Imaginary Worlds - Time Travel Therapy

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Time travel is one of my favorite genres, and it’s also my go-to daydream. But I’ve begun to wonder whether time travel fantasies are a psychologically unhealthy way of avoiding problems in the present, or a helpful way of putting the present moment into sharper focus. I talk with authors Charles Yu, Vandana Singh, and editor Ann VanderMeer about the themes of loss and love in time travel narratives. And professors Antonio Cordoba and Concepcion Carmen Cascajosa Virino explain how the Spanish sci-fi show Ministry of Time (a.k.a. El Ministerio del Tiempo) became a therapeutic outlet for a nation still processing a long history of trauma and disappointments. Featuring readings by actor Woody Fu. The Time Traveler’s Almanac: A Time Travel Anthology https://www.amazon.com/Time-Travelers-Almanac-Travel-Anthology/dp/0765374242 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe https://www.amazon.com/Live-Safely-Science-Fictional-Universe/dp/0307739457 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I was recently talking with my assistant producer, Stephanie, about time travel because it is one of my favorite genres. And I was surprised to learn that she really dislikes time travel stories. And it's not the usual pet peeves that people have, where the logic of the plot doesn't make any sense or is contradictory. Those kinds of things do bother her, but her bigger issue is the emotional logic behind these

stories. And she dug into some of my favorite time travel movies, like Peggy Sue Got Married. In fact, throughout my 20s and even into my 30s, I kept having Peggy Sue-type fantasies, where I would be magically transported back into my teenage body, but with an adult perspective, so I could do everything over again. But if you're, like, who you are now, think about how you were perceived or who you were when you were in high school or middle school or even like, you know, your early 20s.

And now you're getting teased again for these things that you're getting teased about 20 years ago. How do what is that? What is that cognitive dissonance due to you as a person? Wouldn't that depress you? I mean, while you're there, wouldn't you be like frustrated with the fact that you can't really express yourself how you used to or even have with the fact that you can't really express yourself how you used to or even have this future knowledge that you can't share because you don't want to screw

up the timeline yeah i would i would be frustrated because i don't have a cell phone so i'm like what i have to listen to my music on a walkman and i have to take a tape in and out and i've got like if the batteries go out then i'm screwed i can't call anybody because i have to find a freaking pay phone like like those types of things would be so frustrating to you. And they don't really address that in any kind of time travel that I've seen. Like they don't really like to some extent they do with Peggy Sue, but not I think enough because they're going for something else here. They're going for this. You learn your lesson all over again, blah, blah, blah. But even in that story, she still fell in love with it,

even though she knew that that marriage was going to be a disaster in the future. She still went back. She still ended up doing the same things, whether she wanted to or not, because she still fell in love with him because she was reminded of who she fell in love with. Well, you made an interesting point, too. We're talking earlier about that. You think time travel is like a cheap form of therapy and not a good form of therapy either. Exactly. Exactly. So, okay. Again, you're romanticizing your past. If you're in a bad place in your future and you're like, oh, you know, back then it was so much simpler. I was so much happier. If I could go back in time and change everything, I would feel so much better about myself. Or a choice that you made that you really wish you had made a different choice,

which I still have those. Exactly. But you're basically circumnavigating your problem and actually addressing your problem by trying to go back in time and quote unquote fix it. I think what it ends up doing is it gives you more time to actually avoid the problem. I think the only reason I think one of the reasons why I like Doctor Who is because it comes out and it's like, nope, time isn't linear. It's this big bowl of spaghetti and we can do whatever we want with time.

And that makes me more accepting of when they travel in time and space. And they even do still adhere to some rules. They're fixed points in time. Yeah, exactly. And there are fixed points in time that he's like, I can't change them no matter how much I want to. So are there other really well-known time travel movies or TV shows or storylines that

everybody loves that you're just like, no, no people think about this? Back to the Future. To me, Back to the Future is the ultimate like wish fulfillment I'm gonna like therapy thing you know because Marty's life currently his parents aren't happy and even though he goes back in time and like his his mom suddenly sees her the the father is like a hero or whatever and they get together why does that lead to them still being happy in the future I'm pretty sure that they're still gonna they still have the same personality they would still have the same problem. Yeah. But what about the fact that, you know, Marty helps him stand up for himself? He encourages his father to be a writer.

And, you know, he becomes his dad becomes, therefore, a better version of himself. And then that makes his mother happier. And the whole family, you know, ends up being much less dysfunctional because of that. Yeah, that again, I just think that's putting way too much stock in what one person does. I mean, who's to say that those effects actually last? Maybe when Marty leaves, his confidence leaves with Marty. You know, Marty kind of helped build up his self-esteem. But when Marty leaves, he's still going to be in the same circumstances that he was before. Biff can still kick his ass. So it just might be like, okay, you know, Marty's here for a while.

He feels better about himself. And then two weeks later, Biff beats the crap out of him. And all of a sudden his self-esteem is down again. I don't think interacting with Marty at one specific point in time completely changes your personality. It puts way too much stock in that. And a lot of time travel does that. They make these assumptions that when the person leaves from that timeline, everything that they've done is going to have a lasting effect. That's not how it works, people. That conversation with Stephanie made me think, is time travel an unhealthy way of escaping your present reality? I mean, I love time travel stories, especially when characters go to the past. I mean, is it really just a junk food fantasy that's ultimately bad for you?

I wanted to run these questions by Charles Yu because he wrote the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, because he wrote the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, where he satirizes the Hollywood approach to time as if time is something that you can fix mechanically. In fact, the main character in his novel is a mechanic who repairs time machines that were invented by his father. There was something intrinsic about telling a family story through the lens of time travel, because I felt like our kitchen table, you know,

where I now go as like a father now, I go back and, you know, take my kids back to see my parents and we eat at the same table that I used to eat at when I was my kid's age. When I'm having a conversation with my parents sitting at that table, there's a overlapping of time, you know, it's sort of folding in on itself at that point. And Charles was really drawn to the idea of time travel because it's one of the most common daydreams that we could have. People ultimately do a lot of mental time travel and emotional time travel in that thinking about the future is, as I say in my book, basically anxiety. Thinking about the past is usually as I say in my book, basically anxiety. Thinking about the past

is usually regret. I mean, those are negative ways of thinking about it. Thinking about the future can also be hope. And thinking about the past doesn't have to be regret. It can be fond memories. But in this book, in the book, the character is a time machine repairman. And really what he's doing is he's going around to people whose time machines have broken. Ostensibly, he's there to fix the time machine, but really what he ends up telling them is that they've broken the machine themselves or you can't use the machine the way you want to. You can't use it to change the past because if you did, you would no longer be in your own universe. You'd be in a different universe.

Really what the time machine repairman is doing is just sort of acting as like a counselor for people to explain that they sort of have to accept what has happened and move on. Here is the actor Woody Fu reading an excerpt from the book. The reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy, even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his very worst moment over and over and over again. Willing to pay a lot of money to do it too. I mean, look, my father built a sort of semi-working proto-time machine years before pretty much anyone else had even thought of it. He was one of the first people to work out the basic math and parameters and the limitation

of life in the various canonical time travel scenarios. He was gifted or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with deep intuition for time and ability to feel it inside viscerally. And he still spent his whole life trying to figure out how to minimize loss and entropy and logical impossibility. How to tease out the calculus underlying cause and effect. He still spent the better part of four decades trying to come to terms with just how screwed up and unfair it is that we only get to do this all once. With the intractability and the general awfulness of trying to parse the idea of once, trying to get any kind of handle on it,

trying to put it into the equations, isolate into a variable, the slippery concept of onceness. One of the most common themes in time travel stories is undoing a loss. There are huge apocalyptic losses like in Avengers Endgame or X-Men Days of Future Past, and then there are minor losses like Marty McFly wishing he had a less dysfunctional family. Vandana Singh is a writer and a physicist who explores time travel

in her fiction. It makes sense to her why loss would be such a common theme in these stories. Loss is such a very, very hard thing to deal with. And part of that denial is to want to go back in time and find that person again or find that place again. Therefore, memory and story are really the only time machines we have for revisiting something we've loved and lost or someone we've loved and lost. And sometimes that impulse can be pathological in the sense that if we can't work through grief and if we deny loss, then we are in trouble

because we can't be real, fully, really present in the world anymore. Vandana and Charles Yu both wrote stories for the Time Traveler's Almanac, which is an anthology that was co-edited by Anne Vandermeer. Anne sees the time travel genre a little bit differently. She thinks they're all basically love stories, because love is the flip side of loss. stories, because love is the flip side of loss. It's not just love stories in the sense of romantic love, but it's also love stories in friendships, love stories in parents and children, grandparents, you know, reaching across generations. I felt like the whole idea behind people's yearning to time travel was to make these connections with other people in their lives, whether they were good relationships that they wanted to revisit, or maybe there was a problem in the relationship that they wanted to fix. In fact, one of her favorite stories from the anthology is a love letter to San Francisco. It's called Three Rooms, Good View by the writer Karen Haber. And it's about a woman

who can't afford to live in San Francisco anymore. So she goes back to the 1960s so she can pay less rent and essentially grandfather herself into the lease while trying to juggle living in two different time periods. And of course, when she's going back into the past and living in this apartment, she has these neighbors. But when she goes back into the future, she no longer has those neighbors. So it's all those relationships between where she is here and where she is there. And it's just a fabulous story. And it's not your usual time travel story. Two-year lease, he said. Sign here. Then he brandished an additional piece of paper. This too.

If this is a pet restriction clause, I'm going to protest. Your ad didn't say anything about it. I've got a cat. Sure, sure, Raskin said. You can keep your kitty as long as you pay a deposit. This is just your standard non-interference contract. Non-interference contract? He looked at me like I was stupid.

It rarely happens. When it does, I don't like it. You know, he said and recited in a sing-song voice, don't change the past or the past will change you. The time laws. You lawyers understand this kind of thing. You and you alone are responsible for any dislocation of past events, persons or things, etc, etc. and you alone are responsible for any dislocation of past events, persons or things, etc., etc. Read the small print and sign. Time travel is a fairly recent fantasy, because for most of human history, people's lives didn't feel that different from their grandparents or grandchildren.

In fact, Vandana thinks that time travel stories are really a symptom of modernity. Because it's trying to make sense of a rapidly changing present and where our future is uncertain and increasingly so. And I think that's partly modernity that does that. And our own lives are so frantic, always being pushed to the next deadline and the next thing to do and the next thing to do, that time becomes, you know, we all suffer from, as a friend of mine likes to put it, from time poverty. Most of us who live in modernity. And Charles thinks that Americans have a particularly strong sense of time moving fast because our country is so young, especially the city of Hollywood itself.

I mean, I live in Southern California, where if a house is 100 years old, it's considered historic. But as the son of immigrants who came from Taiwan, I have this kind of mix of things where I understand that there's a perspective on things that can stretch much longer than my sort of very American brain. If you don't have a sense, and I'm talking about myself, of larger time scales, it can kind of warp your perceptions of how much you can actually affect the course of things, either in your own life or in a larger sense. Vandana splits her time between the U.S. and India, and she's very aware that her own sense of time changes depending on where she lives. She compares it to the difference between classical Indian music and Western music. In Indian classical music, you always end at the, what would be, you know, if you think about the do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, you always come back to the do at the end. So it's kind of got this circular structure to it.

You wander in all kinds of places. There's a lot of improvisation with some constraints, but you kind of come back to the end, the note that is the do, the original do. What I've noticed in Western music is often the end note is not where you began. And, you know, I know that Western cultures, I'm sure this is an oversimplification,

but that the idea of linear time is a big deal, at least in modern Western cultures, which are now globalized. Whereas we find in other cultures simultaneously, the notion of linear time coexisting with a circularity. She explored these ideas in a short story called Delhi, which is in the Time Traveler's Almanac. Her main character is a young man in New Delhi with the ability to see the past or future layered on top of each other. And he feels disturbed when he learns that the Indian caste

system doesn't go away in the future. It just goes high-tech. The train snakes its way under the city through the still new tunnels, past brightly lit stations where crowds surge in and out and small boys peddle chai and soft drinks. At one of these stops, he sees the apparitions of people, their faces clammy and pale, clad in rags. He smells the stench of unwashed bodies too long out of the sun. They are coming out of the cement floor of the platform, as though from the bowels of the earth. He's seen them many times before. He knows they are from

some future he'd rather not think about. But now it occurs to him, with the suddenness of a blow, that they are from the blind girl's future. Lower Delhi. Nichidili. That is what this must be. A city of the poor, the outcasts, the criminal. And the still-to-be-carved tunnels underneath the Delhi that he knows. He thinks of the metro, fallen into disuse in that distant future, its tunnels abandoned to the dispossessed,

and the city above, a delight of gardens and gracious buildings and tall spires reaching through the clouds. After the break, we will move even further from the Hollywood version of time travel as we explore a European time travel show that became almost like a form of national therapy. free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. We interrupt your podcast to bring you breaking news.

Tim's Classic Breakfast Sandwiches are just $3 when you buy any size coffee. You heard that right, $3. Your mornings will never be the same. Plus tax, Canada only, limited time only, terms apply, see app for details. It's time for Tim's. Earlier this year, a listener suggested that I might like a Spanish sci-fi show called The Ministry of Time or El Ministerio del Tiempo. I binged through the first three seasons on Netflix. I love the concept and the characters, and it is one of the most ingenious shows I've ever seen about time travel.

Not long after I finished binging the show, Netflix lost the rights to stream Ministry of Time in the U.S. The fourth season of the show is already airing in Spain, but so far I have not been able to find any version of the show streaming with English subtitles. Once somebody has the rights again to stream it in the U.S., I will let you know. Also, in describing the show, I do have to give away a few minor spoilers. The Ministry of Time does not rely on a time machine. Instead, they use a series of underground doors that lead to different periods in Spanish history.

In each episode, a trio of time agents are sent to the past to stop whoever is trying to change things, even if those people have good intentions, thinking they're going to change history for the better. Or time might be in flux. People in the past make different choices, and time agents need to stop the butterfly effect because there's just too many unknown variables. Also, the time agents are recruited from different periods of Spanish history, so they can help each other blend in depending on which period of history they're sent to. As much as I love the show, I knew that I was missing a lot of cultural context.

So I talked with Concepcion Carmen Cascajosa-Varino, who goes by Conchi for short. Conchi is a professor at the University of Madrid. She also wrote a book about the Ministry of Time, and she got a lot of access to the showrunner, Javier Olivares. She says the first thing that is uniquely Spanish about the show is that it's about a government agency. It may be a top-secret government agency, but it's still a small bureaucracy. And they're very cautious about making sure history doesn't change, even if that history was tragic. The setting of the series is to be very Spanish.

And there is nothing more Spanish than having things to work in the same way always. It's very representative of what Spain is. I also talked with Antonio Cordoba. He teaches Spanish science fiction at Manhattan College. Both he and Conchi told me something about the show that had never occurred to me. When the show first launched, the three main characters, who are part of a team of time agents,

were intended to be symbolic characters. The three members represent, in a way, all of Spain using Spanish stereotypes. On the one hand, we have the everyman, the man of the people, the man of the present. That character is Julian. He's an EMT in Madrid with a very dry sense of humor. The second member of the team is Emilia from Barcelona.

She was the first woman to attend college in the 19th century. And even if she is a character from the 19th century, the smart character, the character that is looking forward, character that is looking forward, the one that is like the embodiment of modernity, is a woman from Catalonia. And finally, there's Alfonso, a soldier from the height of the Spanish Empire. And he is like this embodiment of all this 16th and 17th century, all Spanish gentleman behavior. He's brave. It's emphasized over again that he's sexist, but he has a heart of gold and he believes in the king, but he's still willing to adapt. And that's also a very stereotypical representation of Southern Spain, Andalusia, in which people are kind of naive, but have their heart in the

right place. Antonio is from southern Spain, so that stereotype jumped out at him. I would not have recognized it, but I did feel the tension in their dialogue. Like when Julian, from our time period, makes self-deprecating jokes about modern Spain, Alfonso is offended because he took so much pride in the Spanish empire. And Conchi says those exchanges are important because Spain is fractured along political and social lines that each of the characters represent, especially the tension between Emilia, the 19th century liberal reformer, and Alfonso, the 16th century macho warrior.

And it's very difficult, very difficult for the two Spains to work together. And we are seeing that all the time. We're now in a very complicated crisis in Spain, and it's the same. It's impossible to have two Spains to be together. Eventually, the three of them become very close. And what helps them bond is that all three of them, and in fact every character in the show, is dealing with a personal loss. Julian lost his wife in a car crash a few years earlier,

and he's haunted by whether he can use time travel to save her. But their boss, Salvador, is a widow, whose wife could have been saved by modern medicine, but he refused to break the rules. And Conchi says that feeling of loss and mourning goes beyond the characters, because the series originally had two showrunners. They were brothers named Pablo and Javier Olivares.

Pablo died when the show was in development. So I think that is, and I think if you compare the first season of The Department of Time with the later seasons, the first season is very sad because all the main characters are facing this, they're facing, you know, the loss of a person, of a situation, of a life, of a life project. That sense of mourning tapped into the national zeitgeist when the show debuted in 2015. Spain was still reeling from the 2008 recession, which had come after an economic boom.

And Spain has a deep history of national losses, going back 400 years. The ministry of time is also dealing with the disaster of the Spanish Armada, but with other moments where we were at the disaster of the Spanish Armada. But with other, you know, moments in where we were like at the top of the wall, we lost power and we were behind in the stream of history. Antonio says it's not a coincidence that several of the male characters are mourning the loss of their wives. Because in the Spanish language, everything always has a gender.

The fact that Spain, España is feminine, always, always, always activates some kind of gender national allegory in which the male character missing his wife or his mother, that's always present there, that sense of a national loss that goes beyond the individual loss of the character. When the show first came out, there were complaints that it was too nationalistic. The ministry was often protecting Spain from foreigners trying to meddle with their history. The writers were open to that criticism, and the second season was more introspective. My favorite episode from the second season dealt directly with the loss of the Spanish Armada, which was the tipping point when England overtook Spain as a global power.

In that episode, King Philip II commits the ultimate taboo and uses the ministry to rewrite time. So he not only wins the Spanish Armada, but every battle afterwards until Spain becomes a 21st century superpower that is also a religious dictatorship. For Alfonso, who is the soldier from the old Spanish empire, this would have been a dream come true. But that character has already changed a lot by living in the 21st century. And he eventually realizes this is a nightmare. And Conchi says that season two also shifted its focus from the theme of loss to disappointment. And they dealt with the biggest disappointment in recent history, the difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy.

You know, we don't have a good opinion about politicians in Spain. I think it's impossible in Spain to produce a television series such as the West Wing drama because it's impossible. We had a very good comedy in Spain. Now this is about a politician, and this politician is like an idiot.

But we had more novel, you know, novel presses coming from literature. Antonio says that's why the time agents are often risking their lives to save writers, poets, musicians, and artists. But if they have to save kings or politicians, it's usually presented as a necessary evil. on the arts, on the literature, on all that great opportunities in which the Spanish people showed that they're made of the right stuff, but that unfortunately the authorities have not been up to the task. The characters do alter history when they can, but it's a power they use sparingly. As their boss Salvador often explains, without that history of loss, disappointment, and tragedy, they wouldn't have this history of

great works of Spanish art and literature, and the arts have helped to define their national character. Too much playing the hero as you would have in a Hollywood movie is not good for you. So they have like these really fascinating paradoxes and really fascinating ways to use time travel and what is preserved and what is not preserved as a way to provide therapy to a nation that in 2015 is still like reeling and recovering from the trauma of the Great Recession. What I like about the Ministry of Time is that these questions can be applied to a country or a person.

I mean, if you could undo the worst things that ever happened to you or the worst things you ever did, you wouldn't be you anymore. And sometimes you need to go back in time to realize that. Although lately, with the COVID-19 crisis, I've been jealous of time-traveling characters, because I feel like the future cannot come quickly enough. At the same time, I have not been dwelling in the past

because it's painful to remember how easily I used to be able to go out and enjoy being in the world. But the future is so unknown and so unpredictable, I haven't allowed myself to fantasize about the future, which is very unusual for me. I have never felt so stuck in time, so stuck in the present moment as I do right now. I know that's supposed to be a good thing,

but I still wish I had a time machine. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Charles Yu, Vandana Singh, Ann Vandermeer, Concepcion Carmen Cascajosa-Varino, Antonio Cardoba, and my assistant producer, Stephanie Billman. Also, thanks to Woody Fu, who did the readings. By the way, I talked about going to the past a lot because I've always thought that going to the future would be disorienting and people would probably just

treat you like a relic. And if you want a sense of what that could be like, check out my episode, Brain Chemistry from 2018. It's an audio drama about a guy who gets to live in the future, well beyond his natural lifespan. And it is not what he bargained for. Obviously, there are a bazillion time travel stories out there that I did not mention.

So tell me, what are some of your favorites? You can let me know on the Imaginary Worlds Facebook page. I tweet at emalinski and imagineworldspod. Also, registration is open for the summer session of my class on how to make a podcast at NYU. And for now, NYU has gone completely virtual. So you can take my course from anywhere. The class is called Creating a Narrative Podcast, and you can sign up at the NYU website. If you like Imaginary Worlds,

please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts, or a shout out on social media. It helps people discover the show. But the best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get either free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. You see, Morty, you weren't saving your place and going back. I don't respect time travel.

If Ant-Man and the Wasp can do it, I'm not interested.