Our next short time travel movie is an easy-paced movie clip which touches on temporal and causal loops – but I’m not convinced it quite gets there. Maybe I’m wrong; perhaps you can help me out?
Meanwhile, sit back and relax with “Lazy Boy”!
Rewind function
The lazy boy chair is the time machine which can take its occupier back in time. There doesn’t seem to be any control in how far back in time we can go, but I was interested to see that the effects were cumulative – once back in time, the chair could be activated again for another jump back in time.
We see this in the last sequence, although in this case instead of a discrete jump the hands of the clock sweep backwards. No jump, but a progression.
Is this important?
Time jump
This is only a personal feeling, but I see a jump more as a time-only reset. Counter-intuitively, an instantaneous relocation on the time line suggests that memories and other information are preserved.
The classic example is the Groundhog Day movie, where multiple time jumps transport Phil Connors back to a particular moment where he relives a portion of his life over and over, each time building on his existing information. In this way, he learns, for example, to play the piano. For the outside observer he does this in one lesson. For Phil, he’s repeated many lessons.
(Coincidentally, there’s also a child who’s caught from falling from a tree!)
Time slide
With a progression along the time line, it’s a bit different. There’s an implication that time is flowing backwards. Again, we might think that information is carried backwards, but if we’re sticking to the time line it’s reasonable to expect that actually this is more of a hard reset (where conditions are returned to how they originally were at each step along the way).
The sweeping clock hand is testament to this – it was at the 6, for example, then slides back to the 5 (where it originally was), then back to 4 and so on. The clock hand is maintaining its original information.
Time lines
This is where I start doubting.
When the guy goes back in time he’s still sitting in his chair. The important point to note is that there’s no double (for example, like there was in I’m You, Dickhead) so we assume that he’s now in a different time line, with, for example, a different girlfriend, who incidentally, still wants to get “that thing (chair) outta here!”
So now he can change history. He can place his informed bets, for example, or have different conversations with his girlfriend. Although being on a different time line, maybe this isn’t a change in history, but a creation of a new one?
“Never again?”
As a side note, I questioned his repeated beer drinking. I’ll leave it up to your own moral standards to decide whether this constitutes “wise use” of the chair!
I couldn’t tell whether he was getting drunk (maintaining preservation of memory) or whether he was able – as I think the clip suggests – to drink an unlimited amount of beer with no ill side effects. In the latter case, this would be an inconsistency; keeping his memory of previous drinks intact but also his clear head.
Maybe this is the clue – memory requires a clear head! 😉
The Final Countdown (in time!)
The final (multiple) jump / slide back in time is for me the most interesting because it avoids a potential grandfather paradox.
Grandfather paradox
The simplest application is if he overshoots going back in time to before he buys the chair. A change in the history may mean that he winds up not buying the chair at all, and hence not capable of going back in time to before it was purchased and changing that history.
The usual side step of the grandfather paradox is multiple time lines (read multiple grandfathers) which as we’ve already discussed, is a possibility in this instance. Indeed, we see multiple versions of the guy (and he’s still clutching a broken handle of the chair, so multiple (parts of) chairs too).
Which version makes it to the present? As we often see, a death makes this decision for us. But crucially, this doesn’t need to be the case here.
Time loop
I think we’re lead to believe that the girl in the tree is not only the motivator of the time travel (true) but also instrumental in a time loop (not sure…)
Ultimately, she doesn’t cause any change in the guy’s behaviour, other than being observed and motivating time travel in an effort to go back to save her. In a time loop, the change in behaviour occurs in the present not the future – there is interaction between present and someone or something from the future (see this wikipedia diagram) so I’m not convinced that what we see here is a time loop.
“You have to make plans for the future!”
Or maybe the loop rests in the idea that this guy will never reach an old age because he’ll always be returning back to the past and getting run down?
Still. We have a multiple time line here – whilst under the tree he sees his original self trying out the chair. Is this where the fork in the time line originates? Or should I call it a branch? 😉
Paul
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