and was saved by suddenly time traveling.
My mistaken assumption was that the hypothermia was a complication of the shooting. This turns out to be a second incident, though: he's fatally wounded by a hunter, I believe his father-in-law, when he time travels into the forest at his wife's childhood home. As we never see that other scene with the train and there are two hunters (and it's snowy out so there's every reason for hypothermia to have happened, esp. to someone bleeding heavily), when this scene finally comes and then we're suddenly at his funeral I become very confused. He was in a wheelchair from this very injury, I think, so how can he be dead?
Here's where I briefly hallucinate: Ah! He's been dead the whole time--this wheelchair thing was a fakery. One of his past selves must have stepped in shortly before his own death, plausibly falsified the fatal injury with some less extreme version on his own person, gotten rid of his future corpse, and convinced his wife he was going to live--she'd been getting understandably agitated about all those signs of his imminent death. So he faked his own life out of love for her, in order to soften the blow or give them more time together or both or some other reason.
That is a kickass plot twist, all suffusive with logically confusing but tragic romanciness of the kind the movie was trying for, and I guess I have copyright to it? The crippling but non-fatal incident is a red herring but (unless extensive cuts were made) it didn't seem intended to foster my particular misreading. Maybe someone who's read the book can correct me, though.
Julie, trying to follow my explanation but who had correctly picked up that his death would occur on the floor, objected, But he was at the hospital! I counterobjected, They took him there--it's not like he can't travel through space.
The movie is silly enough that you do tend to forget he can travel through space.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 07:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 07:38 am (UTC)Showing up and letting yourself out of it.
Placing the parts of the time travel machine needed to go back into your own past in the room, maybe by throwing a special bag in through the window.
Having to build the room in the first place before you can let yourself out of it.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 08:03 am (UTC)single-world time travel:
you wouldnt be able to meet yourself though you could show up before your incarceration, leave the time travel bits, or you could walk around outside the room without seeing yourself (or, be in a side room connected to the first room in certain ways!) -- you could escape simply by time travelling to a point previous in time where the door was open, but you wouldnt be able to escape before setting up your escape system or else the world would be DESTROYED.
branching multiple-worlds:
you could go back in time and change stuff in your own timeline and even meet yourself but since these others are not you per se you wouldnt be able to escape yourself -- a system of permutations would be needed, go back in time, flip a switch, kill yourself, resurrect as next trapped-in-room-man in a groundhog day eventually-get-it-right scenario. that is, if you dont mind leaving a string of dead selves in your wake (which always horrified me about groundhog day).
single malleable world:
the world where you can go back in time and give yourself something and then it would immediately appear in your current inventory. the least plausible of the worlds but really good for video games, like that time in day of the tentacle where you go into the past and hide a bottle of wine and four hundred years later it's vinegar.
shame it's not possible to simulate time travel without, you know, inventing time travel. this is something that computers should be able to solve.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 07:40 am (UTC)As soon as you escape, the game puts you in a second room: a hardware store, where you have to buy the items that enabled your escape. Shopping spree ending.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 07:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 07:12 pm (UTC)And if you don't mind my sleep-deprived unwitty alluding, as I was reading through this I began to think - it is the Enchanted Hunters? Or the Hunted Enchanters?
no subject
Date: 2009-08-28 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-29 02:06 pm (UTC)And...I think I like that idea itself, this default trope of that confusion, and it reminds me of having this default problem - which it what sounds like comes off of this film. As in, "whenever I'm not thinking about it too hard, or not thinking too hard about something else, or at other times, I find myself on a strange floor, bloody and naked."
You know, the traumatic problem that, since it's always waiting, you're always deferring, and anyway when you even try to think about it it's elusive. It's a part of your own psyche that seems at times to hunt you or enchant you, or to defend itself with enchantment when you try to hunt it. Etc.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-01 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-01 08:26 pm (UTC)