EUROPEAN HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY

Academic Department of Media

Master Degree Program

Cultural Studies
Visual and Cultural Studies

ANTONINA IVANOVA
Second year student

TIME TRAVEL FICTION:

HISTORICAL IMAGINATION OF UTOPIAN WORLDS
(CINEMATOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS)

MASTER THESIS

Research supervisor:
PhD, Professor Andrei Gornykh

Vilnius, 2014
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Ivanova, Antonina

I-98 Time travel fiction: historical imagination of utopian worlds (cinematographic representations):
Master degree thesis / Antonina Ivanova ; research supervisor PhD Andrei Gornykh ; European
Humanities University. Academic Department of Media. – Vilnius, 2014. – 83 p. : ill., tabl. –
Typescript. – Summary in Russian. – Bibliogr.: p. 78-81 (51 titles).

UDK 008:82

Key Words: Time travel, Science Fiction, Culture Studies, Narrative, Nonlinear Narratives, Time
Machine, Utopian worlds

This study is an examination of the changes that the time-travel narrative in popular culture goes
through these days. The aim of this paper is, though, twofold: to reveal the historical, economic and
social preconditions of the emergence of the popular fantasy of time travel and to distinguish the
peculiarities of the evolution of the fantasy nowadays. The compliant objectives of the study are the
following: examine the dehistoricization of the modern society, its main reasons and theories;
Research the process of time rationalization and the emergence of the temporality in cinematic
representations; Reveal the origins and the context of the shaping of the time machine idea in the 19 th
century; Track the peculiarities of the transition of the literary fantasy to cinematic representations;
Analyze the transformation of the time travel narrative from 19th century and until now; Find out the
most topical issues (symptoms) that are reflected in the contemporary time travel narrative; Reveal
the critical potential of the time machine: see the way that the utopian worlds are constructed in time
travel fiction (the manipulations with alternative worlds as well as a traumatic experience of
historical events); Evaluate time travel as a narrative tool in modern popular culture.
Thus, the choice of the main subject of the research is vital for understanding the goals and
objectives of the study: the impact of the classic Wells novel on time travel fiction can scarcely be
overestimated. Likewise, with the ongoing process of dehistoricization the time travel fiction as a
genre could be a very informative model and metaphor for the way that culture deals with the
traumatic experiences in the era of late capitalism.
A combined methodology of three stages was used to analyze the cinematographic representations
in popular culture: «Background» mode (analysis of social and historical aspects of a given period of
time, when the film was created and perceived); «Middle plane» (typical patterns and their
transformations in different time travel fiction); «Close-up» (analysis of specific cinematographic
features based on the frame sequences and editing syntax).
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The conclusion of the paper stated that, most likely, the roots of time travel fiction as we
understand it today leads us to the 19th century, the era of industrialization. The end of the
geographical discoveries era made it harder to find new scenes for new utopian stories: the spatial
dimension no longer could provide the writer with the necessary scenery of ultimate change of the
Utopia. Here is where the spatial dimension gives way to the temporality. Since there was barely any
unexplored space on the geographical map, the temporal dimension opened a whole new epoch in
fiction.
The rapid technology development also played its role in the emergence of time travel fantasy: the
increasing gap between the pas and the future had to be filled with new culturally legitimate
narratives.
Today we can actually see the process of construction of a completely new way of understanding
time and time-related issues. Time is perceived as a complex and ambiguous concept that brings a
whole new level of anxiety to the society. However, as we could see from the research, culture
manages to effectively cope with such difficulties, forming new strategies and showing that even the
most fragmented experience could become a basis of consolidation.
Cinema, as a very powerful tool of late capitalism machinery, develops a somewhat therapeutic
effect in its ways of representing the experience of time: the explanation of time dimension changes,
as well as the metaphors, images, visualizations and the social characteristics of the utopian worlds.
This thesis can be helpful for researchers in the fields of visual and cultural studies, as well as for
students of anthropology, art theory and film studies.
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 5
1. TIME PERCEPTION IN THE LATE CAPITALISM SOCIETY AND THE CINEMATIC
TEMPORALITY .................................................................................................................................... 8
1.1. Evolution of time perception and dehistoricization of experience in the late capitalism society 8
1.2. Rationalization of time and emergence of temporality in cinema ............................................. 13
2. TIME TRAVEL FICTION: DEFINITION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENRE ................ 20
2.1. Definition and evolution of time travel fiction .......................................................................... 20
2.2. Time travel as a narrative tool ................................................................................................... 25
2.3 “The Time Machine” by H. Wells: development of the idea and the role in time travel fiction 28
3. CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF UTOPIAN WORLDS AND TIME TRAVELING ....... 32
3.1. Methodology and data entry criteria .......................................................................................... 32
3.2. Films summary and historical background ................................................................................ 35
3.3. Time and time travel concepts explanation, time travel discourse ............................................ 41
3.4. The concept of Time Machine: evolution and transformation of the image in popular fiction 51
3.5. “What if” worlds: Utopian and Dystopian worlds in science fiction ........................................ 60
3.6. Time traveling as a narrative tool .............................................................................................. 72
CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 76
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................ 78
Популярная фантазия о путешествии во времени: историческое воображаемое об утопических
мирах (кинематографические репрезентации) (Резюме) ............................................................... 82
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INTRODUCTION
Being a very significant part of the day to day life, time should be perceived not only as a physical
concept but rather as a socially constructed and objectively experienced phenomenon. It is vital to
note that lately time has become an even more complex notion, dependent mostly on the major
economic, political and social context of any given society.
As the notions of time and history are central to this research, it seems important to analyze the
development of time perception and experience from a historical point of view. The chain of
consecutive events lead to gradual transformation of the economic system; this process was classified
by Ernest Mandel as the three stages in the development of a capitalist mode of production: freely
competitive capitalism (1700-1850), monopoly capitalism (1850-1940), and finally, late capitalism
(1950-now) characterized by multinational corporations, mass consumption and global markets [34].
Each period of capitalism was also defined by the relation of the exchange value and the use value,
which, naturally, had a great impact on the whole social organization: as the exchange/use ratio
became more and more separate, the rupture between the real and the unreal, the collective and the
individual, the rational and the irrational appeared to be more and more disturbing.
Thereupon F. Jameson suggests a classification of phases of culture evolution corresponding to
each stage of capitalism development [27]. According to Jameson, the increasing gap between the
exchange and use value gradually leads to a constellation of misunderstandings, anxiety and,
eventually, to a complete loss of ability to create coherent historical representations of the personal
and collective time experience.
The period of late capitalism is marked by the postmodern phase of culture, which could be named
the cultural equivalent of detachment and alienation between the individual and the collective
principals. Living in the world of mass consumption and still realizing the major mismatch between
the use and the exchange value results in anxiety and loss of any kind of unity. Thus, the only
legitimate way to keep the society together and avoid dangerous cracks is to allow the repressed
dissatisfaction to break through the cultural artifacts, for example, in cinematic representations.
Due to the gradual transformation of the economic system and the emergence of a corresponding
cultural and stylistic approach, the definition of time became central to cinematic narrative. The
cinematic dimension in cinema went through a significant change from being a linear addition to
space to becoming the basis of the narrative. As there was no adequate or material explanation of
time (especially after rationalization of personal time experience), the notion of time lost its
connection with the material, objective world. From now on, time existed only in the enormous
number of interpretations and cinematic representations in particular. It seems logical, therefore, that
 6

time as well as time travel has always been a powerful tool in film narrative, playing a significant
role in the structure of the film story.
Starting from the first adaptations of “The Time Machine” novel and proceeding to contemporary
TV-shows we can see the transformation of time-travelling representation in mass-culture. At the
same time, those variations reflect changes in social, economic and political situations in the modern
(or postmodern) society.
In the 19th century with the evolution of industrialization the concept of time changes drastically.
Time appears to be a currency; it actually obtains a money equivalent. The emergence of strict
working hours, the invention and popularization of the very mechanism of clocks marks the era of
constructing a new, completely artificial concept of time. As a result, the habitual experience of time
and the artificially constructed one come into collision, or a complete disconnection between the past,
present and the future.
Even though it may seem coincidental, the first appearance of the time machine in literature
belongs to the end of 19th century, and that was the time of industrial revolution and major changes in
economic and cultural spheres. It does not, therefore, come as a surprise that “The Time Machine” by
H. Wells [47] becomes the most popular novel about time travel and, moreover, one of the most
topical even nowadays (judging from the number of visualizations and references in mass culture).
Losing the strong connection between time and space in the mediatized society, contemporary
film producers appeal to time-travelling as a narrative tool which brings some order and sense to the
atemporal structure of our being. The time machine itself is used as a clue that ties up the incoherent
and separated fragments of history and time.
On a deeper level of analysis time-travelling becomes a utopian project of a «what if...» world,
and, therefore, an important critical modus of late capitalism. Showing the ultimate difference
between the modern society and the alternative one, time travel fiction reveals the contradictions
most likely reflecting the fears and disturbance of the repressed society. At the same time, cinematic
representations serve as a powerful legitimizing tool, as cinema has always been an important part of
the capitalist system.
This study is an examination of the changes that the time-travel narrative in popular culture goes
through these days. To illustrate those changes I will analyze some of the most indicative films and
shows on time-traveling from 1960s until today and try to build a timeline of the changing role of
time-travelling in mass-culture.
The goal of this paper is, though, twofold: to reveal historical, economic and social preconditions
of the emergence of the popular fantasy of time travel and to distinguish peculiarities of evolution of
the fantasy nowadays. The compliant objectives of the study are the following:
1) Examine dehistoricization of the modern society, its main reasons and theories;
 7

2) Research the process of time rationalization and emergence of temporality in

cinematic representations;
3) Reveal the origins and context of shaping the time machine idea in the 19th century;
4) Track peculiarities of the transition of the literary fantasy to cinematic representations;
5) Analyze transformation of the time travel narrative from 19th century and until now;
6) Find out the most topical issues (symptoms) that are reflected in the contemporary
time travel narrative;
7) Reveal the critical potential of the time machine: see the way that the utopian worlds
are constructed in time travel fiction (manipulations with alternative worlds as well as a
traumatic experience of historical events);
8) Evaluate time travel as a narrative tool in modern popular culture.
Thus, the choice of the main subject of the research is vital for understanding the goals and
objectives of the study: the impact of the classic Wells novel on time travel fiction can scarcely be
overestimated. Likewise, with the ongoing process of dehistoricization the time travel fiction as a
genre could be a very informative model and metaphor for the way that culture deals with the
traumatic experiences in the era of late capitalism.
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1. TIME PERCEPTION IN THE LATE CAPITALISM SOCIETY AND THE

CINEMATIC TEMPORALITY
1.1. Evolution of time perception and dehistoricization of experience in the late
capitalism society
It is quite obvious that with the social, economic and political development the perception of time
and space in the culture has changed drastically. This concerns not only the accelerated lifestyle in
general but also the specific ways of dealing with time-related issues and the concept of time travel in
particular. In this paragraph the aspects of the damaged coherence of the personal experience and its
reflection in mass culture will be analyzed.
Time perception has quite a long history in psychology research starting from 18 th century.
According to one of the classic conceptions, the notion of time refers to succession and duration,
notions both related to the personal experience of change [18]. The concept of succession involves
the perception of two or more different and interrelated events, while the concept of duration
concerns the interval between these two events.
According to Fraisse, time perception is defined as “the attention to, or apprehension of, change
through the integration of a series of stimuli and characterized by the ability to conceive of duration,
simultaneity, and succession” [18]. This definition also implies that time in perception has no straight
relationship to physical time; therefore, time perception is a subjective notion rather than an objective
one.
There are a great number of assumptions concerning the factors that have an impact on the
construction of the subjective time perception and the time perception in a given society as well.
According to the contextual model, the subjective time perception may vary depending on the
following features:
1. Contents of time periods (empty or filled time);
2. Activities during time periods, including temporal and nontemporal attentions;
3. Subjects’ characteristics (personality);
4. Temporal behavior (method of measurement). [6]
So, as we can see, there is a strong connection between time perception and the experience
constructed mainly by the context of a certain social, historical and political situation. The
“historical” interpretation of the role of the contextual factors seems to be the most suitable within
the scope of this work as it provides a clear insight into the processes of historicization and
dehistoricization of experience in the late capitalism society.
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Understanding of history and its definition appears to be a topical issue in the contemporary
philosophical science. As the speed of the evolution development rises, problems of time, history
and the subject’s role in history become more and more complicated.
The rapid development of the economic and high technology leads to inability to process the
present experience: the subject has to refer to his past or to the possible future constantly. Such lack
of ability to transform the actual experience also reflects in mass culture, making the gap between the
past, present and future even more visible. The only way to solve this problem is to figure out more
coherent understanding of history and narrativization of the modern subjects’ experience.
The postmodern society provides an alternative interpretation of history that differs considerably
from the classic, linear concept. The alternative concept shows history as a “mosaic” or a set of
separate events that are not connected by any cause and effect relationships. As a result, many
thinkers of this area (Alain Touraine, Jean Baudrillard) completely turned to the concept of a chaotic
and unknowable history.
The intention to create a more coherent concept of time and history became known as a tendency
of textualization of history and reality in general (Derrida, Foucault). According to the textualization
logic, reality in all its various implementations is accessible only through texts: the world is
constructed as a text and is open for interpretations as textuality.
Foucault’s historicism concerns the spasmodic, uneven changes rather than an evolutionary and
linear social progress. Those changes naturally are arousing new misunderstanding barriers between
different historical epochs. The goal of such deconstructive approach is to emphasize the uniqueness,
sharpness, isolation and the contextual “closeness” of each historical epoch.
The refuse from evolutionism becomes the most evident idea in the article “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History”: “The traditional means of constructing a universal view of history and recreation of the
past as a constant and persistent development have to be systematically dismantling… History
becomes “effective” only to the extent to which it introduces the idea of eruption to our very
existence…” [17]
Hence, history is understood as discontinuity that makes visible the “lack of consistency” to the
viewer and comes out as a sphere of action of the unconsciousness. Foucault denies the existence of
any standing out, immanent historical cause that could allow us to make any kind of conclusions
about the determinism of the subject’s behavior and thinking. However, it could be said that history
itself is some kind of a hidden cause that has a significant influence on subjects while still remaining
latent and unobvious.
The Foucault’s concept of history as a hidden cause is somewhat related to the Althussers’s theory
of structural causality rather than expressive causality.
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So called “expressive causality” has to do with the traditional understanding of cause and effect
relationship: the cause exists as some dominant discourse, while any possible external fact or event,
any part of the whole is determined by the inner essence. Althusser and, later on, Jameson criticized
this approach for being too mechanistic. As an alternative Althusser suggested his own structural
approach, where structure is a feature essential to all of the elements and emerged as a result of the
interaction of these elements rather than being just an organizing principle. This makes the very
concept of the hidden cause more understandable: it is hidden because “it is only available to us in
the form of text and all our efforts to comprehend it and the reality as well, inevitably goes through
the preliminary stage of textualization, narrativization in the political unconscious” [1].
Talking about textualization again, Jameson interprets history as the textualization of the hidden
cause: history is the hidden cause itself as it becomes visible only in the results of its’ own influence,
in a textual from, in the narrative of the political unconscious.
In this interpretation of the political unconscious Jameson proceeds from two general assumptions:
absolute historical, class and ideological determination of any person’s consciousness and, at the
same time, complete lack of awareness about this determination.
Therefore, the main goal of a critic and a historian is the revelation of the political consciousness
not only as a determination of any given individual consciousness, but as a coherent historical
narrative, connecting the past with the present. The collective unconscious narrative is characterized
by Jameson as “collective struggle, that has only one purpose – to wring the land of Freedom from
the fetters of Necessity” [28]
Jameson believes that the investigation of the political unconscious is able to make more visible
the coherent, integrated narrative, the logic and dialectics of history. Narrative is the principal point
in the concept of the political unconscious. As for Foucault, for Jameson the textualized narrative
appears to be the only accurate way to perceive history and that is why it so important to trace the
specific features of this narrative, its evolution through the years as well as nowadays.
One of the most common and obvious literal form – the novel – is, as a matter of fact, an “after-
image” of real events, or the way of processing the changing practical experience. Thus, the very
existence of a coherent narrative reflecting the reality is a clear sign of a “healthy” organized and
viable society as the inability to process the present experience leads to the unavoidable gap between
the past and the future.
Jameson, however, diagnoses exactly that kind of a disturbing symptom nowadays: with the rapid
development of economic and social systems the narrative starts to fragment and gradually lose its
integrity. Therefore, the fragmented narrative is no longer an effective way of processing of the
existent experience. Therefore, the research of a critic and a historian today is aimed at finding the
lack of the coherent narrative: “The probability of narrative could be a kind of evidence of the
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viability of a social organism. Such probability could be found only negatively nowadays, while there
actually is no such probability, while the internal and external, subjective and objective, individual
and social are so significantly separated that they resemble two incommensurate realities, two
completely different languages or codes, two different systems of equivalences with no possible
mechanism of translation” [28]
Another philosopher that observed the fragmentation of modern temporal structure (in cinematic
structure in particular) was J. Deleuze [10]. Deleuze states that it was World War II that completely
transformed the very concept of a universal History (powerful and coherent) of the nineteenth
century. The “realistic” and pragmatic notion of History previously based on the belief in human
agency, was naturally shaken by the war experience and resulted in a large-scale crisis of History
concept itself. The confidence and faith in the fact that human action can change the whole picture
was entirely destroyed by the whole consequence of events that accompanied and followed the war
World War II.
Deleuze believes that there will be no history of the twentieth century after World War II: not in
the sense of the end of history, but rather meaning the shaping of new temporal conceptions such as
becoming and the event [44].
This concept as an alternative to the linear flow of time is a great example of understanding
history as an aggregation of events. Such approach emerged in various spheres of scientific research
right after World War II. For instance, sociology and political science turned to the analysis of events
in order to figure out the typical patterns of various periods of time. At the same time at the
beginning of the 1950s a new approach emerged in linguistics as well: the researches paid attention
to the representation of historical events in natural language rather than the representation of history
as a whole coherent timeline.
Such turn raises a question why does historical fragmentation occur in the age of postmodern and
what are the main manifestations of these changes?
Jameson adheres to the opinion that the historical and economic context in many ways
predetermines the perception of time and history and their reflection in mass culture. In his work
“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” Fredric Jameson quotes Mandel’s classification of the
stages of modes of production and the corresponding organizations of culture. This classification
contains 3 forms of capitalism:
1. Market capitalism – 1700 – 1850 - industrial capital in national markets;
2. Monopoly capitalism - 1850 – 1960s - age of imperialism;
3. Multinational capitalism – 1960s – now - international corporations expand to
transcend national boundaries. [34]
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According to these 3 stages Jameson defines 3 major aesthetical styles – realism, modern, and
postmodern. Each stage or phase is characterized and to some extent predetermined by the present
correlation between the exchange and use value, and between the individual and the collective basis
in culture.
Speaking about postmodern culture it is important to note one of its most specific features – the
mobility of the stylistic boundaries, the loss of continuity and, to some extent, the lack of
historicization. First of all, it is vital to understand the notion of “postmodern”. For Jameson, as a
(post)Marxist theorist, postmodern is not just a style but rather a set of new cultural peculiarities
evoked by the appearance of a new economic and social order, or, in other words, late capitalism.
The basic concept and characteristic of late capitalism is reification as the major mode of
production that results in a substitution of the use value by the exchange value. These transformations
lead to a new phase of social alienation of the subject who turns into a closed monad. Thus, this
resulted in the lack of coherence in all possible spheres of the personal existence: biological and
social, individual and collective, past and future, etc. What is more, these changes create a whole new
postmodern experience of time and space which Jameson correspondingly calls pastiche and
schizophrenia that represent the inability of coherent perception of the past, present and future.
The fragmentation noticed by Jameson emerges on the level of disappearing forms of collectivity
and commodity relations as well as on the cultural level. The example of this influence is the growing
popularity of shorter narrative forms that do not require a consecutive order or embeddedness in a
general context. Such changes concern not only textual forms of expression (e.g. the popular social
network Twitter only allows posts no longer than 140 symbols, while the platforms that do not limit
the symbols number are losing their popularity), but visual forms as well. The eloquent example of
visual short forms is the rising popularity of social networks aimed at sharing gif images: even the
shortest videos now can be replaced with a sequence of two or three shots.
The ultimate fragmentation of the modern culture results in creation of even a bigger amount of
individual styles, codes, and languages: “each group starts to speak its own language and each person
becomes some kind of an isolated island” [27] In this kind of circumstances there is no longer need
for irony or parody as such: as a result of endless division there are less and less unique styles and
identities left. The only possibility left for the postmodern subject to state his identity is pastiche as
an imitation and nostalgia about the previous stylistic practices.
As Jameson states, one of the most striking symptoms of the inability to create new identities is
the nostalgic cinema that reconstructs the atmosphere and stylistic features of different previous
times. The inability to create a coherent narrative is also reflected in the social and cultural processes
of escapism and references to the fantastic future rather than dealing with the present.
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Time travel fiction is one of such ways to exploit various existing stylistic identities by constantly
changing the environment and, thus, escaping the contemporary world. It becomes obvious that the
culture, incapable of creating aesthetical representation of its own experience, is doomed to appeal to
representations from the past and interpret them again and again.
The inability of organizing a coherent representation of the current experience is also reflected in
the concept of “schizophrenia”. Schizophrenia is understood here as a kind of linguistic disorder
rather than a psychological concept. For Jameson the ability to tie together the future, the past, and
the present is the only way to perceive any events adequately and, therefore, the culture, incapable of
reconstructing history, is condemned to lose its identity and to repeat its present endlessly.
A striking example of such inability is the recent photo project for The History Channel by an
American photographer Seth Taras [41], who created a series of photographs where he blended the
past and the present: the contemporary photos of different places and the documentary photos of the
same place in different time.
The goal of the project is to help people remember their history, or, as the channel stated: “It is a
way to motivate people to understand the history of where they live by watching the History Channel.
It's easy to forget that, where we now stand, many have stood before us”. This project is
schizophrenic in its essence as it shows the tendency to “forget” the history, so that the only way to
actually remember it is to create a situation of visual presence of the past on contemporary
photographs, intruding the space-time relationship.
Hence, the schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated discrete material signifiers that
cannot be linked into a coherent narrative. At the same time, the schizophrenic experience is always
more material and realistic and lacks context.
Pastiche and schizophrenia in full measure reflect the spatial and temporal organization of the
postmodern culture. The fragmentation and dehistoricization acquire various forms and modes to
help the subject put aside the experience that he has lived. Time travel fiction in some way reflects
this escapist tendency to change your location and temporal being in order to avoid the experience of
the contemporary reality. Nevertheless, it can be said that time travel fiction also plays the critical
role of construction of utopian or dystopian worlds which provide an insight into alternatives to the
late capitalism social and cultural order.

1.2. Rationalization of time and emergence of temporality in cinema

The notion of time seems to be going through considerable transformations from the turn of the
last century and until now. The rapid development of technology affects both the understanding the
time and space relationship in quotidian life and the way it is constructed in cinema.
 14

Often being characterized as a time-based media [19], cinema has always been not only a
reflection of time, but also a way of dealing with time, transforming it and making it bearable and
understandable. In this paragraph the evolution of time perception and the construction of temporality
in cinema will be considered.
Modernity was marked not only by the transition to capitalism and industrialization, but also by
rationalization of all spheres of social life including time and space perception. What role do the
concepts of time and space play in the transition to modernity? Many theorists [25] state that the
whole transition to modernity is based upon the process of rationalization of society. Foucault
explains this change in terms of the transition for a classical episteme to the modern one where
everything is placed in a grid of knowledge/ratio:
When natural history becomes biology, when the analysis of wealth becomes economics, when
above all, reflection upon language becomes philology, and Classical discourse, in which being and
representation found their common locus, is eclipsed, then, in the profound upheaval of such an
archaeological mutation, man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a
subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator. [16, p. 312]
The focus of the knowledge also changes: now the center of the observation is the subject himself.
Therefore, modernity becomes the time when all human sciences (philology, biology, economics,
history) emerge. As knowledge becomes human-centered and focused on effectiveness for the
society, the notion of time transforms drastically.
This marks the new era of time perception – the rationalized time, characterized by “wearing”
time (watches) as an attached part of the body. The 24-hour clock system was adopted at the
International Meridian Conference in 1884 and became a mode to measure labor as opposed to the
task oriented natural rhythms.
Compared to the “natural” time, the rationalized time of modernity can be characterized by the
following statements:
 Time is less humanly comprehensible (almost no logical connection with the “natural”
rhythms – seasons, time of the day, etc.);
 Clear distinction between work and leisure time
 No place for any waste of time, constant “urgency”
Thus, time turns out to be a value that is no longer just passing by, but is spent as a currency [19],
while the process of rationalization leaves no space for the affective, subjective and contingent,
forcing it out into the sphere of personal, leisure time.
The rationalization of time continued with the exploration of time direction and irreversibility that
emerged in various spheres of knowledge starting from physics and thermodynamics in particular.
 15

Before the elaboration of the laws of thermodynamics the directions of time and the cause/effect
relationship were generally undefined. With the emergence of the thermodynamic laws, time and
cause/effect relationship gained their direction and this idea transformed into the metaphor of the
“arrow of time”:
From this moment on, time is endowed with a direction. It is irreversible and drifts from order to
disorder, or from difference to the dissolution or dissemination of a homogeneous mixture from
which no energy, no force, and no motion can arise [40].
The systematic rules of time irreversibility are also associated with the notion of entropy in
physics as a measure of randomness and reflect the extent to which the situation is shuffled. Time
arrow is one of the most effective ways to keep the system together, showing if the process is moving
backwards or forward.
One of the human-centered sciences also dealing with randomness and probabilities is statistics
that is very closely connected to physics in its method. The major role of statistics is basically to
sustain the stability of the system and control the entropy level in the society. Thus, the extreme cases
should be taken into consideration but immediately excluded from the system as marginal and not
significant ones (in other words, lying astride the Gaussian curve).
Statistics as a way of dealing with the marginal is a striking example of sustaining the stability of
the capitalist system. Even though the dualities of the rational and affective, the lawful and the
contingent seem incompatible, they are effectively working together in order to keep the system of
capitalism stable. And, as it was already said, the invention of statistics as a legitimate way of dealing
with extreme cases is an example of such collaboration.
However, even being quite stable, the capitalistic system cannot avoid the controversial
experience of time which leads to clear symptoms of stress and anxiety. Thus, the understanding of
time as something stressful and overwhelming becomes the major topic for the psychoanalytic
studies of modernity:
The emergence of mechanical reproduction is accompanied by modernity’s increasing
understanding of temporality as assault, acceleration, speed. There is too much, too fast. Time
emerges as a problem intimately linked to the theorization of modernity as trauma or shock. [11]
The debates on the topic of time as a “troublesome and anxiety-producing entity” concern the
questions of continuity and discontinuity of time and its management, storage, and representation.
For Freud, the notion of time never corresponded to a flow or an external process. Rather, in
psychoanalytic tradition time is understood as an effect, reflecting the operation of the physical
system, discontinued in its nature. What is more, time is a symptom of the subject’s troublesome and
painful relationship with the world and the environment.
 16

However, there was an alternative and more optimistic interpretation of time. Étienne-Jules Marey
[14], a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer, believed that the pure essence of time
is coherency and continuity. As a chronophotographer, Marey always wanted to grasp the smallest
unity of time and movement by making sequences of photos of moving objects. Therefore, his main
argument was that time is actually a flow of a substance and, what is more, understanding of time
helps to figure out the general laws of movement, cause and effect and more.
Thus, Marey’s dream of representation without loss confronted Freud’s essential concept of time
as the effect of loss. In his theory of physical apparatus, Freud stated the necessity of intervals of
nonreceptivity of mnemic traces: there must be gaps to protect the subject against the traumatic and
overwhelming energies of reality. These gaps eventually produce the notion of time.
It is known that despite the major controversies of their theories, both Freud and Marey rejected
cinema in their argumentation.
As it was already said, Freud sees time as a traumatic effect or the contingent surroundings, as the
ultimate reflection of the material world. Maybe, that is the reason why Freud did not support the
newest technical inventions and cinema in particular: for him, cinema was an abuse of time
representation, a “noise”, a construction of new excessive and traumatic timelines, an unnecessary
duplication of the discontinuity in life.
At the same time Marey also tackled the issue of the meaninglessness of cinema, saying that it
gives the viewer nothing that differs from what he could see with his own eyes. For Marey, cinema
just excessively captured the reality and duplicated it aimlessly, not giving any new information but
producing even double loss of information: the illusions that we see with our eyes and the illusions of
cinema representations.
Fair enough, the early cinema produced by Lumier brothers was mainly representing daily life
events without any actual direction or story plot. Fascinated by the very possibility to represent
movements adequately, early cinema producers aimed to show the most recognizable, routine actions
to prove this representation capability. At the same time the hyperindexicality of such representation
made early films incapable of dissociation from the real of the contingent and material.
Thus, the early cinema was mostly criticized for its banality and lack of difference from reality.
This is the point when cinema starts its transition from a focus on the actualities towards narrativity
when time starts to be produced as an effect to protect the subject from the anxieties of total
representation generated by the new media.
Despite the dominance of the actuality in the first decade of the cinema, despite the extensive
fascination with the camera’s relation to “real time” and movement, narrative very quickly becomes
its dominant method of structuring time. [11, 67]
 17

The earliest attempt to oppose the realistic representation tendency was the first so-called
“Cinemagician” was Georges Méliès. Méliès used various kinds of manipulation with reality in
cinema: he was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography,
dissolves, and hand-painted color in his work. The films “The Trip to the Moon” (1902) and “The
Impossible Voyage” (1904), which are considered to be the first science fiction films in history, are a
great example of the way that narrative opposed the “documentary” tendency in cinema.
From this moment on cinema started its development as a time-based media [19]. Cinematic time
emerged as an independent structure bringing all three time narratives together: the time of
production, the time of fiction and the time of projection. [19]
Even though the early signs of time-based cinema are traced back to the very start of the cinematic
era, the real development of cinematic time started after WWII with the emergence of so-called
postwar cinema in connection with a completely changed conception of history. [10]
Deleuze opposes the classic cinema of movement (movement-image) and its tendency to display
the “realistic” timeline to the modern cinema of time (time-image).
Deleuze’s understanding of cinematic time in his work Cinema II is based on the ideas of Bergson
and his conception of time. To make clear the both concepts it is easier to figure out what time does
not mean to Bergson and Deleuze [44].
Here we can see that Bergson continues the subject that we’ve already tackled before: the
rationalization of time or the critique of the “clock time” (formal, objective one) in favor of the “lived
time” (subjective and emotionally experienced). Rationalized or “clock-time” for Bergson is a way of
spatializing time, making time a kind of space where each moment is represented as a self-contained
entity, separate from the others [4]. It turns out that for Bergson such definition is an invalid and
misleading simplification: the lived time flows almost chaotically, always intersecting with the past
(in the form of memory) and the future (in the form of desire). The subjective essence of time makes
its duration flexible and dependent on one’s emotional state at any given moment: time can move
slowly when we experience crisis or depression and it can pass by in a great speed when we are
happy or excited.
Therefore, Bergson sees the present as a constant and dynamic interaction of past in future, which
brings up the question of interrelation of the real/actual and the virtual:
“But as we dive deeper into memory and/or fantasy, that is, the realm of the virtual, we leave the
present and its needs ever more behind. This is why it is perhaps best to equate the actual with the
present, and the virtual with the past/future, or future/past, whichever you prefer.” [4]
The concept of experiencing time in the forms of memory and desire concerns the therapeutical
aspect of displaying time in cinema.
 18

The modern philosopher and specialist in culture studies Slavoj Zizek in his works turns to the
problem of the interaction of the real and the symbolic (as the Other) in mass culture and Hollywood
cinema [51]. It should be noted here that the tendency to rationalize time and turn it into an objective
entity is a manifestation of the Lacaninan symbolic Other as the ensemble of laws, rules and
regulations.
“We are dealing with the rules/laws which function, although they cannot ever be retranslated
into our experience of representable reality. Contemporary experience again and again confronts us
with situations in which we are compelled to take note of how our sense of reality and normal
attitude towards it is grounded in a symbolic fiction, i.e. how the "big Other" that determines what
counts as normal and accepted truth, what is the horizon of meaning in a given society, is in no way
directly grounded in "facts" as rendered by the scientific ‘knowledge in the real’” [51]
The prevalence of the Other is most evident in the popular cinema and in science fiction movies in
particular as they are often implementing various manipulations with desires and alternative versions
of the events. The cause and effect relations and the images displayed in such cinema are
representing the both aspects of the interaction of the unconscious and the cinema: the cinema fulfills
a therapeutical and a symptomatic role simultaneously.
The symptomatic aspect of cinema provides an insight to the fragmented essence of the subject in
his desires and at the same time the legitimized ways to solve these desires by the means of cinematic
narratives. Thus, cinema emerges as a way of dealing with the fragmented reality by the means of
time-images.
Bergson and Deleuze distinguish three basic types of time-images: Recognition, Recollection and
Dream.
Recognition provides a not very deep level of referring to the past in order to find the interrelation
between the events that have already happened and the present time. Recollection is the next level of
depth that allows creating more profound connections with the past and, consequently, reconstructing
whole scenes from the past. The deepest level of digging into the past marks almost ultimate lack of
connection with the present
Thus, it can be noted that the time-image was defined by Deleuze as an image infused with time,
an image constantly penetrated by the past as well as the future. Naturally, there were time-images
before World War II, but as a whole that period in cinema was dominated mostly by movement-
images. It wasn’t before the war when time-image became a prevalent image in cinema rather than
the action image.
Another way of interrupting the temporal structure of the film and making it more mobile and
unsteady is the concept of mirroring also developed by Deleuze as a mirror-image. Film can contain a
scene with mirroring which leads to temporal circuits, but it is also possible that the film itself could
 19

be represented as a mirror or as a crystal-image (notion by Deleuze that reflects a whole sum of

mirrors). Films that contain parts that mirror each other and which are full of intertextual relations,
Deleuze calls image crystals or crystal-images. A striking example of such films is the time travel
fiction movies:
«Time travel films of all sorts are image crystals, as are films which literalize fantasy,
hallucinations, and dreams so as to create repetitions of various sorts. Films full of mimicry and
doubling might not have overt time-travel in them, but they produce odd temporal short-circuits
nevertheless. These are all, for Deleuze, crystal-image films». [44]
According to such approach the virtuality is a quintessence of difference and human experience of
time as well. That is why time-images bring difference into the image and, in particular, that is why
time-images also bring the montage. Thus, the process of watching image crystals requires
suspending any hasty conclusions as one never can be sure about the true meaning of the whole
image:
“In this manner, each image becomes suffused with past/future, time, context, relation, and
difference. It becomes virtual, less directly present, pure difference lurks between the very pores of
the aspects of the image. What is present is an imaging of time, a depiction of time, of pure
difference, in the image itself” [44]
Therefore, the role of change and virtuality rises and the difference itself becomes a new way of
constructing the temporal structure in modern cinema. While the classic cinema (Griffith, Eisenstein)
tended to grasp the reality in its most natural aspects, the modern cinema rejects this tendency that
was actually based on strong belief in humanity.
After World War II the confidence in human action was naturally lost as well as the belief in the
classical film illusions that became nothing more than clichés. That was the time when something
new has to emerge and deal with these disillusionments
The soul of cinema demands increasing thought, even if thought begins by undoing the system of
actions, perceptions and affections on which the cinema had fed up to that point. [10]
The “increasing” of thought in cinema seems to be connected to the rising importance of
complicated temporal structures that no longer allow a simplistic and presupposed flow of events in
the narrative. The complicated time structure of modern cinema appears to be an important part of the
modern society system as it effectively constructs and represents both aspects – ratio (in the form of
linear narrative) and contingency (becoming a source of variety and freedom as well as capturing the
moment).
 20

2. TIME TRAVEL FICTION: DEFINITION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF

GENRE
2.1. Definition and evolution of time travel fiction
Time travel fiction is and has always been a reflection of the scientific and social development
level of a given period of time. Moreover, this fiction provides an exact depiction of the latest
interpretations of the concepts of time and Utopian worlds.
The principal issue of genre classification of time travelling fiction is based on the lack of any
specific and yet constant characteristics. For instance, we can easily classify a fiction as a criminal
detective or a western proceeding from a specific and recognizable set of features, heroes or plot
twists. As a result there is a tendency to classify time travel fiction as a sub-genre of some more
persistent genre: science fiction, fantasy, adventure novel and so on [50].
The most common arguments on the topic of time travel fiction definability are built around the
question, whether such fiction should be classified as science fiction or as fantasy. This discussion is
based on the classic question, if time travel is a real possibility (and then it can be classified as
science-based fiction/science-fiction) or it is just a fiction with no connection to reality (then it is just
fantasy). The most striking example of such discussions is the non-stop polemics on the subject of
time travel realization in future and time travel paradoxes that would make it impossible. For
example, the essay “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” by D. Lewis [32] should be mentioned as one of
the most emblematic works on the subject.
In spite of the hectic discussions on the possibility of time travel in reality, this work is focused on
time travelling as a narrative construct used in fiction. Thus, the scientific and pseudoscientific
theories of time and time travel will be taken into account only from the perspective of their usage
and transformation in fiction.
Appealing to the definition and classification issues again, the definition of science fiction
literature given by James Gunn [24] should be noticed:
‘It is the literature of change, the literature of anticipation, the literature of the human species, the
literature of speculation, and more. And because it is the literature of change it is continually
changing; if it remained constant, it would no longer be science fiction.’
This definition of science fiction seems to be relevant and applicable to time travel fiction as well.
Time travel fiction appears to be fiction of speculation in many aspects: speculations about the
concepts of time itself, speculations about the role of the time traveler and his/her companions,
 21

speculations about the numerous utopian or dystopian “what-if” worlds that can be reached by
traveling in time.
Talking about the changes and alternative worlds, it is crucial to understand the role of utopian
and dystopian worlds in time travel fiction. The aspect of alternative world construction reveals the
critical potential of such fiction towards the existing social and political system: as a symptom and at
the same time a reaction to the problems of the society.
According to F. Jameson [27], the main issue of the society of late capitalism lies in the absence of
its alternatives in the public awareness. Thus, the issue is not only that capitalism doesn’t have any
equal competitors, but also that there is a strong belief shared by the absolute majority of people, that
capitalism is the only possible system of political and economic organization.
The only possible solution that could break this hegemony is, thus, invention of new utopias.
Utopia as a genre is itself a quintessence of Change, maximal difference from the existing world.
Thanks to this quality, utopia becomes the only possible “antagonist” or, as Jameson [27, 156] says,
‘a critical modus of the late capitalism society’.
On the level of social productions, it can be stated that one’s imagination is in some way a hostage
of the mode of production prevalent in the society. Therefore, the images, reflected in modern
utopias, are also directly connected with the reification process and represent capitalistic laws of
social existence and development.
The virtual alternative worlds open a whole new space for any imaginable kinds of Different,
creative and drastically distinguished from the present. Bergson and Deleuze also describe this virtual
potential as something extremely vivacious and radically new opposed to the fixed and unchangeable
present:
The actual is in a sense dead, it can only be what it is. But the virtual is the opening of what is
onto the possibility to be different in the future, to have been different in the past, and for desire and
memory to impact the present so as to alter its relation to itself and the world around it. [44]
Maybe it was for that reason that the creative potential of time travel as a narrative tool was first
widely discovered in the genre of utopian novels.
However, it is still argued, which novel was the first time travel fiction. In fact, science fiction as a
means of constructing alternative realities can be traced starting from the first fantastic stories that
contained any transformations or transportations leading to various changes and until the times when
such changes are being achieved mostly by time traveling.
I would like to trace the history of time travel fiction starting from the utopian novels that
progressively shifted their focus from the actual place to the means of traveling. The popularity of
utopian novels could not be underestimated at any given phase of their existence, starting from
 22

Plato’s “The Republic”. However, we can see that the issue of future, history and time emerged at the
same period when the rationalization of time discussed in the previous paragraphs was at its peak.
Therefore, in this paper the first phase of time travel fiction evolution will be tightly associated
with the development of the utopian novel, starting from the American bestseller Looking Backward
by E. Bellamy [3].
Edward Bellamy placed the plot of his utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1887 [3] at the year
of 2000 but at that time he still didn’t have such convenient instrument as the time machine. Instead,
the narrative itself (and a very excessive one) was used to describe the whole transportation (trance)
in details:
No limit can be set to the possible duration of a trance when the external conditions protect the
body from physical injury. This trance of yours is indeed the longest of which there is any positive
record, but there is no known reason wherefore, had you not been discovered and had the chamber in
which we found you continued intact, you might not have remained in a state of suspended animation
till, at the end of indefinite ages, the gradual refrigeration of the earth had destroyed the bodily
tissues and set the spirit free [3].
Such extensive description seems to be a kind of scientific justification for an unbelievable
transportation forward and backward in time. Moreover, some critics believe that time travel fiction
actually emerged from this extensive (or as some rhetoric theorists call it “macrological”) narrative.
The extreme urge to explain the existence the utopian “what-if” worlds and to make them legitimate
evokes the various justification models. The question is, first of all, how and why these explanations
turned to the temporal dimension rather than the geographical one. As Jean Pfaelzer states [50], the
nineteenth century marks a completely new connection between the text and the context as the need
to escape reality and somehow transfer the narrative into the utopian world.
Chris Ferns continues the point:
“Imperfect reality fills all the territory on the map where utopian perfection could once be
imagined. Forced to look elsewhere for a locale, writers of utopias turn increasingly to the space
provided by the extension of temporal, rather than geographical horizons” [15, pp. 67-69].
Thus, we can see that the first phase of time travel fiction development was characterized by an
extensive and detailed description of the very process of travelling. This tendency transformed into
something more global and significant later on – the evolutionary macrologia based on evolutionary
theory. It was a time when, as Michael Rise described this: “People became evolutionists at a
remarkable speed”.
By the middle of the 1880s the discourse of social development was commonly placed into the
context of a “general idea of evolution”. Evolution became one of the basic components of the
 23

semantic fields in the description of cultural and social processes. Obviously, the evolutionary theory
affected all scientific spheres at that time, becoming some kind of an axiom.
Exactly at that time of the prevailing evolutionary context the utopian novels gained massive
popularity and became best-sellers. Practically all utopian novels have a claim to describe a new
political and social system and it was crucial to them to be legitimate and following the tendencies.
Therefore, almost all writers of that period shared the main important principal in their novels:
they believed that the social and political field is necessarily a part of a wider explanatory
evolutionary model. The impact of the prevalent explanatory model of that time could be seen in the
vocabulary of the utopian novels as a tendency to explain society from a biological point of view. A
great example of such organicism is the concept of crime in the utopian society of Bellamy – any
kind of crime has become a medical issue (or atavism) that was treated also medically.
Another important change in the utopian novel narrative is the shift from the spatial dimension
towards the temporal one. Even though the earlier classical utopian novels also described alternative
worlds in different times, they mostly portrayed the what-if worlds that were situated in a different
space rather than time. Moreover, most of the first utopian novels didn’t turn to the question of the
actual traveling to the destination (the Utopia or any other alternative world) at all.
Starting from “The Republic” written by Plato and proceeding to Tommaso Campanella’s “City of
the Sun” and even the classical “Utopia” by Thomas More, the utopian writers concentrated mostly
on the description of the actual utopian society and on criticizing the present one.
It wasn’t before the raise of the Darwin evolutionary theory when the utopian writers turned their
full attention to the future as the main narrative rule remained the following: the story has to be
connected with the present place (so it is always actually “here”) but the plot shows the way that the
evolution process changes the place by the means of time.
The major shift towards the time dimension can be noticed from the end of the nineteenth century
as the fast industrialization process resulted into the need to create narratives with prospection into
the future. Such necessity created a response from the writers of that time who started speculating
about the future of the society development.
The third-largest bestseller in America of its time, “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy
wasn’t the only one utopian novel depicting a rather optimistic view on the future. The novels “News
from Nowhere” (1890) by William Morris, “2894” or “The Fossil Man” (1894) by Walter Browne,
“Fragment d’histoire future” (1896) by Gabriel Tarde, “Garden Cities of To-morrow” (1898) by
Ebenezer Howard marked the completely new phase of understanding and representing history, time
and evolution in literature and in the scientific sphere.
Consistent with the evolutionary theory, the utopian novel has to be set in the real coherent future.
Thus, the ways of reaching the future have to be scientifically legitimate and extremely realistic and,
 24

moreover, connected to the current social and political system. Even though, there were alternative
versions of utopian novels outside the temporal framework, they still should be seen as derivatives
from the present [50, 40].
This phase eventually developed into something completely different with the emergence of the
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time Einstein
became some kind of “celebrity”: the personality of a genius and an underdog at the same time was
condemned to enjoy wide popularity in Western culture. That was the time when almost everyone
was concerned about the dimensions of reality and time dimension in particular.
Here we can draw a parallel between the evolutionary theory of the 19th century and the theory of
relativity: they both had an enormous impact on the society and mass culture in particular. However,
the interesting note is that even though the relativity theory is a physical one, the impact on the
society is mostly psychological and even nattarological.
In particular, the relativity theory created a whole new semantic field of time and space metaphors
that were consequently used in fiction. Also, Einstein’s theory provided the novel writers with a
brand new explanatory model that took the time travel story to a new level. Hence, as the new theory
presupposed a variety of time continuity depending on different factors, the fiction writers started to
explore the new possibilities of storytelling: this new phase of time travel fiction was marked by the
emergence of paradox stories that tackled questions of time and time perception directly.
At this period time travel fiction went through its new phase which can be traced in one
emblematic pulp fiction story by G. Peyton Wertenbaker “The Man from the Atom” published in the
“Scientific Fiction” in 1923:
“For time is relative, and depends upon size. The smaller a creature, the shorter its life. And yet,
to itself, the fly that lives but a day has passed a lifetime of years. So it was here. Because I bad
grown large, centuries had become but moments to me. And the faster, the larger I grew, the swifter
the years, the millions of years had rolled away. <…> Men had come and died, races had flourished
and fallen. Perhaps all mankind had died away from a world stripped of air and water. In ten
minutes of my life” [48]
Here we can see the evident shift from the destination of time travel (as it was in the utopian
novels) to the means of such traveling (the time dimension itself). Thus, the numerous possibilities of
distorting and changing time in the plot gave the fiction writers a new experience and created a new
phase of time travel fiction.
Therefore, starting from the mid-1930s, time travel fiction developed into a new self-sufficient and
fully-recognizable genre which was not just a narrative but rather a metanarrative – “a genre about
the basic conventions story construction” [50, 63]. From that time on the genre of time travel fiction
 25

creates a very powerful critical field of speculations – a whole sum of fundamentally undecidable
questions about life, or, in other words, paradoxes.
The psychological aspect of the new phase of the genre development represents itself not only by
the means of a classic “time loop” story but also in the form of the self-canceling and self-creating
paradox, which brings the self-reflective subject to the story.
It is in some way harder to define the next phase of time travel fiction due to the great variety not
only in the scientific sphere but in the cultural and semiotic fields as well. The third or so called
“post-paradox” or “filmic” phase is characterized by the diversity in science (physics, for example)
and is represented by multiverse approach with a large emphasis on visualizing as the era of cinema
and new media approached.
The “post-paradox” phase of time travel fiction could be described as the “spatialization of form”
in the terms of Joseph Frank, the author of the critical essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”.
Frank analyzes an episode from Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovari” and, in particular, the way in
which the language in the passage manages to break the temporal sequence in order to express an
emotional state. Moreover, such narrative device creates a whole new “superspace” or a “viewpoint”
of the observer, who actually “stands off and perceives duration from eternity”. [26].
To sum up, any time travel story of the “post-paradox” or “filmic” phase, or, even more, any story
dealing with time, has to obtain such superspace of transcendent observation that is visual in its
essence.
The subsequent analysis of the cinematic core of modern time travel stories as well as an
investigation of the viewpoint in connection with some of the main concepts of narratology, such as
fabula and syuzhet, will be given in the next paragraph

2.2. Time travel as a narrative tool

Speaking about the role of time travel in utopian and popular fiction, a whole number of
contradictory opinions is encountered. For instance, one part of the researchers consider time
traveling as an instrumental tool that just helps to connect two worlds – the real world and the
alternative one. R. Williams, for example, deduces several types of utopian/dystopian fiction with
their own organization and different modes to get there, regardless of the type of the alternative
world. It is vital to mention that Williams defines time travel as a strictly instrumental narrative tool:
The paradise or the hell can be discovered, reached, by new forms of travel dependent on
scientific and technological (space-travel) or quasi-scientific (time-travel) development. But this is
an instrumental function; the mode of travel does not commonly affect the place discovered. The type
 26

of fiction is little affected whether the discovery is made by a space voyage or a sea voyage. The
place, rather than the journey, is dominant. [49]
However, most of the discussions in the field concern the way that the visual component of the
narrative affects the quality of the storyline. To understand the specific features of time travel
storytelling we should define its essential elements. I would like to choose the Russian Formalism
viewpoint from the numerous definitions of narrative and storyline in order to make a clear statement
here.
The differentiation between fabula and syuzhet is established on a classical paradigm that
postulates the primary nature of fabula as the reality itself. According to this paradigm, fabula
represents history while the narrator plays the role of a historian who has to follow strictly the flow of
the historical events.
However, in time travel fiction this dualistic pair is represented differently. As the time paradox
stories emerged, fabula no longer was a fixed events sequence. In time travel fiction changing
something in the syuzhet may lead to a change in the whole fabula, reconstructing its core features
and events. Thus, history no longer was prior to the story: it was more important to know how the
story is told rather than to find out what actually happened.
Therefore, reality (or history) in terms of narrative becomes a reflection of the syuzhet. Even
though the viewer or the reader is longing to be guided by the fabula, it becomes a derivative of the
syuzhet – unstable, fickle and impossible to access.
To some extent, the reality or history becomes the Lacanian Real [29]: we can perceive the reality
only through the Symbolic (the syuzhet), while the fabula remains out of reach.
Speaking in psychoanalytical terms, it seems logical to parallel the pair syuzhet/fabula with the
pair symptom/trauma. Thus, the classical understanding of fabula in narratology resembles trauma a
lot – as something that really happened and resulted in the necessity of creating a coherent syuzhet in
order to reconstruct the events.
It is in fact important to note that in reality we have access only to symptoms – the product of the
Symbolic. However, the symbolic and traumatic is represented differently in the time travel fiction
displayed in cinema. The visual component becomes crucial for the construction of the narrative as
the fabula/syuzhet ratio changes drastically.
In time travel cinema we first of all experience fabula as a picture, but the picture remains
coherent only on the visual level: we see the events taking place before we actually understand the
story as such.
After that comes the story itself – as an explanation for the visual sequence that is displayed. In its
turn, the story (or the syuzhet) creates the possibility to finally reconstruct the primary history (or
fabula).
 27

For example, in the 1960s “The Time Machine” we first of all see pictures of some events (friends
having dinner, a man entering the room), then we see the constellation of events in a consecutive
order and only by the end of the film we get to understand the whole history underlying the story that
has been told.
As we can see, the visual component plays a huge role in the science fiction narrative and in time
travel fiction in particular. There is a popular opinion that such prevalence of the visual leads to a loss
of sense and intelligence in the storytelling as a whole.
The fact that the special effects in cinema are very significant and as well overtake a huge amount
of almost any time travel film budget makes this phenomena interesting for film critics. It is often
implied, that such prevalence of the visual is a marker of the death of clever storytelling. Even more,
some say that the digital era offers the special effects as a substitute for “good” storytelling which
inevitably leads to the destruction of classical “good old Hollywood”.
A very important question should be raised here: what is actually a good story and how do we
evaluate the quality of storytelling in any given film? The answer is not that easy, as it seems that
there are no strict criteria on such subjective categories.
Nevertheless, we can find out some criteria of such evaluation proposed by modern film critics.
The classical understanding of a ”good” story is based on some classic narratology concepts, while
most of them represent the classic understanding of the way that a story structure should look like.
For example, Aristotle defined dramatic structure as “A whole is what has a beginning and middle
and end” [2]. Even though this definition is a bit simplistic and seems outdated, it reflects the
contemporary understanding of a story as well.
The film critics who believe in the power of the classical dramatic structure imply that modern
cinema (just as the classic Hollywood films or even ancient drama) serves one main purpose – to tell
a linear and, therefore, understandable story. [36, 10]
Regardless of such presupposition, it seems irrelevant to judge modern cinema against the classic
narrative standard, especially in times like today when the classic storytelling goes through
significant changes.
Storytelling is and always will be an important part of human culture and identity construction
process – this is the reason why storytelling takes many forms and changes according to the changes
in the society [36].
For instance, a completely new way of storytelling was introduced in the new media art project
“Soft Cinema” headed by Lev Manovich [35]. This new narrative no longer relies on linearity and
provides endless possibilities for each human mind to create a unique story of themselves instead.
The nonlinearity seems to be a new source of creativity, while, by the words of Manovich, “new
cinema gives up realistic representation” [36, 27].
 28

The digital effects that are now used on the stage of production can offer new techniques to
support that new way of storytelling.
Even though some critics still see the combination of science fiction and new technology as a
disaster for the classic cinema, time travel fiction in cinema provides a whole new insight to the
theory of storytelling.
Being both an attraction and an entertaining artifact, time travel fiction is at the same time
constructing a new field where nonlinearity and the visual essence of the narrative can be explored in
its full measure:
Indeed, time travel fiction is narratological in very much the same sense that detective fiction is
semiological, by virtue of the formal and aesthetic demands built into the plot structures either
provoked or constrained by its science, or, in other words, in the guise of an inherent almost reflexive
response to genre expectations. [50]
It can be said that the cinema today functions as a machine for virtual time travel in different kinds
of ways:
 As a theatrical mise-en-scène that is set in a particular time
 Through its capacity to change the perceived temporal structure through montage
 Through its ability to be repeated (and, therefore, to create new subjective situations
for each viewer). [19]
Thus, as it was already said, time travel in cinema should not be seen only as a way to attract
viewers by creating an emptiness manipulated by bewitching and powerful visual images
It is crucial to understand that even though the technology development affects and changes the
classical paradigm of storytelling, the special effects and new media as well as time travel turn into
extremely powerful narrative tools nowadays.
Time travel as an organizing narrative element combined with the whole range of high technology
tools is likely to become a basic center and a bench mark for finding new plot variations. That leads
us to the idea that time travel fiction emerges as a distinctive “laboratory” of narrative ideas and
transformations, a place of an extreme freedom of the narrative and a concentration of a great number
of alternative narrative constructions.

2.3 “The Time Machine” by H. Wells: development of the idea and the role in time
travel fiction
Herbert Wells’ novel “The Time Machine” marked the new phase of time travel science fiction:
time travel was no longer just a tool to create comedian/unusual circumstances (as in “A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by M. Twain, for example).
 29

Time travel novels began to touch upon the question of alternative, «what if” worlds in a serious
and critical way while for the first time the question was raised: why exactly time concept is so
commonly used until now to construct ideal Utopian and Dystopian realities. One of the possible
answers is that time travel fiction is actually always about the present: no matter how far in space and
time we go, we still inevitably refer and compare these alternatives to the present moment. This
makes time travel fiction one of the greatest “mirrors” of the present world. This tendency only
strengthens in modern popular science fiction, where the concepts of time and alternative realities
become a fundamental part of the narrative.
Herbert Well first considered the notion of time traveling in his earlier work “The Chronic
Argonauts” (1888). This short story marked the first use of a vehicle for traveling in time (which
from that time on was called “the time machine”) in science fiction.
“The Time Machine” was published as a series novel in 1895 and was generally based on “The
Chronic Argonauts”. However, there was a significant shift in the plot and, even more, in the
ideology of the novel. “The Time Machine” was a very clear reflection of Wells’ socialistic political
views: the Utopia wasn’t just a mise-en-scène for the action, it became the central idea and arose the
critical aspect in the novel.
The actual for that time concern about industrialization and discrimination was reflected in the
idea of Utopia – a place where all contemporary fears became reality. The Morlocks and the Eloi
represent the exaggerated, grotesque images of the working and the ruling class – the distinction that
was becoming more and more evident by that time.
It is understandable now why “The Time Machine” is still an example of utopian (“macrological”)
fiction, where the manipulations with time dimension as a narrative tool still were not central to the
plot.
Even though “The Time Machine” is a very modernist novel and was always considered to be
ahead of its time, it is perceived mostly as a utopian/dystopian novel. The explanations of history,
time and time traveling are all serving one main purpose – to legitimize the transfer to the utopian
world and alternative realities.
However, the role of the novel in the development of time travel science fiction cannot be
underestimated. “The Time Machine” is notable not only for popularization of time travel theme in
fiction, but also for the great variety of adaptations (both audio and video) and quotations in various
fiction (TV shows, films, etc.).
There are at least 4 known film adaptations (1960s, 2002, etc.), not mentioning the number of
derivative works inspired by H. Wells’ novel (such as “Time after Time”, 1979 film by Nicholas
Meyer). Keeping in mind the fact that “The Time Machine” can be classified as a “first stage” of time
 30

travel fiction evolution [50], it became remarkably popular and influential in popular culture in
general.
Here I would like to answer the question about the origins and causes of such popularity of the
novel.
Obviously, “The Time Machine” is notable for the direct statements of author’s civic stand:
criticizing the contemporary society and even foreseeing some negative outcomes from the
contemporary conditions is a mark of one very thoughtful utopian novel.
However, it is somewhat clear that the critical pathos of “The Time Machine” is not the only thing
that makes the novel so popular and topical even nowadays.
The key to understanding the popularity of “The Time Machine” adaptations probably lies in the
visual essence of the novel. By “visual essence” here I mean the openness to various kinds of
visualizations of the plot and the opportunities for transforming textual components into visual ones.
One of the first cinematic representations of the novel made it clear that the plot holds a lot of
potential for spectacular visualization. The adaptation of the book by George Pal (“The Time
Machine” film, 1960) shows a lot of innovations in visual effects for that time. In fact, the film even
got an “Oscar” for Best Effects in 1961. The award was given for the innovative scene where time-
lapse photographic effects were used to show the world changing rapidly as the character travels in
time.
Here is the exact scene where The Time Traveler describes his first experience in the time
machine:
“As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the
laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky,
leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been
destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already
going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by
too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.
Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new
to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the
palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful
deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a
streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing
of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.”
As we can see, the representation in the novel is very cinematic in its essence: there is color,
sound, speed and, all in all, a very excessive description of the process of the transformation.
 31

It is easy to see why such description turned out to be a very cinematic scene, easy to visualize and
to transform into something spectacular.
The visual elements of the story are used mainly to show changes and transformations that lead to
the new (alternative, “what-if”) reality. Even though the critical potential of such narrative (the
narrative of ultimate change) was revealed much later, the early adaptations of “The Time Machine”
also showed that there is a lot to work on in this classic novel.
Probably, that combination of a strong critical power (from a pure expression of socialistic views
to a criticism of the modern society through the prism of utopian and dystopian worlds) and almost
endless possibilities for visualizing made “The Time Machine” one of the most quoted and
memorable novels about time travel.
The following study examines the way that “The Time Machine” cinematic representations
developed and changed through the years from 1960s and until now. The goal of the study was to
find out the main patterns that were represented in cinema and, what is even more important, to trace
the shift from visual attractions to narrative complexity in these films.
 32

3. CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF UTOPIAN WORLDS AND TIME

TRAVELING
3.1. Methodology and data entry criteria
The goal of the research was to understand the changing perception of temporality and historical
imagination in modern society through the representations of time in cinema. Time travel fiction
seems to be a unique genre which constantly contains reflection on time, time experience and history
perception. Since time is the central focus of such fiction, it is natural to appeal to time travel fiction
as a major area of speculations about history and time.
Another important subject of study is the critical potential of time travel fiction seen through the
lens of the construction of utopian and dystopian worlds: time travel always implies the existence of
at least two alternative worlds that differ a lot from each other. The evident or implicit comparison of
the modern world and the alternative one reveals the critical potential of time travel fiction.
Cinematic representations were chosen as the most distinctive way of expressing the change:
change of time and place that is visual in its essence. The structure and the meaning of time travel
fiction in cinema can be traced and studied through comparing films from different periods of time.
Various uses of the narrative patterns along with the specific role of the visual component in the
examined films are the significant and indicative markers of the transforming society: as the
perception of time changes, the cinematic representations become different and unique for each
decade as well.
As we have already seen in the previous chapter, the novel “The Time Machine” by H. Wells is
one of the most indicative narratives about time, history, time travel and utopia. At the same time,
this story is notable for its great potential of visualizing that resulted in numerous adaptations of the
novel in different periods of time. That explains the choice of data for the research in this paper.
Thus, the analysis is based mainly on the variations of “The Time Machine”, one of the most
influential and indicative stories about time travel.
The visual adaptations of the book can be divided into two main categories: actual film
adaptations and derivative works. There are 4 film adaptations of the novel:
 1949 BBC teleplay
 1960 film
 1978 television film
 2002 film
 33

The first visual adaptation of the book was a live teleplay broadcast from Alexandra Palace on 25
January 1949 by the BBC, which starred Russell Napier as the Time Traveler and Mary Donn as
Weena.
Unfortunately, no recording of this live broadcast was made; the only record of the production is
the script and a few black and white still photographs. Thus, the 1960 film “The Time Machine” is
actually the first available visual adaptation of the novel.

Still, there are some derivative works that should also be taken into consideration in the research.
For example, the work of Nicholas Meyer – “Time after Time” that shows quite an alternative
interpretation of the story. The other notable films are “Morlocks”, a Syfy (Syfy Channel) film which
is a radical re-imagining of the story, and “Utopia” – an episode from the cult TV series “Doctor
Who”.
To sum up, here is the list of the films that represent the “axis” of the research:
• The Time Machine (1960)
• The Time Machine (television film, 1978)
• Time after Time (1979)
• The Time Machine (2002)
• Utopia (an episode of the television film “Doctor Who”, 2007)
However, this will not be the only basis – there is also a list of most popular (most mentioned)
films about time travel from 1960 and until now. The data of the research is supported by popular
mass culture films and TV-shows, that are notable for the time traveling subject, represent a historical
period and also contain alternative utopian/dystopian worlds with the reference to the present days.
These films will also be taken into consideration during the research (see the list in the enclosure).
The analysis of time travel fiction in popular cinema and TV-series will be based on 3 aspects, or
focus modes, that will be merged in the final summary:
 «Background» mode - analysis of social and historical aspects of a given period of
time, when the film was created and perceived
 «Middle plane» - typical patterns and their transformations in different time travel
fiction
 «Close-up» - analysis of specific cinematographic features based on the frame
sequences and editing syntax [8]
Thus, not only the social background will be analyzed, but also the cinematic aspects such as
montage and the mise-en-scène.
The “middle plane” stage was used as a general basis for finding typical patterns for the analysis,
such as:
 34

1. Time and time travel concepts explanation, time travel discourse

2. The concept of Time Machine: evolution and transformation of the image in popular
fiction
3. The Time Traveler: evolution of the personality and the role in the narrative
4. The “what if” worlds: Utopian and Dystopian worlds in science fiction
5. Time traveling as a narrative tool
The hypothesis is that the way that people perceive and represent time (especially in cinema) is
very much affected by the economic and social circumstances in a given period. That is why it is so
important to analyze films from different periods of time: to see the similarities and differences in the
time, time travel, history and utopian world cinematic representations.
What is even more crucial is to understand the way that the original plotline of the novel by G.
Wells transformed into cinematic representations. This could be the starting point of the comparison:
we have a prototype and the specific features that differ from the original story in the visual
adaptations of the story. The visual potential of the novel results in completely different visual
images through the years, but still, as we will see, all these images appear to be very simple and yet
powerful metaphors of the contemporary social order.
Here the historically rich material (various adaptations of the same story) should also be used as
an advantage for the research: the historical distance allows us to find correlations between the
cinematic representations and actual social and economic events. Afterwards, knowing the
mechanisms of reflecting and transforming the society in cinema, it is possible to draw conclusions
about the latest contemporary representations of time experience. As we do not have the possibility to
fully abstract away from the epoch we live in, the historical approach may be the only relevant
solution in studying the evolution and transformation of cinematic images and ideas.
It is vital to note that time travel fiction has a more complex, ambiguous and influential narrative
structure than it may seem. In fact, the time travel narrative fulfills two main social and psychological
functions – representational (making the most important problems visible) and therapeutic
(suggesting alternative ways to deal with the problems, e.g. making them understandable and
common or transforming the psychological effects with the help of the narrative).
Both functions could actually show the modern experience of time and anxiety with the fast pace
of life in a more constructive way, as it is important not only to see cultural artifacts in a critical way,
but also to understand its power to transform the society.
 35

3.2. Films summary and historical background

The influence of the historical background and the cinematic representations is definitely a two-
way process: the changes in the social state are reflected in popular culture, while the visual images
of cinema contribute to the shaping of the collective imagination and ideology.
This paragraph is aimed at analyzing the historical, social, economic and cultural context that
accompanied and influenced the process of forming the time travel cinematic representations from
1960 and until now.
The 1950s and the first half of the 1960s were characterized by the hegemony of consumerism and
mainly conservative political views in the Western society. Indeed, the post–World War II economic
expansion, also known as the postwar economic boom, the long boom, and the Golden Age of
Capitalism, was a period of economic prosperity, especially for the USA under the presidency of
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It was also the time, when the fear of communism was cultivated, as the Cold War with the Soviet
Union escalated dangerously. The idea of the “common enemy” became a great power of
legitimizing the politically conservative climate in the USA alongside with the highly materialistic
and anti-communist ideology.
The 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s were the years of moderate development in the culture
sphere as well. The classic Hollywood continued its rapid evolution as the need to attract viewers and
return them from television to cinema theatres emerged.
Film studios and companies had to use innovative approaches to regain their audience: more
techniques were used to present new films through widescreen and big-approach methods, such as
Cinemascope, VistaVision, and Cinerama.
Such spectacle approach coupled with the growing Cold war paranoia resulted in renewed interest
in visually impressive historical epics (The Robe, The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, The
Ten Commandments, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and Ben-Hur) as well as science fiction films
(The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World, The War of the Worlds, It Came from
Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Them!, This Island Earth, Earth vs. the Flying
Saucers).
Among those science fiction films the cult visual adaptation of the classic novel “The Time
Machine” by H. Wells should be noted.
The Time Machine is a science fiction film by George Pal. The plot is built around a man from
Victorian England who constructs a time-travelling machine and uses it to travel to the future. The
main character (H. George Wells himself) travels to the future and by accident stops on October 12,
802,701. There he meets the Eloi (people of that time, with no interest in science, or any knowledge)
who live in fear of the Morlocks (cannibal people leaving in the underground). Wells helps Eloi
 36

escape the pressure of the Morlocks and, after a short trip back home, he returns to the future to help
Eloi build “a brave new world”. The film received an Oscar for time-lapse photographic effects
showing the world changing rapidly.
Although the film followed the plot of the book quite directly, there were some significant shifts
in the meaning, especially regarding the socialistic pathos of the original story. Obviously, a
Hollywood movie couldn’t totally correspond to the anti-utopian ideology, but still the way that the
utopian world was depicted in the film is very indicative of the society of that time.
The comparatively conservative beginning of the 1960s changed to a completely new era. Some
critics named this time “a classical Jungian nightmare cycle, where a rigid culture, unable to contain
the demands for greater individual freedom, broke free of the social constraints of the previous age
through extreme deviation from the norm.” [7]
The end of the 1960s and the 1970s were the decades of significant changes. In the second half of
the decade (1965), young people began to reject the conservative norms of the time, as well as
oppose themselves to the mainstream liberalism and the high level of materialism in the society.
Those countercultures first appeared in the USA and then it became widespread across the whole
Western society as an opposition to the conservatism and social conformity of the 1950s.
The subsequent decades were seen by the historians as the “pivot of change” [38] in the world
history, concerning the rise of political awareness as well as the emergence of progressive social
values: anti-war movement, African-American civil rights movement, Hispanic and Chicano
movement, second-wave feminism and gay rights movement.
The cultural changes were remarkable too as they were very much influenced by the New Left
movement that saw the United States as a corrupt and almost fascistic society. Such extreme views
eventually lead to the philosophy of the need to reveal your inner self with the help of LCD or acid.
The promise to unveil the truth became something more than just use of drugs – it was a completely
new religious experience that was shared in the cultural sphere and affected the way that culture
developed in the 1970s and in the decades that followed.
The revolutionary ideas resulted into a completely new approach in cinema as well. Starting from
the late-1960s and up to the early 1980s a new generation of young filmmakers took over Hollywood
which marked a new era – the New or Post-classical Hollywood, sometimes also called “The
American New Wave”.
Films produced at that time were very much influenced by the new generation of filmmakers as
even the major studios became open to individual styles and more off-mainstream subjects. New
Hollywood was the revival of the auteur cinema, as the individual filmmakers got the possibility to
express themselves and to experiment under the names of major Hollywood labels.
 37

As Todd Berliner puts it: “The 1970s marks Hollywood’s most significant formal transformation
since the conversion to sound film and is the defining period separating the storytelling modes of the
studio era and contemporary Hollywood. Seventies films deviate from classical narrative norms more
than Hollywood films from other eras. Their narrative and stylistic devices threaten to derail an
otherwise straightforward narration.” [5]
The narrative strategies of the 1970s differ a lot from the classic Hollywood schemes, as they
show a tendency to transform the linear timeline and interfere into the classical genre integrity. At the
same time the narrative often aim to create and maintain suspense and confusion.
The urge to transform the classic narrative and temporal structure of the film resulted into the
emergence of various time travel fiction visualizations at that time. The both adaptations of “The
Time Machine” at the end of the 1970s embrace the significant tendencies of mixing genres (science
fiction and a horror story or a western action film) and restructuring the temporal experience. Let’s
see the both films based on the Wells’ novel more in details.
The Time Machine – a 1978 American television film produced by Sunn Classic Pictures as a
part of their Classics Illustrated series. The film was a modernization of the Wells' story, making the
Time Traveler a 1970s scientist working for a fictional US defense contractor, "the Mega
Corporation".
Dr. Neil Perry (John Beck), the Time Traveler, is described as one of Mega's most reliable
contributors by his senior co-worker Branly (Whit Bissell, an alumnus of the 1960 adaptation). Perry
time travels twice over the course of a weekend, and reports to Haverson (an analog to the novel's
Hillyer), Branley, and J.R. Worthington (Andrew Duggan), chairman of the board of Mega
Corporation.
As Neil tells the story of his travels, the reversed time-lapse images of building construction
demonstrate Neil's passage backwards in time. Unlike the novel, the time machine and its rider do not
stay in the same place as they travel through time, and the machine can travel to different locations.
Time After Time – a 1979 science fiction film by Nicholas Meyer. George Wells invents a Time
Machine, but his friend (who happens to be Jack the Ripper) steals the machine and travels to the
future (1979, Sand Francisco) to escape the police. Wells decides to go to the future to save the
Utopia from Jack the Ripper (Stevenson).
There, Wells is dismayed to find that the future is not Utopia as he had predicted. But Wells is
also picked up by a young woman named Amy Robbins. As Wells and Amy search for Stevenson,
Stevenson conversely is after Wells to obtain the master key to the time machine. As Stevenson
continues his murderous ways, he places Amy in danger. Wells and Amy try to do their best to save
their lives.
 38

Finally, Stevenson still manages to get the key. As Stevenson starts up the time machine, Herbert
removes the "vaporizing equalizer" from the machine and Stevenson nods in understanding. The
removal of this component, Herbert confirmed earlier, causes the machine to remain in place while
its passenger is sent traveling endlessly through time, with no way to stop; in effect destroying him.
Herbert proclaims that the time has come to return to his own time, by himself, in order to destroy
a machine that is too dangerous for primitive mankind. Amy pleads with him to take her along
(despite her aversion to living in Victorian England). As they depart to the past, she says that she is
changing her name to Susan B. Anthony. The end credits reveal that the two got married later.
As we can see, both films tackle the main social concerns of the decade: feminism, menace of war,
violence and some more. At the same time, those adaptations correspond to the New Wave of
Hollywood films, such as the mixed temporal structure and genre inconsistency.
It is important to note the fact that the end of the 1970s was the only time so far when two
adaptations of “The Time Machine” were released simultaneously. This shows the interest in the
questions of changing history and the end of history as well. It was also the first time when the
character was allowed to actually affect the events, change them and shape the future of the
humankind. To some extent, this is a clear marker of the urge for change in the society and, of
course, a sign of the fears and concerns about the future of the world that escalated at that time.
Indeed, the 1980s was a period of great changes in the economic and politic spheres as the major
power shifted to the new rapidly developing economies, such as Thailand, Mexico, South Korea,
Taiwan, and China, Japan and West Germany. Those changes tackled not only the economic sphere,
but the social, political and cultural ones as well.
In cinema industry it was the period when the “high concept” films were introduced. “High
concept” films were characterized by simplicity and marketability, all films were very understandable
and easily sold. In fact, the phenomena of the Hollywood blockbuster appeared at that time and
turned out to be the most popular film format of the decade.
1980 also marked the era of time travel plot in mass cinema, as the following films were released
and became extremely popular: Somewhere In Time, Time Bandits, Star Trek IV: The Voyage
Home, The Terminator the cult Back to the Future saga and much more.
Innovative tendencies continued in the 1990s which was determined by the development of the
Internet. The new technology changed the economic and cultural sphere considerably as the
alternative media, multiculturalism and underground scene arose. A constellation of events (such as
the growth of the global market, new media, and dissolution of the Soviet Union) resulted into a
reconsolidation of social and economic power.
In the 1990s cinema attendance was raising significantly - mostly at multi-screen cineplex
complexes throughout the world. Therefore, to be suitable for large screen display, most of the
 39

popular films contained a lot of action scenes and high-cost demanding stars. Striking examples of
such box-office hits about time travel are “Time Cop” (1994) starring Jean‑Claude Van Damme and
“12 Monkeys” (1995) starring Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis.
As we can see, even science fiction films of that time had a lot in common with blockbuster action
movies. Maybe, that explains why there were no adaptations of “The Time Machine” in the 1980s
and 1990s as these were the years of action, celebrities and special effects, and “The Time Machine”
didn’t offer a lot of new possibilities to expose new technologies as spectacular as they should look.
The decade after (the 2000s) generally continued the technological and socioeconomic changes
that started in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s. The geopolitical situation marked the transition
to a more open and globalized world with the United States enjoying economic growth as well as
political and military power. The world was also very much affected by the terroristic attacks of the
September 11th, that initiated one of the most controversial wars in modern history (The War on
Terror).
The technological improvement led to the rapid development of space exploration, which became
a central subject of various science fiction books, films and computer games (such as, for example,
the return of the “Star Wars” saga in 2002).
At the same time, the globalization of the market and the cultural sphere gave rise to a counter-
tendency – the will for individualism, intimacy and personal space. Thus, a lot of melodramatic films
and book adaptations emerged at that time. Apart from epic and computer-generated graphic-films
there were a lot of author’s and more intimate works, such as the most-acclaimed films of the decade:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michele Gondry, Mulholland Drive by David Lynch or
Amélie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
The tendency towards more personal and emotional stories can be traced in science fiction films
too: The Jacket, The Lake House, The Butterfly Effect or The Time Traveler's Wife. One of the most
interesting interpretations of “The Time Machine” is also represented by a more personal story.
The Time Machine – a 2002 film adaptation of Wells’ novel by his great-grandson Simon Wells.
This is the newest close adaptation of the book and it contains major differences from the original
plot (the plot incorporated the ideas of paradoxes and changing the past that were absent from the
classic novel). The film is based on a romantic love story of a scientist who loses his fiancée and then
invents the Time Machine to go back and change the present.
The place is changed from Richmond, Surrey, to downtown New York City, where the Time
Traveler moves forward in time to find answers to his questions on 'Practical Application of Time
Travel;' first in 2030 New York, to witness an orbital lunar catastrophe in 2037, before moving on to
802,701 for the main plot. He later briefly finds himself in 635,427,810 with toxic clouds and a world
 40

laid waste (presumably by the Morlocks) with devastation and Morlock artifacts stretching out to the
horizon.
Hartdegen (the time traveler) finds a place where the Eloi live in fear of the Morlocks. Hartdegen
becomes involved with a female Eloi named Mara, played by Samantha Mumba, who essentially
takes the place of Weena, from the earlier versions of the story. In this film, the Eloi have, as a
tradition, preserved a "stone language" that is identical with English. The Morlocks are much more
barbaric and agile, and the Time Traveler has a direct impact on the plot.
Thus, we can see that some liberal and protestant values are displayed here: the main character is
able to change the history, he is prior to the natural flow of time, but at the same time he always stays
connected to the logical timeline.
The 2010s were marked by the global financial crisis that continued from the late 2000s. The Arab
Spring showed the international community that a lot of political changes are going to come. One of
the most remarkable trends of the decade is the incredible rise of the information value. The anti-
globalism and Occupy movements mostly generated in the Internet reflected the anti-surveillance
public mood.
With the dramatic increase in the use of 3D-technology in filmmaking, films in the 2010s also
somehow showed a great intertextuality in genre. Also, the popularity of TV shows and series rose,
as more and more highly tailored series were released.
An example of such popularity is the renewal of the cult British series about time travel – Doctor
Who.
Doctor Who – a 2005 and until now renewal of a long-aired BBC series. The TV-show first
appeared on television in 1963 and was suspended in 1989 until its renewal in 2005.
The show depicts the adventures of a Time Lord – a time travelling humanoid alien, known as the
Doctor. He explores the universe in his 'TARDIS', a sentient time-travelling space ship with
companions, who are usually human.
In this thesis in particular a three episodes session is mentioned. This story, called Utopia,
depicted a travel to the end of the world in the year 100 trillion. As the Doctor and his companions
explore the planet, they find an abandoned city and the Doctor notes that they are nearing the heat
death of the universe. They encounter a lone human running for his life from the Futurekind,
cannibalistic humanoids that are attempting to eat him. He is attempting to reach a nearby missile silo
to get transport to "Utopia", the last hope of the human race. It is the first of three episodes that form
a linked narrative, followed by "The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords".
The interesting thing is that the series shows the tendency very clearly: the transformation from
epic blockbuster time travel films to more individual and personal stories resulted into a completely
 41

new way of storytelling. The Doctor Who series is a combination of a large-scale action story and a
very personal and almost philosophical reasoning about time travel and personal experience of time.
It wasn’t until this TV series in science fiction, when the question of time, history and time
paradoxes were answered so thoroughly and in detail. Fair enough, the shift towards unexpected and
provocative narrative turnarounds is very typical for time travel films of the 2010s: Source Code,
Midnight in Paris, Looper and much more.
The radical changes in the mode of storytelling in time travel fiction could be analyzed and then
the results could be extrapolated to the cinema as a whole. As D. Wittenberg stated, modern cinema
itself is a big “time machine”, where time travel is not only and just a narrative tool, but an infinite
source of changes, variations and original plot turns [50]. This semantic shift is a crucial point for
understanding the potential of time travel cinema as a narrower and more specific prototype of
cinematic storytelling in general.
Thus, it is obvious now that the time travel fiction didn’t stay the same throughout the years – it
changed according to the social, economic and historical context, being a reflection of the given
society. At the same time, each of the mentioned films played a constructive role in forming a new,
timelier mode of storytelling.

3.3. Time and time travel concepts explanation, time travel discourse
Discourse analysis is known as a wide approach in qualitative research rather than a name of some
specific methodology with strictly defined rules. As there are a lot of variations and traditions in
discourse analysis, it seems important to note which of the conceptual approaches is going to be used
in this work.
As the main subject of the analysis here is visual media (cinematic adaptations) based on literature
(“The Time Machine” novel) it seems logical to use the critical approach to reconstruct the actual
ideologies that lie beyond the popular cultural representations.
Naturally, time traveling and changing something in order to effect today’s society leads to time
paradoxes in the narrative structure. Since that makes it even harder to avoid narrative inconsistency,
the discursive reasoning and legitimization strategies become central focus of the story.
Even though it is hard to define the specific name of the approach, the tendency to reveal some
factual and somewhat real events behind the discursive strategies uncovers the prevalence of the
critical linguistic approach [21]. However, this research lacks the radicalism of the approach as the
“reality” of the events hidden behind the discursive practices is understood as something relative and
socially constructed rather than objective and unambiguous.
The methodology of such aggregated approach is based on two main actions: finding the major
repetitive patterns in the text and, consequently, exploring the functions of the discursive patterns. To
 42

make that work, it is important to formulate the research questions clearly, then extract the most
answering phrases from the text (corresponding to the research questions) and gather them around the
common “themes” or explanatory patterns.
Main research question of this thesis concern the way that the chosen time travel fiction films deal
with time, time travel, personal time experience and the possibility of changing the natural flow of
events in history.
First of all, let’s recollect the phrases corresponding to the main research questions.
The Time Machine (1960) Table 3.1.
Personal experience of time Explanation of time About changing history and
and time traveling purpose the consequences
FILBY TIME TRAVELER BRIDEWELL
Relax, try to relax a bit. You've When I speak of time, I'm Oh, I say George! If you start
all the time in the world. referring to the fourth dimension. floating around in the future,
aren't you likely to mess things
As he looks up, amused. TIME TRAVELER up for the rest of us?
Now, as you know, the difficulty
TIME TRAVELER in explaining the fourth DR. HILLYER
You're right, David. (almost to dimension is that it cannot be The future is already there. It's
himself) That's exactly what I seen or felt - it must be thought irrevocable and cannot be
have. - of. changed.
All the time in the world!...
BRIDEWELL TIME TRAVELER
FILBY Well, then, what's the fourth That's the most important
Why this preoccupation with dimension? question to which I hope to find
Time? an answer. Can Man control his
DR. HILLYER destiny? Can he change the
TIME TRAVELER Well, that's...that's mere theory! shape of things to come?
If you want to know the truth, I No one can really say what the
don't much care for the time I fourth dimension is or even that FILBY
was born into. - It seems people it exists. But it isn't like George. – To
aren't dying fast enough these return empty handed. To try to
days. They call upon science to TIME TRAVELER rebuild a civilization without a
invent new, more efficient On the contrary, Doctor! The plan. He must have taken
weapons to depopulate the earth. fourth dimension is as true and as something with him.
real a dimension as any of the
FILBY other three. In fact, they couldn't MRS. WATCHETT
I quite agree with you. But here exist without it. Nothing. Nothing except three
 43

we are and we have to make the books.

best of it. So - for an object to exist at all, it
must exist in the fourth FILBY
TIME TRAVELER dimension....and that fourth Which three books?
You may have to. I don't. dimension is duration....Time!
MRS. WATCHETT
FILBY Why is it that we usually ignore I don't know. -- Is it important?
All right. Take a journey on your the fourth dimension? Because
contraption. What would you we have no freedom to move in FILBY (smiles)
become?... A Greek? A Roman? it. We can move in the other No, I suppose not. - Only...what
One of the Pharaohs? three -- up, down, forward, three books would you have
backward, sideways. taken?
TIME TRAVELER But when it comes to Time, we
I prefer the future. are prisoners. MRS. WATCHETT
Mr. Filby, do you think he will
TIME TRAVELER ever return?
No! Time changes space. This
flat ground we're standing on FILBY
now could have been at the One cannot choose but wonder. -
bottom of the sea a million years You see...he has all the time in
ago. the world!

Time after Time (1979) Table 3.2.

Personal experience of time Explanation of time About changing history and
and time traveling purpose the consequences
GENTLEMEN TIME TRAVELER TIME TRAVELER
Well, H.G., which is it to be? Gentlemen, I have called you What have I done? I've turned
The past or the future? here tonight to bid you that bloody maniac loose upon
farewell. utopia.
TIME TRAVELER
The future. GENTLEMEN TIME TRAVELER
Farewell? Where are you Stop a bit. You know we're
GENTLEMEN going? Another holiday in making a big mistake. We
Why the future? Scotland? keep imagining time is our
enemy. It's not.
 44

TIME TRAVELER TIME TRAVELER We know what's supposed to

I belong there. In three No. No, I am traveling...but happen. When and where. He
generations, social utopia will I'm not leaving London. I doesn't.
have come to pass. There'll be don't expect to leave my This is one time I do know
no war, crime or poverty. And laboratory. I am talking about how he thinks.
no disease either, John. Men traveling through time. I am I even know before he thinks.
will live like brothers, and in going travelling but I’m not Look here. We're too late to
equality with women. leaving London. I am talking prevent the murder of number
about traveling in time, in a three.
machine constructed for that But what about number four?
very purpose Let's see.

The Time Machine (1978) Table 3.3.

Personal experience of time Explanation of time About changing history and
and time traveling purpose the consequences
TIME TRAVELER TIME TRAVELER TIME TRAVELER
If the machine worked, maybe I If my calculations are correct, it That is why I got to return, to
could see some of the history may be able to escape the time make people realize that our
I’ve read about. dimension world is hoping plant the seeds of
destruction.
TIME TRAVELER GENTLEMEN
What we have learned is that You mean, travel to the past or to WEENA
their eyes can’t stand the light. the future? Will they believe you?
Their weapons only paralyze for
a short period of time. TIME TRAVELER TIME TRAVELER
Haven’t you thought about that? Hopefully, both I don’t know, but somehow I
None of you? have to try.
TIME TRAVELER
*no thoughts about the future, no It utilizes the electromagnetic TIME TRAVELER
possibility to analyze and realize force field to molecularly Now you see why I’ve came
* no utopian motifs reconstruct the space-time back? We have to act and we
continuum. have to do it now.

TIME TRAVELER
Can’t you see, I’m giving you
 45

proof – we are destroying the

planet.

DIRECTOR
And you think we can stop that?

TIME TRAVELER
We at least have to try.

AGNES
Do you really think he will be
able to save the Eloi?

RALPH
Neil is the one who can do it.
And I hope he does. It’s the only
chance of survival of the human
race.

You know, I envy him. He is

reshaping mankind, creating
world based on good things.

The Time Machine (2002) Table 3.4.

Personal experience of time Explanation of time About changing history and
and time traveling purpose the consequences
STUDENT DEAN FULTON You built your machine
Sir, if I may, wouldn't it be easier "Duration" is not a dimension. BECAUSE of Emma's death. If
if you applied a Fibonacci Scientists do not imagine the she had lived, it would never
sequence to the differential world around them. They do not have existed. So how could you
coefficient? wool-gather or cloud-spin. They use your machine to go back to
prove. They demonstrate. save her?
 46

ALEXANDER Columbia University does not

It's not supposed to be easy, it's teach fantasy. PHILBY
supposed to be beautiful... Alex, nothing will ever change
ALEXANDER what happened, but --
ALEXANDER With respect, sir, would we have
For a time it was astounding. I the telegraph without fantasy? ALEXANDER
saw the years spinning by, I was Would we have radium and X- That's where you're wrong. I will
in the years spinning by. We rays without someone first change it.
made such advances. I don't dreaming we could?
understand half of them. ALEXANDER
DEAN FULTON Time heals all wounds -- then let
The advances you speak of were it!
the result of countless years of
study and empirical ALEXANDER
experimentation, a careful Yes... After her death, it was
evolutionary process, not intolerable for me here... The
chalkboard parlor-tricks. future had to be better.

ALEXANDER
My equations are not parlor-
tricks!

DEAN FULTON
Abstract mathematics, relativity
of dimensions, geometrical
"durations" -- even allowing for
the uses of speculation, what is
the point?

ALEXANDER
Because it's a new way of seeing
the world! Of seeing our place in
it!

Doctor Who (2005-2013) Table 3.5.

Personal experience of time Explanation of time About changing history and
and time traveling purpose the consequences
 47

DOCTOR DOCTOR DOCTOR

The thing is, Adam, time travel is
like visiting Paris. You can't just
read the guidebook, you've got to
throw yourself in. Eat the food,
use the wrong verbs, get charged
double and end up kissing
complete strangers- or is that just
me?
People assume that time is a
strict progression of cause to
effect, but *actually* from a non-
linear, non-subjective viewpoint -
it's more like a big ball of
wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey...
stuff.
Crossing into established events
is strictly forbidden, except for
cheap tricks
ROSE
The thing is, Doctor, the Gelth
don’t succeed. ‘Cause I know
they don’t. I know for a fact
corpses weren’t walking around
in 1869

DOCTOR
Time’s in flux, changing every
second. Your cosy world can be
rewritten like that.

RIVER
It doesn’t work like that. We
came here because of what we
saw in the future. If we try and
prevent the future from
happening it’d create a paradox.

AMY
Time can be rewritten.

RIVER
Not all of it.

Even though in all the chosen films time has to be understood from a non-subjective point of view
(we can’t see it, but it exists, so to understand it we should overcome our stereotypes and just take it
for granted), it is still explained as something complicated and confusing, maybe never fully
understandable by any human. Moreover, such “timey-wimey” explanation model also helps
screenwriters avoid difficulties and paradoxes of the cause-effect relationship in time travel narrative.
 48

The routine explanation of such uncommon thing as time travel in the modern time travel fiction
correlates with the explanation of the purposes of such traveling: it ranges from scientific interest and
pure will of the scientist to prove he was right (Time Machine (1960)) to the duty to prevent
something happening either in the future (Time after Time, 1979 and The Time Machine, 1978) or in
the past (Time Machine (2002)) and, at last, time travel fiction evolution leads to some kind of time
and space “tourism” – exploring new worlds, finding new adventures and at the same time saving the
world (Doctor Who, 2005-now). So, the purpose of time traveling becomes more and more specific
and individualistic: the traveler is no longer obliged to answer the needs of humankind, he has goals
and motives of his own.
The individualization and “habitualization” discursive strategy is also an evidence of the fact that
nowadays time traveling is perceived like something more understandable, than it was in the 60s,
maybe because humanity encounters different forms of nonlinearity and time changes in the day-to-
day life due to the technology development and expansion of social media connections.
The understanding of the time concept transforms from the “fourth dimension that is mere a
theory” (1960s) into a way more clear representation by the end of the 1970s, when the existence of
time dimension is already not so strange and extravagant. However, then time still could be explained
only through the prism of a more habitual dimension – space.
A clear example of such reference is the “farewell” discursive strategy that associates time travel
with tourism and tightly connects time with spatial dimension. Even though, the way of traveling and
dealing with time differs in the late 1970s films (going forward and backward in time like on a road
or “reconstructing and escaping” the space-time continuum), both adaptations of “The Time
Machine” in the late 1970s represent time as another linear axis which is still tightly coupled with a
specific geographical place.
This strong association changes in the upcoming years as time becomes more and more
understandable in the quotidian life of the audience. The 1980s and the 1990s became the decades of
the rising popularity of time travel fiction in cinema. The urge to explain and learn how to deal with
the rapidly changing time experience led to the emergence of numerous speculations about the future,
possible utopian and dystopian worlds as well as alternative historical timelines (The Philadelphia
Experiment, The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, 12 Monkeys, and both Back to the Future and Star
Track sagas).
With the development of the anti-globalization movement and the opposition towards the
depersonalized attitude, new kind of time travel fiction emerged and gained popularity in the
beginning of the 2000s. As the high technology allowed the majority of the Western society to be
involved into the changing of time and space boundaries in the world, more and more stories in
Hollywood tackled the personal experience of time and time travel.
 49

The 2002 adaptation of “The Time Machine” is a rather melodramatic variation of a science
fiction film, where time travel is compared to flashbacks in memory. Thus, time travel is represented
as something that everybody can relate to, even described in terms of “beauty”, a new philosophical
way to see the world.
What is more, the personal experience of time becomes more important than the objective timeline
of history as the main character manipulates time and history in order to fulfill his own dream – to
meet the love of his life again.
It can be said that the 2000s was the decade of popularization of time travel fiction through putting
it into another, more personal and yet popular genre surrounding – melodramatic experience of time
and time travel (The Butterfly Effect, 2004; Primer, 2004; The Jacket, 2005; The Lake House, 2006;
The Time Traveler's Wife, 2009).
The progressive individualization of time travel continued in the late Doctor Who episodes, where
time could and should be experienced personally (as something you “go through”) but still could not
be understood to the full measure (as a nonlinear “ball of stuff”).
The explanatory strategies of personal time experience also differed in various decades of time
travel films. The first adaptations represented the time traveler as a strong personality who is the only
or among a very small group of people who are able to experience time traveling:
FILBY
I quite agree with you. But here we are and we have to make the best of it.

TIME TRAVELER
You may have to. I don't
Being opposed to the majority of ordinary people, the time traveler undertakes the role of the hero
who has to save the world on his own. The discursive strategy of opposing the majority is a clear
indicator of the lack of habit to deal with any kind of nonlinearity of time in everyday life. Thus, only
the chosen one (“a man ahead of his time”), the hero can perceive such tricky time structure and,
moreover, use this power to save the world from a catastrophe.
Still, the opposition turns into collaboration in the late 1970s when the time traveler no longer is a
separate subject: it is time for him to experience time traveling as a citizen with his own social and
political civic stands.
The time traveler of the 1970s is obliged to express his social views: “There'll be no war, crime or
poverty. And no disease either, John. Men will live like brothers, and in equality with women”. What
is more, he needs to go to the past or to the future to learn and to change the present, to make it
better.
 50

Therefore, time becomes the source of knowledge about the history, or the tool to make
conclusions about the past and the future and avoid major mistakes. The inability to learn from
history, to process the personal experience thoughtfully and understand something from it is
represented as one of the most dangerous features of the modern society (which was by the time
under the threat of world war 3).
Even though the questions of processing time and history remain important in the 2000s films, the
main focus of personal experience shifts to more individualistic aspects. Time travel had to be not
only meaningful or objectively necessary but also ethical as well as esthetically proven. As the main
character of “The Time Machine” (2002) described his admiration of the social and technical
advances of the future: “It's not supposed to be easy, it's supposed to be beautiful...”
The 2000s really is the decade when the personal experience of time becomes really important in
cinema and even surpasses the importance of the future of the humankind. The tendency gained
strength by the end of the 2000s and in the 2010s as well. Personal time experience are the central
themes of many modern films, as time travel is compared to personal tourism and the individual
perception of the events is equated to actual time travel: “We are all travelling through time together,
all we can do is relish this remarkable ride.” (About Time, 2013)
In early cinematic adaptation of “The Time Machine” (1960) there is barely any concern about
changing history as this question is only raised for the first time but not answered to the fullest at the
end. Even though the time traveler “has all the time in the world”, he takes only a few books from the
present and heads to the far future in order to build a “brave new world” there.
So, there is no actual connection to the cause and effect problem as the new future world is so far
away that it cannot even slightly effect the present. Thus, the problem of changing history becomes
more important in the future with the rising concern about the future of the humankind in the 1970s.
Both in the 1978 and 1979 adaptations of “The Time Machine”, the main character’s goal is to do
something that is aimed at changing the natural timeline of history as it is. Specifically, in “Time
after Time” (1979) the character is willing to save Utopia from the invasion of the modern world
(that is a threat), while in “The Time Machine” (1978) the time traveler needs to prevent the modern
world from becoming Utopia (“the future has to be better”).
As it was already stated, the 1980s and the 1990s were the decades of blockbuster time travel
films in Hollywood. The problem of changing history was solved very differently in different films
(some of them allowed changing history and some prohibited this strictly), so there is possibly no
common strategy that could define this period as a coherent discourse.
This tendency of scattered storylines resulted into a major change by the 2000s decade, when the
linear storytelling timeline gave place to a non-linear and more subjective one: the cause and effect
merged and it was no longer possible to reconstruct the linear timeline.
 51

Obviously, for the most modern time travel fiction it is theoretically impossible to change history
(as everything had already happened), or, as the Über-Morlock in “The Time Machine” says: “You built
your machine BECAUSE of Emma's death. If she had lived, it would never have existed”. Thus, the character
understands that every event is already meant to happen.
Still, it is interesting that such changes in history actually do happen very often in modern time
travel fiction. The “Doctor Who” series is a great example of such an ambiguity, as the “first law of
time travel” states: history cannot be changed. However, we understand from the stories that it could
but should not be changed.
This small but very important note changes the storyline completely: the right to decide whether to
change or not to change something in your destiny belongs to the person who changes it. Therefore,
comparing to the early 1960s cinema, the ethical problem becomes central rather than the technical
one.
Somehow it can be said that the modern films are the contemporary answer to the open-ended
question of the 1960s: anyone can change one’s destiny and the central point is the way that such a
decision is made.
Capitalism to some extent tend to absolutize the power of the personal will and its ability to
achieve anything with hard work and motivation (protestant roots, as well), and this results into a
completely new way to perceive time travel: the possibility to go through time and change anything
in history only depends on the personal qualities of the time traveler. This makes time travel a deeply
personal process, which is, therefore, a highly personal act, dependent from the time traveler’s
decisions.
That is why in the latest Doctor Who episodes (from 2005 and on) time is no longer just the
unbelievable “fourth dimension” (3D+time), but rather a stable axis, perceived as an equal dimension
(actual 4D). Whereas in earlier time travel fiction traveling is still linear (back or forward in time), in
modern fiction shows like Doctor Who time and space traveling are actually equal concepts depicted
like two inseparable dimensions.
Thus, the step-by-step evolution of the time and time travel representation in fiction and in modern
society as well is quite evident: from an “alien” and supplementary dimension it becomes an
incorporated dimension, equal to space.

3.4. The concept of Time Machine: evolution and transformation of the image in
popular fiction
Even though there are various explanations about the origins of time travel fiction, it wasn’t until
the end of the 19th century when time traveling was conducted with the help of a machine. It is still
argued who actually first used the idea of time travelling via a mechanical contraption, but it is most
 52

likely that the time machine was for the first time mentioned in a Spanish play by Enrique Gaspar “El
Anacronopete” (“The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey”) in 1887.
In his mostly unknown until the last few years story Gaspar described a time machine as a big
time ship with rather complex structure:
The Time Machine, as we have said, had a type of basement above which rested the floor of the
hold. Steps embedded in the thick walls led to a large door, the vehicle's only entrance. This was
rectangular in shape. Standing in the corners were four imposing tubes, the exhaust pipes that, with
their openings twisted toward the four cardinal points, looked like enormous blunderbusses bent to
resemble the number seven...

Image 3.1.
The almost simultaneous appearance of the two time machine novels may seem coincidental;
however the roots of this coincidence obviously lay in the industrial revolution of the 19th century.
The industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries brought major changes to the development of
transportation, labor organization, technology and, obviously, had a great effect on the day-to-day
living. The impact on social life really was enormous, as the revolution gradually changed the
standards of living for a major part of the Western society.
The year 1886 is regarded the year of birth of the modern automobile - with the Benz Patent-
Motorwagen, by German inventor Karl Benz. From that time and now on the automobile started to
become a more and more popular attribute of both social status and convenience. The overall
fascination with mobility and high-technological spirit, which was now brought to everyday life,
resulted in a heightened interest in exploring the impact of the first automobiles on the overall
experience of space and time.
It seems natural that the idea of a personal automobile was developed in science fiction into a
speculation about the inevitable changes in time perception and personal time experience. The idea of
 53

the machinery time travel (by means of an actual automobile-like machine) became widely
recognized owing to H. Wells’s novel which was first published in1895.
Even though there is no detailed description of the Time Machine by Wells, there is a small hint
about its’ appearance in the text:
The thing the Time Traveler held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger
than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline
substance.
There is also almost no information concerning the process of traveling (managing the machine,
etc.), but we can still see the resemblance with an automobile in the use of oil in order to make the
machine work:
It was at ten o'clock to-day that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap,
tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle.
The upcoming visualizations of the time machine appear to be very important markers of the
contemporary society, as they usually display the most leading technology ideas of the given time.
Still, since this work is based mostly on the cinematic representations of “The Time Machine” by H.
Wells, the visualizations depend a lot on the original idea of the machine in the novel. However, as
we will learn from the following paragraph, the depictions of time machines differed according to the
cultural and economic context of the time when the film was produced.
The 1960 “The Time Machine” adaptation is a relatively close to the original plot, and a very
classical and iconic one in terms of critics’ response and audience appreciation. The depiction of the
time machine was, obviously, made as close to the original as possible, and, eventually, also became
iconic for other adaptations of the novel.
The stylistic characteristics of the machine appearance were designed and interpreted in the terms
of the steampunk trend. The notion of “steampunk” was officially introduced for the first time in the
1987th by a science fiction author K. W. Jeter, who mentioned it in a letter to a science fiction
magazine Locus:
Dear Locus,
Enclosed is a copy of my 1979 novel Morlock Night; I'd appreciate your being so good as to route
it Faren Miller, as it's a prime piece of evidence in the great debate as to who in "the
Powers/Blaylock/Jeter fantasy triumvirate" was writing in the "gonzo-historical manner" first.
Though of course, I did find her review in the March Locus to be quite flattering.
Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come
up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the
appropriate technology of the era; like 'steam-punks', perhaps. [42]
 54

Even though the notion of steampunk became widespread only by the late 1980s, the Victorian-
fantasy was, obviously, used in the 1960s adaptation of Wells’ novel.

Image 3.2.
As we can see here, the design of the machine resembles the first automobile appearance. Still,
there are a lot of decorative elements, so that the stereotypical image of a Victorian retro-futurism is
translated effectively.
According to the explanation of time travel given in the film, the time machine really is an
automobile, a very concrete and material means of travelling backwards and forward in time. The
way it functions is also quite understandable, as it clearly serves as a transportation tool being
controlled by human completely.
The steampunk stylistics is sustained in the 1979 adaptation of the novel, where the story takes
place in the Victorian times and, after the time travel, in modern San Francisco (Utopia) in 1979.
 55

Image 3.3.
The typical characteristics of steampunk and the classical features are represented here by the
complex structure of the machine, the great number of small decorative details, the polished brass
construction and the leather seats. However, the external form of the machine changed drastically:
here it resembles a helicopter rather than a retro-car.
The 1970s was an era of rapid civil aviation development, since in the 1970 the first wide-body
aircraft was built in order to meet the rising global demand for air travel. Air traveling in the
seventies became widespread and common for the mass audience, so that it seems natural that a time
machine turned into a small variation of a plane.
In order to correspond strictly to the actual problems, the time machine in the 1979 has a set of the
so-called “safety features” – naturally, one of the most vital concerns in the era of aviation
innovations:
The machine is designed with several safety features. The reversal rotation lock returns the
machine to its starting date...after the completion of a voyage. If the occupant is injured during a
flight...the passenger is returned to the point of departure. Unless he uses this key to countermand the
device. Without that key, it's a bloody homing pigeon...this is the vaporizing equalizer.
 56

It also seems natural that the machine corresponds to the seventies’ concern with
environmentalism, as it uses the solar power:
- Twelve years ago, an engineer used the sun to power a printing press. My time machine uses the
same power source.
- You can't be serious.
- This thing is propelled by sunshine?
- This cup catches the rays of the sun...converting its heat to electricity here. Electricity does the
rest. Juxtaposing fields of energy create friction. The result is an ever-increasing series of
reactions...that literally rotates the machine out of one time sphere into another. Cruising speed is
two years per minute. Go into the past or future.
Thus, the machine of the 1979th adaptation reflects some of the topical issues of the period: the
development of civil aviation and environmentalism. Still, the stylistic choice here is still built
around Victorian aesthetics.
On the contrary, the 1978 adaptation reflects more of the contemporary stylistics, as the time
machine looks a lot more like a stationary computer.

Image 3.4.
 57

During the 1970s, computer technology took great leaps forward, and by the end of the decade
computers had become smaller and more available than at any time in history. The 1970s were the
era when the actual personal computer was produced, along with the microprocessor and the mouse.
The ongoing computerization affected the private spheres of life, so the time machine in the 1978 th
film reflected the immense impact that the first personal computers had on the everyday life.
Thus, the structure and the design of this machine could be described basically as a monitor,
keyboard and a seat in front of the monitor with a big external processor unit attached with wires.
The era of total computerization was only beginning in the seventies, however, the designers of the
time machine managed to predict the significant role of personal computers in personal time
experience in the subsequent decades.
Actually, the 1980s and the 1990s were marked by a very specific transformation in the time travel
fiction genre: the stories got more personal and the depiction of time machines began to vary a lot.
Referring to the list of the most mentioned time travel films, it is clear that maximum of two or three
variants of time traveling means (time machine, wormhole through time, spaceship) transformed into
a really great variety: phone booth, tunnel, automobile, loss of consciousness, time portal, etc. It is
specifically notable that the time machines turned out to be more personal and often seen in day-to-
day life.
However, the depiction of the time machine seems an exception of this tendency: the construction
is heavy and complicated; the stylistic features turn to the past rather than to the future in its
stylistics. The steampunk design here is even more evident than just the influence of the Victorian
era.
Massive details and the overall gigantism of the machine become even more striking when we
compare its size to the size of the laboratory in both 1960 and 2002 films (as the 2002 resembles the
first adaptation in various visual and stylistic features). The room remains the same in the both films,
while the proportion of the time machine changes drastically: in the 2002 film the machine almost
fills all of the space in the laboratory.
It seems like the machine is depicted as an excessive extension of the human body, expressing
both the admiration of the high technology evolution and the aggravation with the enormous presence
of machines and technology in the personal life. The machine becomes a massive organ of memory
for the human body and without it one would feel defective and useless.
Apart from that tendency of anxiety and technophobia, the 2002 film also reflects the latest
technology development achievements: the time machine itself now resembles a satellite with its
circle extensions that look exactly like solar panels on a space station.
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Image 3.5.
Speaking about the time machine structure in the “Doctor Who” series, it should be noted that the
time machine TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) first appeared on the show in 1963,
so it cannot be described as a contemporary time machine now. Though, it is interesting to see, what
features exactly made this time machine so popular and long-living, especially taking into
consideration the fact that the machine changed on the inside in the last decades.
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Image 3.6.
The Tardis transformed from being just an awkward police box with ability to time travel (in the
early series) into quite a complex and multi featured machine (in the late series). It wasn’t until the
2000s renewal of the series when the mechanism and even the “character” of the time machine were
addressed directly.
The important thing is that one of the main characteristics of the time machine is the fact that it is
very difficult to be controlled and driven. In fact, the machine has a lot of various buttons and levers
which one person could hardly control, as he has to run around the control center trying to press all
the required buttons simultaneously. It is possible that this extreme complexity reflects the anxiety of
the modern society caused by the rapid development and fast changes in the technology sphere, as the
machine seems to be a powerful metaphor of the complex network of simultaneous events that the
modern (or the postmodern) subject has to deal with. Running from one point to another, without
actually knowing how to cope with the mobility effectively – this is a clear message that we get from
the modern image of the Tardis time machine.
Still, expressing and reflecting a high level of anxiety in modern society is not the only function of
the contemporary time travel fiction. The therapeutic effect of the cinematic representation of time
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travel becomes apparent as the “Doctor Who” series uses the classic method of dealing with complex
and alien phenomena – animation and personification:
"Well the Tardis is more than a machine Tegan, it's like a person, it needs coaxing, persuading,
encouraging".
Thus, the Tardis is endowed with strong personal qualities – it has its own temper, biological and
psychological features, it even has an impersonation and a name (the “heart” of the machine is a
woman called Idris). On the one hand, this personification makes the machine a more emotionally
and logically understandable image and, on the other hand, describe it as a complex and ambiguous
phenomena (as the time experience itself).
The latest time travel fiction of the 2000s and the 2010s corresponds to the tendency of
personification and humanization of time travel. What is more, in the latest time travel films the time
machine image transforms into the idea of teleportation through thought and memory, without the
help of any technical means. As a result of extreme interiorization the time machine eventually
transformed from an actual machine to an image of psychological and mental one rather than
mechanical and material as it was before.
In fact, in the late 2000s and in the 2010s it appears that there is almost no need in the actual time
machine as it is. Examples of this are the films Time Travelers' Wife (2009), About Time (2013),
Midnight in Paris (2011), Time Crimes (2007) and much more. Thus, the time machine becomes
more and more abstract and, at the same time, domestic image. The initial stylized steampunk image
gradually transformed into a more understandable one, and took the form of the most familiar
metaphor - memory.
As we could note, there are two main tendencies in the time machine depiction: domestication
(time machine here is more understandable and close to real life) and psychological characteristics
(time machine concerns memory, individual experience, psychological effects). Both tendencies
make the time machine more “human” than pure technological, which also fulfills the therapeutic
function of time travel fiction – making time-related issues more understandable and interiorized.

3.5. “What if” worlds: Utopian and Dystopian worlds in science fiction
Utopian worlds in time travel fiction deserve a thorough analysis as they are both mirrors
reflecting the real world and instruments of changing it. One of the possible ways to see the
differences and the contradictions is to compare both of the worlds and find out which of the
characteristics are represented as important and which are most likely to be intentionally omitted.
It is even more interesting how the film adaptation of Wells classic novel “The Time Machine”
varies through the years, as the plot contains a critical potential in at least three aspects: showing the
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contemporary world (“now”), the Utopia (implementation of the ultimate change), and the very
process of traveling (cinematic representation of evolution and history).
Being a clearly socialistic concept, the classic Wells’ Utopia is actually a dystopia showing how
capitalism leads to a moral catastrophe of the humankind. However, without reading the book such
conclusion could hardly be made from any of the later cinematographic adaptations of the novel.
Still, the most interesting questions faced are those differences in interpretation and reflection that
change corresponding to the historical context of the film production.
The 1960 film by George Pal contains no traces of the anti-capitalism ideas of Wells, on the
contrary it completely eliminates the socialistic idea of the economic cause of the changes that led to
the differentiation in Utopia: "by some awful quirk of fate, the Morlocks had become the master, and
the Eloi their servants." And, what is more, it was people’s own choice to decide who they wanted to
be: Eloi or Morlocks.
The actual description of the Eloi changed completely in the film. In the novel H. G. Wells
describes the Eloi as a humanoid race which was very naïve and childish as well as a bit clueless:
And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their
Dresden-china type of prettiness. Their hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the
neck and cheek; there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly
minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point.
The eyes were large and mild; and - this may seem egotism on my part - I fancied even that there was
a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them.
On the contrary, the Eloi in the 1960 film looked exactly like ordinary people, but all blond, young
and very naturally beautiful. Talking about their personality, they were more like harmless children –
so, we can see that any repulsive features (naivety, indifference, helplessness) were more or less
eliminated from their representation in the film. This, of course, is understandable as the film was
produced in Hollywood and had to correspond to the needs of the capitalism society of that time.
Moreover, some of the weaknesses of the Eloi turned into their advantages, especially concerning
the very feminine and attractive to men image of Weena, which also reveals the patriarchal relation to
women that was still dominating in the early 1960s.
Talking about the Utopia itself, the representation of the future in the film still manages to convey
some criticism. This is even more indicative, as “The Time Machine” of the 1960 can be considered
the most mainstream adaptation of all.
The critical aspect contains the fear of inability of the modern society to remember history and to
learn lessons from it: the Eloi have historical records and books but they have let them become dust.
Though, this inability is still not the central part of the story, as it seems reversible to the time traveler
who decides to solve this by taking some books from the contemporary world to Utopia.
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One more important reflection is the pessimistic views of that time: the inevitability and fear of
the Third World War, and, therefore, the need for a happy-end and a strong hero (Wells) who defeats
the evil (Morlocks). This is also a sign of the urge to separate the unquestionable “good” from the
dangerous “evil” – a dichotomy that does not allow any half-measures. The Utopia in the 1960s is
just a place that needs some order and control by a strong and brave man, which also reflects the
views of that time.
The patriotic pathos of the “good” versus the “evil” both in the modern world and in the Utopia is
maintained by the patriotic speech of Dr Hillyer at the very beginning: “There's a war on, you know!
The Boers are putting up a pretty stiff fight in South Africa and our country needs inventors like you”.
Speaking about the process of evolution, the cause and effect relations in the narrative structure
are quite evident in the 1960 adaptation: the modern world is connected to the Utopia as a straight
progression of time; the Utopia is a direct result of the development of the modern world.
The marker of the changes is also very revealing, because while the small changes from day to
night are represented by flowers, the sunset and the sunrise and other natural markers, the evolution
process is represented by changes in a shop window: the history of the consumption era can be traced
through the fashion tendencies on a mannequin.
The situation changes drastically in the late 1970s adaptations of the classic novel. The seventies
became a time of revision of consumerism values, disappointment in the political and social system
(opposition to the Vietnam War and to nuclear weapons, environmentalism, and anti-globalism).
Such shift towards the anti-capitalism values made the socialist ideas of Wells’ “Time Machine”
topical again. Maybe that’s the reason why the end of the 1970s was marked by two impressive
visualizations of the novel and, what is more, the 1978 and 1979 versions of the classics of time
traveling reflect the contemporary transformations of the society of that time in a very evident way.
The concern about a new world war is widely represented in the 1978 film, where the time traveler
is a scientist who has to work on a major weapon - the laser death ray, while it is the government that
determines the priorities of his research, and the funding depends on the achievements in that main
project only.
This criticism of the contemporary society becomes even more evident with the development of
the story, as the time traveler sees the consequences of the arms race and militarization - almost
complete destruction of the planet.
There are two points of view about the future represented by the idealistic ideas of Wells and very
pessimistic ideas of Jack the Ripper in the film “Time After Time” (1979). This conflict resolves
when Wells and Jack the Ripper find themselves in the late 70s San Francisco, when Jack admits:
“Ninety years ago I was a freak. Today I'm an amateur”. Thus, the main problem of Utopia appears to
be violence and a threat of war.
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However, violence and pacifism are not the only central points of both stories. The peculiarity of
many science fiction films of the 1970s is great attention to social affairs and criticism of some
outdated values (which could probably be explained by the raise of the New Wave Hollywood film
directors who were allowed to act relatively free).
The concerns with the social issues of that time made the representation of the history evolution in
the 1979 film very significant: the travel through longer was depicted through the major historical
events rather than changes on a shop window. It is vital to note the core events that were chosen to
represent any given period in history:
- The Lindbergh kidnapping – 1932
- Pearl Harbor - 1941
- Proclamation of the state of Israel - 1948
- Queen Elizabeth I is crowned - 1953
- President Kennedy assassination - 1968
- Martin Luther King assassination - 1968
- First man on the Moon - 1969
- Munich massacre - 1972
- Vietnam cease-fire agreement - 1973
- Watergate scandal - 1974
- Birth of the world's second test tube baby - 1978
- Election of Pope John Paul II - 1978
- Four generals execution during the Iranian Revolution - 1979
As we can see, the reconstruction of history here is also corresponding to the pessimist attitude of
the late seventies, showing the combination of the most violent events (assassinations, kidnapping,
war in Vietnam, etc.) and some global political events (political scandals, coronations).
All together, the chosen arrangement of events presupposes a certain link between the events, so
that it seems natural that politics and violence are tightly coupled in history and, moreover, can be
mutually a cause or effect of each other. Obviously, the tendency to associate globalization and
politics with a threat of violence is very typical for the seventies advanced views.
Idealization of socialist values created a very critical attitude to capitalism, market globalization
and mass media influence. Apart from the fact that the main character of the 1978 film is working for
the frightening MEGA Corporation (a weapon producing company), there are a lot of other problems
represented in both films:

Table 3.6.
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Capitalism and capitalist - Nobody cares about hard work anymore, not like the old
work process that leads to days. Then you worked around the clock, but it was
alienation and exciting. You worked on simple things; you could see the
depersonalization results of your labor.
- Well, I guess that things have changed a lot.
- Now it’s a big system, everything is big, impersonal.

Media influence - Where are all your books?

- I don't have all that many.
- I don't seem to read much anymore. Even when I have the
time, it's easier to watch TV...even though that's mainly
crap.

Globalization and - Let me do a computer check. If it's clear, you'll have a

depersonalization check in a week. I don't have a week. I don't believe you
exist. Driver's license, credit card, something like that.

Another vital social problem is the “sexual liberation” that was on its rise at the time. Actually, the
late 1970s adaptations were the only ones where the issue of gender was touched upon so explicitly.
Specifically, the fact that Wells supported the “free love” attitude made his ideas even more
topical in the context of the seventies. The influence of the hippy subculture is really very indicative
for the films of that period:
- Will The Gazette continue with your pieces on free love, H.G.?
- Free love sells newspapers. Gentleman, the Fleet Street Casanova.
- Here, here. I've got my little experiments to pay for.
- You're the hero of the working class.
- Free love is all they can afford. (Time After Time, 1979)
The feminist movement was also an important part of the cultural context of that time, which
probably made the 1970s Weena a completely different character, expressing the advanced concepts
of equality and sexuality liberation:
Table 3.7.
Sexual liberation - That was a very cute man.
- That was a pickup.
- Against bank rules.
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- I don't care. At least he's not gay.

Gender equality In three generations, social utopia will have come to pass. There'll be no
war, crime or poverty. And no disease either, John. Men will live like
brothers, and in equality with women.

Be reasonable. How am I gonna make it? It's your life we're talking about.
My work is my life. As much as yours or any other man's

Moreover, the thing that represents the 70s-80s the most is that there is only one solution to all of
the problems – love. In the end Wells gives up his battle with Jack the Ripper and lets him go to save
the life of a “utopian” girl Amy Robinson (Time After Time, 1979), while in the 1978 “The Time
Machine” we hear a very typical conversation between Weena and the time traveler:
- Tell me about your world. Are your people friendly, do they get along with each
other?
- Sometimes.
- Is there fair/fear in your world?
- There is also love and compassion.
- The new world has hope for its feature.
- I’m having a lot of doubts about that.
- But if they have love and hope there must be a future. (The Time Machine, 1978)
To sum up, the late 1970s were the time when time travel fiction gained a whole new critical
potential while expressing the concerns about the modern world as well as showing alternative
options of history development.
The following decades were the years of popularization of time travel fiction in cinema. However,
concerning the alternative “what if” worlds, the 1980s show the tendency to depict nostalgic
alternative realities rather than futuristic ones. Specifically, those science fiction films were
characterized by nostalgia about the 1950s and 1960s: Somewhere in Time (1980), Back to the
Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Pleasantville (1988).
Some film critics described this period in the following way: “The hippie generation hit their
forties and suddenly began looking back. They apparently didn’t like what they saw.” [23]
The certain obsession with historical references in the 1980s was definitely just the start of a more
general tendency which emerged in the 1990s. Although, not all films of the decade represented a
thorough and thoughtful reflection about time, time travel and history matters, there was obviously a
serious shift towards more complicated and specified storylines.
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Alongside with a great number of science fiction blockbusters depicting the robotized future of the
humankind, the 1990s were marked by the emergence of a completely new genre, where time travel
became an instrument of creating suspense and speculations about memory, personal time experience
and nonlinearity of time in general.
The tendency to correspond to challenges of personal time experience and subjective perception of
history was tackled in various 1990s films (Groundhog Day, 1993; 12 Monkeys, 1995) and continued
to develop in the 2000s (Frequency, 2000; The Jacket, 2005; The Lake House, 2006; The Butterfly
Effect, 2004; The Time Traveler's Wife, 2009).
Yet, the scope of the reflected problems becomes even more narrow and personal in the 2002 film
“The Time Machine”, where Alexander (the time traveler) decides to go to the future to learn how to
change the past and save his fiancée.
The socialistic and even any futuristic ideas of the Wells novel were almost completely removed
in this film: the only purpose of traveling was to solve a personal problem. However, the story surely
reflects some specific features of the early 2000s and even at first look at the plot it is easy to get the
main message concerning the Utopia and the future of Humankind: “David Philby: [looking at a
futuristic picture] I wonder if we'll ever go too far.” “Going too far” naturally means knowing too
much, changing the laws of nature, interfering with the power that should not be controlled.
Contrariwise to the 1970s, “The Time Machine” of 2002 scenario puts the socially-significant
problems aside while reviewing the historical evolution process. The original draft screenplay (2000,
by John Logan) still contains a very similar visualization of time traveling to the future. Some of the
chosen events replicate the historical timeline shown in the 1970s, such as the president Kennedy
assassination, Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal – quite
significantly, all the repeated events belong mostly to the history of the USA.
However, the actual screenplay of the 2002 film was changed a lot and most of the events from the
draft screenplay were put aside due to the commercialization of the film. Milestones that were left to
show the evolutionary process are all connected with the development of knowledge in the form of
architecture and, mostly, technology (the scene with emerging New York City skyscrapers, first
airplanes, spaceships and satellites on the orbit of the planet).
Another parallel evolution timeline features a shop window again (as it was in the 1960s
visualization):
“In the window of the dress shop across the street he watches a female mannequin as she is
redressed, her clothes morphing from style to style, a swirl of styles and outfits. He is shocked to see
the mannequin in a miniskirt! He sees the dress shop becoming a department store and the
newspaper store becoming a high tech electronics shop” (The Time Machine, 2002)
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The actual events that were present in the time travel scene show very clearly the tendency of the
consumerism society to replace the actual historical events with the development of technology and
manufacture. Such evident substitution plays a great role in the shaping of the social historical
imagination: creating a whole new timeline of history helps reshape the understanding of the
collective memory as a rearrangement of what is important (technology, economics, science) and
what no longer is (concerns about politics, violence and social affairs).
Speaking about the theme of “knowledge” in the narrative, technical development is actually the
only expectation that Alexander has about Utopia: the science will be so developed that he will be
able to understand, why the past can’t be changed.
Alexander himself represents the humankind that is “haunted by those two most terrible words:
What if?” This question makes people try to change the natural way of living, this may lead to
terrible catastrophes (like the Moon falling on the Earth).
To the contrary, the Utopia is seen as a place, where people live in harmony, even though they are
constantly frightened by the Morlocks. Those people “don’t dwell on the past” and do not resist to
the natural eternal battle of the evil and the good: “It’s day and night – this is our world”.
Thus, the only solution for Alexander (and the whole humankind) is to go back to the roots and
build a new world where the knowledge won’t overbalance all other spheres of life. Since there is no
possibility either to change the past or to influence the future, the time traveler has only one option
left – to accept the situation as it is and to choose a space in time where he could settle down and be
happy with it.
Another important plot twist is representation of time traveling as something that we are used to in
our daily life: “We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories... And
those that carry us forward are dreams”.
The modern world of the time traveler is described quite in detail so that we can trace what
problems were more important at that time. Naturally, the issues of gender equality, violence and
globalization continued to be important in the decades after the 2000s, however there were more
daunting problems that attracted more attention by that time.
One of such problems is the environment – an issue that is widely popularized and, therefore,
often taken into consideration in popular culture. The probable negative outcomes of the
overwhelming technology development became the main reason for the great catastrophe in “The
Time Machine” of the year 2002.
Still, even the skepticism about the future cannot keep the time traveler from actual admiration for
the “beauty” of the major scientific breakthroughs of the centuries that lead to Utopia:
- Learning was important?
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- Oh very. Learning, commerce, the arts -- the whole place was buzzing all the time.
Night and day (The Time Machine, 2002).
Along with the admiration, the time traveler feels a bit overwhelmed by the speed of the lifestyle,
as he says: “It's hard for me to imagine a better place. Where I come from there's so much... frenzy.
Day and night. It seems we're all running faster and faster...All in identical bowler hats”.
Thus, the Utopia here represents two main concerns: fear of the rapid technology development
(resulting in an environmental catastrophe) and the need for slowing down the pace of modern life.
That is why, on the one side the Utopia is a result of a very negative outcome of the capitalist society
and, on the other side, is represented as a Paradise, where people are living “today” and enjoying
their lives (note the stereotypical images of the Eloi who look exactly like a native tribe on some
deserted island).
The Utopia of the 2002 film is to some extent ambiguous in its narrative, as it goes from a
negative cause (the catastrophe) to an attempt to change the way things are (Alexander tries to
motivate the Eloi to take part in their destiny) and, finally, to the understanding and acceptance of the
fact, that actually nothing can be changed:
- No, it's more than that. When you create something you say to the world: I was here.
I mean something. How can you just let that be taken away from you?!
- This is out life, Alexander. It's a hard life but it is how we have always lived.
- Then it's time to change that
- We are who we are (The Time Machine, 2002).
Such complete obedience to destiny is not something accidental: the ability to adapt, to accept
things the way that they are actually the keystones of the late capitalism society organization. The
symptoms of anxiety and any kind of concern are here effectively neutralized by the popular culture
narrative (at least on the level of one given film).
Moreover, we can gradually trace the process of acknowledging the inevitability of destiny:
Alexander tries to change his destiny but does not succeed and this leads him to a brand new, “right”
understanding of the way that things are.
The rising speed of technical and scientific development gradually led to a major raise of science
fiction popularity. The science fiction TV-show Doctor Who is one of the longest series in television
history and, what is more, it gives rich material for analysis of changes in time traveling narrative and
alternative world’s construction.
The actual episode “The Utopia” is not a direct adaptation of “The Time Machine”, while it still is
definitely an allusion of the classic story (it has a time traveler, a time machine, Utopia and
equivalent of the Morlocks). Utopia here is a place, where people are willing to go to escape from
their dying planet, where they live in fear of the Morlocks (wild and zombie-alike human race).
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One very humanist idea of the undefeatable faith of the human race is expressed by the Doctor
(the time traveler) quite when he finds out about the idea to build a spaceship and find the Utopia:
You survived. You might have spent a million years evolving into clouds of gas and another
million as downloads, but you always revert to the basic human shape – the fundamental humans.
The end of the universe and here you are…indomitable, that’s the word… indomitable (Doctor Who,
The Utopia, 2007).
The problem is that this humanistic dream of the Utopia world is used by an evil Timelord, a
madman who created a world of his own (the anti-Utopia, actually, and used the human race as
weapons to conquer the planet, being controlled by a major network).
Such narrative perfectly illustrates a desperate need of the late capitalism to legitimize its basic
values and fundamental rules. The message of the narrative is quite clear: Utopia (a reflection of a
socialistic society of equality, a dream-world) seems to be a great idea, but as we know from history
any real implementations of this idea turned out to be a totalitarian power of a madman, the Master.
The Utopia itself appears in two forms – as a dream that the human race has imagined and as the
reality as it turns out to be. The dream Utopia is nothing but a slight signal that the inhabitants of the
planet receive from outer space – the dream for salvation is represented as elusive and subtle as it
could be.
Eventually, the actual Utopia turned out to be an apocalypse world, an opposite of the dream
world, an ultimate slave empire controlled by murderous robot globes, which contain the remnants of
the human race. The Master’s vision of the Utopia looks more like a technocratic dystopia with its
totalitarian regime and the fixation on fulfilling the desires of a one man – the Master himself.
The absence of real alternatives becomes evident and inevitable in the narrative of “Doctor Who”,
as even in all the variety of space and time there is no possibility of Utopia. Any actual
implementations of the Utopia could eventually turn into a dystopian apocalyptic world.
Though, as it was stated by Jameson, lack of something in the narrative can be a critical marker
too, as it makes this absence visible and, therefore, understandable. The absence of alternative “what-
if” worlds reveals the critical potential of contemporary popular time travel fiction even on a deeper
level.
Since the idea of the possibility of the socialistic Utopia as a place of tolerance and peace
vanishes, the very concept of equality for all is subjected to criticism too. Clearly, any kind of such
equalization could potentially lead to a tragedy of the unification of humankind, which (the
unification), as we know, to some extent has the same status as total control and repression in the
modern society.
In a world where the principal of human rights is the actual basis of the political, economic and
ideological legitimization of power, a socialist Utopia could never be reached. The damage and
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danger of the Utopia lies in its totalitarian power of unification. As H. Wells has warned in the novel
“A Modern Utopia”:
It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all such generalizations with suspicion; it is
part of the training of the Utopist and statesman, and all good statesmen are Utopists, to mingle
something very like animosity with that suspicion. For crude classifications and false generalizations
are the curse of all organized human life. [25]
Being aware of the aggressive and proscriptive essence of radical utopianism, the author of Utopia
should never take any idealistic ideas as they are, but rather he should use the narrative in a more
constructive way: as an ongoing dialogue between the contemporary society and the possibilities of
the future.
The tendency to turn to appeal to more personal stories, to implement changes on a more personal
level (as in the contemporary time travel fiction in comparison with the earlier ones) offers a brand
new narrative tool which should be used to avoid radical polarizations of the Utopian and modern
worlds.
Though, progressive individualization inevitably results in atomism and fragmentation on the
narrative level. The coherence of the narrative in cinematic representations of time travel is often
maintained by a logical description of the very process of travel, a consecutive change from one
epoch to another. Early visualizations of “The Time Machine” follow this scheme: time travel is
represented as a linear movement from one point in time to another, while the evolution could be
traced by the historical events that happen on the way. The coherence of time travel began to fade as
the early 2000s “The Time Machine” plot shifted from a historical organization of events to a
technological one: now the only marker of evolutionary changes was the development of technology.
The “Doctor Who” series goes even further towards the totally fragmented and incoherent
understanding of time and history. Since time is nonlinear and there are countless alternative
timelines existing at any given moment, the notion of history becomes unnecessary and there is no
direct connection between the present and the Utopia.
Starting from the first attempts to rationalize time, the humankind was floating away from the
natural and logical understanding of history and personal time experience. History was gradually
becoming something abstract and not meaningful. As the Utopia in modern culture loses its
connections with the past or present, it becomes harder to define any cause and effect relations in the
chains of events.
The ultimately fragmented cinematic representations in the “Doctor Who” series are actually
fulfilling both the therapeutic and symptomatic functions of the narrative: the inability to adequately
process time is represented in the incoherency of history, while such narrative effectively helps the
audience to cope with this inability (showing that this is the new standard).
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Probably, the most important thing here is to make the ahistoricism visible on the level of popular
visual culture – the sphere where such changes are the most exposed to mass audiences. The inability
to organize personal timeline in a logical way is both dangerous and adaptive, as it not only makes
history unimportant but also helps people find a new, more suitable for the epoch way to organize the
events.
Thus, the ahistoricism of the late capitalism society may be not so simple and easily
understandable as it seems to be. It could be true that the incoherence and illogicality of the modern
historical events may eventually result into a new social practice that is more effective and
corresponding to the needs of the society than the classical, linear and History-centered way of
organizing the time experience. Since the fragmentation of history and both collective and individual
timelines made it impossible to see logical and understandable links between the events, the only way
left to keep the history coherent is to instantly travel through it by means of memory. Naturally, in
the era of visual media memory becomes a more open and joint unit, based on popular visual images
such as graphics, cinema and video clips.
Keeping in mind the nonlinearity and fragmentation of the personal time and memory experience
as well as the subjectivity of history reconstruction, the author in popular culture is now given all the
necessary narrative tools to activate the critical potential of time travel fiction, even the most
mainstream examples of it.
Thus, even popular TV-shows and films on time travel not only reflect the peculiarities of a given
time, but are also able to provide alternatives, or even ways to resolve some major issues of the
society, even if those issues are hidden or not depicted at all, as the lack of alternatives speaks for
itself.
Not surprisingly, the idea of the Utopia in popular time travel fiction has modified significantly
during the last decades. Transforming from a paradise-like faraway world into an unreachable and yet
dangerous dream, the Utopia reveals its critical potential to represent topical concerns and fears of
the society.
The therapeutic and symptomatic functions of popular fantasies allow the audience to both find
the reflection of their fears and desires and attempt to transform this complex experience into
something more understandable. Expressing the ideas of alternative worlds, time travel fiction is, on
the one hand, serving the rules of legitimizing the existing rules of the society, but, on the other hand,
on a deeper level it is making an attempt to represent the negative sides, or at least, make them more
or less visible.
 72

3.6. Time traveling as a narrative tool

Time travel as a narrative tool transformed a lot since its first usage in literature. From a tool to
create farcical situations (mostly variations where the contemporaneity meets the “naive” people of
the past) time travel developed to an inexhaustible source of plot variations.
The constant need of mass culture to reach new audiences and keep the interest of the loyal
viewers obliges the producers to seek for some new original plot twists, surroundings and characters.
In some way, the commercial success of a film or a TV-show depends on its’ mobility and openness,
while the popularity is often measured by the number of sequels or “seasons”. The most modern and
popular time travel saga Doctor Who is a striking example of such commercial success – 50 years
and seasons with 11 different embodiments of the main character. Most likely, the show owes the
major part of its popularity to the smart implication of time and time travel.
Time traveling appears to be a perfect narrative solution for a permanent commercial success:
nothing is stable and almost all elements of the narrative are interchangeable: the surroundings and
time periods are changing, the main character has the ability to regenerate (to revive with different
bodies and personalities), and the main characters’ companions are constantly changing too.
Time travel fiction becomes more and more open to mixing genres: the 1960 classic “The Time
Machine” is still pure science fiction with a glimpse of an action movie, but later the 1979 “Time
after Time” combines science fiction with a Victorian thriller and a modern detective story, the 2002
filming of Wells novel is more drama and romance than science fiction, while the Doctor Who series
after the renewal in 2005 becomes the symbol of diversity in narrative tools and in genre mixing (as
one clear genre cannot be defined).
Thus, time traveling develops from being just a mode of transport to some different surroundings
to a tool of changing the reality (to prevent something from happening and save the Universe/a
beloved person), and, finally, to means of opposing any “fixed point” in the narrative.
The prevalence of discourse (the way that the story is told) over story (understood as an objective
chain of events in reality) is very indicative of time travel fiction as a genre where the speculations
about time, memory and history become central to the plot. History here is no longer an objective
linear timeline but rather a sum of fragments connected with each other by the means of discourse.
Since, the objective reality in time travel fiction can always be changed by a new narrative
organization, the notion of historical accuracy is no longer relevant- there is no History, but there are
a lot of various alternative histories.
Certain professional criticism and anxiety is natural for classic historians that believe in
absolutism of History. The major complaint concerns the fact that the privilege of the historians to be
the “gatekeepers” of the past is now mostly taken away by the visual media whose productions are
blurred, simplified and misleading:
 73

If, in telling a story, we find it impossible to adhere to historical accuracy in order to the
necessary dramatic effect, we do change it and we do feel it is the right thing to do. Irving Thalberg.
Moreover, criticism goes even further as modern audience tends to receive historical facts from
popular visual culture artifacts rather than from books and this, potentially, leads to an uncritical
perception and lack of reflection about history.
Jameson criticizes that as well, since he believes that late capitalism society lacks the ability to
obtain any historical memory at all:
“It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically
in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place” [27].
Actually, the fact that this new way of remembering the past and constructing the future is
fragmented, multi-meaningful and not centered reflects a new organization of human day to day
personal time experience. As life changes, there is a need for new ways of processing time and time-
related issues.
Michele Foucault expressed his concern about the Orwellian empowered and centralized notion of
history: “if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their
experience, their knowledge of previous struggles”. The positive side is that since in modern time
travel fiction there is no pre-defined History, everything can be changed either in the past or in the
future. The emergence of a great number of new ways to represent time and history (past and future
as well) shows that there actually is some kind of new memory, transformed and influenced by the
new technology.
Without any objective milestones, time travel fiction reflects a new mode of perceiving and
processing time and history – anything is mobile and interchangeable, all of the events are
represented by a multi-timeline mosaic with no fixed points.
This, in contrast to the sceptic notion of public amnesia (Jameson), is rather a sign of an infinite
loop of history and the possibility to instantly return to any event from the past, or go to the future
and deal with it in a new way.
The so feared inability to process time and recall history that was expressed in many of the
analyzed time travel films, turns out to be the opposite – an urge to have the ability to refer to any
moment of the past, present or future at any time. The ultimately fragmented narrative seems to be
both the reflection and a mode of dealing with the new historical imagination – the emergence of
public memory as a substitute for history.
Though, both history and memory are spheres of discursive reflection of time-related issues,
memory “suggests a more dialogic relationship between the temporal constituencies of ‘now’ and
‘then.’”. Expressing a more personal attitude, memory is a more fluid and reversible way to see the
past and foresee the future.
 74

Thus, time travel fiction appears to be a great source of collective memory – the way that the story
is told depends on the discursive specifies of the narrative (perception of historical events, reflection
of dramatic experience, emotional attitude rather than some defined and the only possible way of
being). Absolutization of personal stories in opposition to one general meta-narrative History is
clearly expressed in the “Doctor Who” series: I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK: we're all
stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? (Doctor Who, 2010)
Dialogism of memory works as a way to understand time and evolution and, therefore, to escape
the limitations of history: as memory is always connected to the present, and, what is more, is being
reflected through the lens of today. As Paul Grainge puts it, “memory studies draws attention to the
activations and eruptions of the past as they are experienced in and constituted by the present” [22].
Time travel films are a great example of dialogue between different points in the timeline – the
past, the present, the future. The dialogism becomes more evident as stories turn out to be more
personal and interconnecting intimate time perception with a more general historical one. Marita
Sturken’s notion implies that cultural memory makes it possible for multiple pasts interact as
products of modern visual pop culture, as well as to interfere into alternative variants of future “what
if” worlds.
As we already know, the mode of traveling in late time travel fiction is omitted (“Doctor Who”,
“Source Code”, “About Time”, etc.) so that we can only see the whole sum of events in different time
periods as a fragmented mosaic. The visualizing of this mosaic of disconnected events in the past,
future, present and in alternative realities creates a new mode of memory – a prosthetic memory (a
notion by Alison Landsberg).
The prosthetic memory is a completely new, yet artificial way to perceive reality and to obtain
memories about certain events without actually experiencing them:
“Thanks to these new technologies of memory on the one hand and commodification on the other,
the kinds of memories that one has ‘intimate’, even experiential, access to would no longer be limited
to the memories of events through which one actually lived. ‘Prosthetic memories’ are indeed
‘personal’ memories, as they derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with the
mass media’s various technologies” [30].
Such impersonation of history by the means of prosthetic memories created by visual images
makes time travel storytelling a sphere of constant reinvention and retelling versions of the past and
the future, as well as the present in alternative images of the Utopia. The cinematic representations of
time travel, therefore, are not just meaningless speculations about time, but rather a whole new
innovative social practice.
An infinite set of subjective interpretations of history is most often seen as a dangerous outcome
of commodification: endless possibilities of subdivision leads to a fragmented society, where each
 75

person is an “island”, isolated and incapable of overcoming ultimate individualization. However,

commodification does not necessarily mean atomization, as well as constant references to nostalgia
do not mean historical amnesia of the society.
Instead, it is possible that visual media may generate the opposite to amnesia – the constant
obsession with traumatic events that have to be repeated again and again in an infinite loop. As it is
always possible to return to any event in the past or to go to any event in the possible future by the
means of visual media and, especially, cinema, the time traveling narrative appears to fulfil the
therapeutic function, dealing with the traumatic personal experience in the cultural memory:
“No longer is storytelling the culture’s meaning-making response; an activity closer to therapeutic
practice has taken over, with acts of re-telling, remembering, and repeating all pointing in the
direction of obsession, fantasy, trauma” [13].
The traumatic experience of the historical events in the nearest past (the terrorist attacks of the
2001, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King) result in traumatic
fantasies about apocalyptic future and the inability to reach the Utopia. Hayden White has described
the twentieth-century historical events as ‘modernist’; lack of closure, fragmentation and dissociation
of one event from another, inability of historians to process the events in a narrative form.
The ambiguous tendency of the visual media to both concentrate on traumatic experience and
create “prosthetic” symptoms in the audience may seem more dangerous than legitimizing and
strengthening. Yet, the complex structure of modern time travel narrative provides a new kind of
therapeutic experience: the fragmented and disconnected reality is represented here as something
natural and, therefore, possible to comprehend.
Moreover, it may be true that the new way of creating a collective memory is also a means of
constructing new social communities connected by common (prosthetic) memories that is, to some
extent, a new kind of an artificial but yet therapeutically justified common ideology.
 76

CONCLUSION
The phenomenon of time travel fiction seems to be a very indicative marker of the way that
history and time-related issues are understood and represented at any given time. Being an extremely
popular genre, time travel fiction is able to provide a rich source of information about popular
representations of time in mass culture. The actual time and space where the researcher lives
becomes a boundary when we speak about making conclusions about the contemporary society: the
research becomes questionable without a significant prism of historical distance that is required from
the researcher. Luckily, the rich material of time travel fiction (literary and cinematic quotations and
allusions of various times) makes it possible to parallel the previous adaptations of the story and the
newest ones.
Most likely, the roots of time travel fiction as we understand it today leads us to the 19 th century,
the era of industrialization. The end of the geographical discoveries era made it harder to find new
scenes for new utopian stories: the spatial dimension no longer could provide the writer with the
necessary scenery of ultimate change of the Utopia. Here is where the spatial dimension gives way to
the temporality. Since there was barely any unexplored space on the geographical map, the temporal
dimension opened a whole new epoch in fiction.
The rapid technology development also played its role in the emergence of time travel fantasy: the
increasing gap between the pas and the future had to be filled with new culturally legitimate
narratives.
Literary representations of the 19th century gradually transformed into cinematic ones, while it
became evident that the Wells’ novel had a very significant visualization potential. The analysis of
the time travel fiction of different historical periods in this paper makes the economic and social
premises of time travel fantasy clear: the fast flow of development along with the end of the era of
great geographical discoveries resulted into the emergence of a completely new way of representing
time and history.
Today we can actually see the process of construction of a completely new way of understanding
time and time-related issues. Time is perceived as a complex and ambiguous concept that brings a
whole new level of anxiety to the society. However, as we could see from the research, culture
manages to effectively cope with such difficulties, forming new strategies and showing that even the
most fragmented experience could become a basis of consolidation.
Cinema, as a very powerful tool of late capitalism machinery, develops a somewhat therapeutic
effect in its ways of representing the experience of time: the explanation of time dimension changes,
as well as metaphors, images, visualizations the social characteristics of the utopian worlds.
 77

An enormous gap between the individual and collective dimensions of culture results in the need
of a new way of processing time and history. From now on, we don’t have to tie up the fragmented
parts of reality as we can get from one fragment to another with the help of a time machine.
Moreover, as it could be seen from the research, even the time machine is not a necessary
requirement: absolutization of the individual instead of the collective in the late capitalism resulted
into a new, extremely personalized and subjective way of traveling – through memory.
Time travel fiction provides this kind of new perception as well as a completely revamped
understanding of history as a collective memory. Since there is no need in a meta-narrative or a
unique and objective History, the fragmented reality is perceived as a constellation of subjective,
personal interpretations.
On the positive side, this ambiguity may look like an implementation of democratic values, or a
world where all subjective experiences are valuable and are taken into consideration. However, a
more deep consideration reveals that here we analyzed on the one, therapeutic function of time travel
narratives.
The other and not least important function is legitimizing the system of late capitalism with the
help of diagnosing symptoms and partial elimination of negative effects by compensating. The
research made this legitimizing function very clear: the transformation from the collective to
individual (as time travel gradually became an individual travel in search for adventures), the ability
to change history and, at the same time, the ability to see the negative outcomes of inefficient
changes.
The same function is implemented by depicting alternative utopian worlds: the time traveler is
more likely to be encouraged to stay in his/her own world and live “his/her own time”. The utopian
worlds become an indicator of the issues disturbing the society; that is why the critical potential of
the utopian worlds is revealed to its fullest when the Utopia becomes unreachable or is represented as
something that is better to be kept aside.
Even though this thesis seems to be a very detailed analysis of time travel fantasy evolution, a
whole number of questions (such as the importance of alternative history analysis in order to reveal
the prognostic potential of time travel) is yet to be answered in future research.
Time travel is indeed a very powerful narrative tool that provides the researcher with a great
number of unique interpretations of temporality, history and personal time experience. At the same
time the time machine in any of its actual implementations appears to be the so needed nexus that ties
the past, present and future together.
 78

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Популярная фантазия о путешествии во времени: историческое

воображаемое об утопических мирах (кинематографические репрезентации)
(Резюме)
Данная работа представляет собой исследование того, как меняется нарратив о
путешествии во времени в современной популярной культуре. Работа преследует две
основные цели: выявить исторические, экономические и социальные предпосылки появления
популярной фантазии о путешествии во времени, а также определить особенности эволюции
этой фантазии до сегодняшнего дня.
Соответствующие задачи работы: изучить деисториизацию современного общества,
основные её причины и теории; изучить процесс рационализации времени и появления
времени как измерения в кинематографических репрезентациях; обнаружить истоки и
контекст формирования идеи о машине времени в 19 веке; Проследить особенности перехода
от литературной формы фантазии к визуальной, кинематографической; Проанализировать
трансформацию нарратива о путешествиях во времени, начиная с 19 века и до сегодняшнего
дня; Обнаружить наиболее актуальные проблема (симптомы), которые получили отражение в
современном нарративе о путешествиях во времени; Обнаружить критический потенциал
машины времени: проследить, как утопические миры конструируются в фантазиях о
путешествиях во времени; Оценить путешествие во времени как нарративный инструмент в
современной популярной культуре.
В исследовании используется комбинированная трёхступенчатая методология анализа
кинематографических репрезентаций: «Дальний» план (анализ исторических и социальных
аспектов того времени, в котором фильм был создан); «Средний» план (типичные паттерны и
их трансформации в интерпретациях истории о путешествиях во времени разных лет);
«Крупный» план (анализ специфических кинематографических средств).
В результате выполненной работы был сделан вывод о том, что, вероятнее всего, корни
появления историй о путешествиях во времени, ведут нас в 19 век, эру индустриализации.
Окончание эпохи великих географических открытий привело к тому, что авторам стало
гораздо сложнее находить новое место действия для своих утопий: пространственное
измерение больше не было способно предоставить необходимую степень отличия Утопии.
Именно тогда возникла необходимость исследовать новое измерение – время. В результате
того, что на географической карте практически не осталось неизведанных мест, временное
измерение открыло совершенно новую эпоху в утопической и фантастической литературе.
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Быстрое развитие технологии также сыграло свою роль в появлении фантазии о

путешествии во времени: нарастающий разрыв между прошлым и будущим должен был
оказаться заполненным новыми, культурно легитимными нарративами.
Сегодня мы фактически можем видеть процесс конструирования совершенно нового
понимания времени. Время воспринимается как сложное и противоречивое понятие,
способное ввести общество в состояние перманентной тревоги. Тем не менее, как мы могли
увидеть в исследовании, культура стремится найти новые эффективные пути борьбы с
повышенной тревожностью, создавая новые стратегии и показывая, что даже самый
фрагментированный опыт может стать основой консолидации.
Кино как один из самых сильных инструментов позднего капитализма, выполняет
определённую терапевтическую роль, разрабатывая новые способы репрезентации времени и
истории, так же как и метафор и социальных характеристик утопических миров.
Эта работа может быть полезной исследователям в сфере визуальных и культурных
исследований, а также студентам антропологии, теории искусства и исследований кино.