Today vs. Tomorrow
My previous essay, I considered how several characters in the The Lord of the Rings saga desired to revive the capital P Past, as in Aragon reestablishing the House of Elendil’s rule over Middle Earth. Within the confines of fantasy (perhaps fiction broadly), nostalgia is something that appears capable of being realized: Aragon and Arwen marry, Gondor and the various kingdoms of Middle Earth flourish, the ties between Men, Elves, and Dwarves are forged anew. We’re left to believe that Middle Earth becomes a kind of utopia after the fall of Sauron and the end of the War of the Ring. The promises made by nostalgia are kept.
But in our world, this aspiration to resurrect a lost history is often aligned with reactionary politics, which are utilized by the right to harken back to some halcyon era as a justification to enact oppressive policies in the present. When people in the real world talk about reviving a past (e.g. “Make America Great Again”) this is neither a simple political slogan nor an empty daydream, but an active attempt to weaponize nostalgia for a false past to justify modern-day tyranny.
Having written an essay about the past, my sense of symmetry compels me to follow it up with one about the future. I have a book in mind that I read some time ago that wasn’t tied to anything I was working on, but has been rattling around my skull. In all honesty, my interest in the future is rather untethered from literature and more closely bound to a recent trend I’ve noted in film and television.
I’m confident that a lot of people consider Bill Murry’s Groundhog’s Day a classic. I’m less convinced that anyone expected its plot to proliferate into its own cinematic genre. Just off the top of my head, I can think of The Edge of Tomorrow, Russian Doll, Palm Springs, Happy Death Day (and its sequel), and Boss Level (which I haven’t seen but pops up on my YouTube ads constantly), and on and on. In video games, we have The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Outer Wilds, Twelve Minutes, and Deathloop, among other recent indie titles. Two Distant Strangers is an Oscar-winning short about a Black man trying to escape from a sadistic police officer that kills him over and over an infinite time loop. It artfully mirrors the anguish we feel watching Black person after Black person get murdered on a near daily basis while nothing ever changes. I’m sure I’m forgetting many “time loop as central plot device” works of fiction, but my point is that there’s a lot of them.
At first glance, I’ve always assumed time loop fiction is just easier to produce: one cast with one set of costumes on one set with limited props. Easy to shoot. Easy to code. Yet, there is also a sense of gratification as the audience watches the characters work through the puzzle and free themselves from the temporal trap; it’s like watching someone solve an escape room.
But I think there is another appealing layer to time loops. In short, people are--obviously--flawed and mortal. We are flawed and make mistakes that we’d like to undo. We are mortal and, on a long enough timeline, we will all age and die. The time loop structure offers an escape from both of these curses. The characters in time loop fiction have an infinite amount of time to be better, grow stronger, change their fate, or accomplish their mission. Growth, the hero’s journey, is often the mechanism that allows them to break free from their repetitive prison. Mistakes don’t matter and death be damned. It’d be a paradise if it weren’t simultaneously hell since there are no consequences: nothing matters, utter nihilism. This is a trap a lot of time fiction falls into, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Reorienting toward this essay’s central topic, there appears to be another cinematic trend, distinct from the time loop, where a bureaucratic organization maintains the integrity of a central timeline. Older contemporary works like JCVD’s Timecop and, perhaps, the Time Lords from Doctor Who come to mind. More recently there was the TV show Timeless, or The Umbrella Academy’s shadowy Commission. I’ve been a big fan of The Ministry of Time, a Spanish TV series, and as I’m writing this, Loki just released the last episode in its first season. But the book I’m focusing on in this essay definitely predates all of these: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity, first published in 1955. Normally, I like to cite page numbers, but as I’m in the middle of a transatlantic move, I don’t have access to any copies of these books, so this essay will be mostly based on my recollections. If you’d like more info on The End of Eternity, here’s a link to the Wikipedia page. First, a brief synopsis. Minor spoilers ahead. The major twist comes later.
The End of Eternity follows Harlan, a technician for Eternity, a sprawling bureaucratic organization that can move “upwhen” and “downwhen” in time through devices called “kettles.” As a technician, Harlan makes minute adjustments in the time stream to keep humanity on a particular track, namely one of safety and security; survival of the human race at all costs. Curiously, there is a block on the kettles when they try to travel to times around the 100,000th century and beyond; the Hidden Centuries they’re called. Some in Eternity have speculated that in this era, humanity has evolved beyond their comprehension and a rival time travel organization based far in the future has blocked the kettles from accessing these periods. This turns out to be the case when Harlan falls in love with a woman whom he initially believes is a member of the aristocracy from a far flung future, but is actually an agent from the Hidden Centuries. She tells Harlan that Eternity’s priority was always safety, destroying entire timelines to keep humanity on the straight and narrow. But humanity could--indeed, will be much more, but that requires risk and daring. That requires . . . the end of Eternity. Harlan and the spy are transported to the early 20th century where he’s presented with the choice between saving Eternity, thereby keeping humanity on a short leash, or ending the organization and letting humanity find its own stumbling way forward through time. Though I will reveal his decision shortly as it’s necessary to engage with this essay’s central topic, I’d like to move on to two complimentary works of theory that come to mind when I think of “the future.”
The first is Tufts English professor Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Again, without his text in front of me, I can’t cite pages, but the short version is this: often when people talk about “the future,” they do it through children; “please think of the children” is that common, pearl-clutching refrain. This is a form of “reproductive futurism,” where the figure of “the child” is that of an innocence, a (human) mortality, that needs to be protected at all cost. Much like with reactionary nostalgia, the prerogative (i.e. all-consuming necessity) to defend “the children'' is used to galvanize a political base to make very particular decisions about the shape of progress. This is how anti-abortion religious zealots have consolidated so much power and employed a supposed single issue voter bloc to stall a raft of socially progressive programs.
What Edelman points out in his queer reading of this dynamic is that queer identity is seen as inherently antagonistic to the figure of the child as same-sex couples would not, in a very limited sense, be able to sexually reproduce (which is perhaps true if one wrongly believes that reproduction can and should happen only in a heteronormative nuclear family). Queerness is perceived as being anti-future, positioned as selfish or narcissistic, effectively a threat to the continuation of civilization. Edelman suggests that the reader consider a [queer] world with “no future,” i.e., where the abstract (and unhelpful) concept of “the child” is not the basis for all decision making. Would a world unconcerned about this false specter be better positioned to take care of the people alive right now? This rejection of the heteronormative social script is the power that queer theory brings to the moment.
Anytime someone writes a polemic, there are bound to be rejoinders. The late Cuban academic, José Esteban Muñoz, fired back with Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Published five years after Edelman’s No Future, this work suggests that queerness must be future-oriented. For Muñoz, imagining a future better than the present is crucial to liberatory movements. For many, the world as it stands is simply not good enough. Not even survivable. To expect present conditions to continue into perpetuity--to stagnate in a state of oppression--is not just undesirable but surrenders the fight to the oppressor. So, rather than accepting Edelman’s “no future,” Muñoz insists that we imagine a brighter future using queer (of color) theory as a guide.
I generally agree with Edelman’s critique that the figure of “the child” as a rhetorical tool is harmful and dangerous, and has been used as a anti-LGBTQ cudgel as well as a means of power accumulation for largely conservative, right-leaning campaigns. For the right, every strawman problem has its sacrificial scapegoat. With crime, it’s the Black supercriminal. With jobs, it’s cheap immigrant labor. With sexual liberation, its feminism. And here, the LGBT movement threatens the very future of humanity. By holding up these marginalized communities as targets, the right is able to con much (too much) of the population into enacting policies that benefit the rich and wealthy: for-profit prisons, harsh border measures that keep immigrants in a state of constant precarity, misogynistic and homophobic and anti-trans bills to regulate the life choices of these groups under the banner of “family values” and “the children.”
But I find myself agreeing with Muñoz’s larger point. For me, accepting the present without a future toward which I may orient myself is not just untenable but dangerous. To reject the power and utility of hope strikes me as coming from a place of nihilism. Alternatively, it may speak to the views of an individual that may be more comfortable with the status quo than they’d care to admit, and who’s lost track of what others, even others with whom they share pieces of their identity, might suffer.
An important kernel in Edelman’s reasoning is that in steering toward a particular future, we sometimes lose sight of the present. We may see our present actions as wholly justified by the future we are trying to create: the ends justifying the means. Surely that never got anyone into trouble. And this is a tension I see regularly repeated in time-centric and time loop fiction.
With a TV show like Loki, the Time Variance Authority destroys lives--whole universes--to preserve the Sacred Timeline (which now strikes me as similar to the Golden Path from Frank Herbert’s Dune series). In The Ministry of Time, most of the featured agents have, at one time or another, desired to alter something in their own timelines--to save a loved one, for example--but the institutional posture the ministry adopts is that Spanish history--for better or worse, rise of Franco, defeat of the Spanish Armada, whatever--is fixed and must be maintained as is. No exceptions. Within the world of the show, trying to fix the past always and inevitably results in worse outcomes (given what I’ve seen of the show). But why? Why is attempting to adjust a timeline so wrong? Why does our media so often make it seem that trying to enact a brighter future is doomed to fail?
Similar questions are asked in Asimov’s novel. Should Harlan trust his superiors and let Eternity keep humanity on the safest path, or should he listen to the Hidden Centuries agent and destroy the bureaucracy confining humanity’s tremendous potential? Big spoiler: Harlan chooses to free humanity of Eternity’s control. The decision he makes ensures the organization never comes into being. The final line of the book ends on something like, “This was the end of Eternity and the start of infinity.” A character in Loki makes a similar choice, though I suspect we’re led to believe that this new freedom will lead to a multiversal war that the next phase of the MCU will set about rectifying.
There is the familiar phrase, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Just war theory, specifically the right to go to war, posits that the risks/costs of waging war--the most terrible activity in all of human endeavors--must be outweighed by the potential atrocities allowed by not going to war. And here we come to it: what do we risk, to gain or to lose, by choosing to fight for a better future? Edelman, in this regard, appears pessimistic (though, again, I don’t want him to just be read as a defeatist, but rather as someone offering an alternative approach to the heteronormative cultural scripts). Muñoz, on the other hand, wanted the desire for a brighter future--a shot at a better world--baked into the DNA of any liberatory movement. In his view, we need a future to believe in because sometimes hope for the future is all we have. Harlan, in choosing to erase Eternity, has set humanity free, and risked ending the entire species when it could have been kept safe by his former, now nonexistent colleagues. But what is safety without freedom? That is the core question at the heart of so many works about time travel. Sometimes this works out as a battle between fate and free will. Perhaps it is cast as the tension between order and anarchy. Regardless, there exists a conflict between what is and what shall (or should or must) be, temporally speaking.
I didn’t have any of these books on hand as I was writing this essay, but I did have access to Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta. There is a scene toward the end where the chief of the government’s police force takes a bunch of LSD and visits the concentration camp where the titular anarchist was imprisoned, tortured, and experimented upon. The detective is trying to get into the headspace of the terrorist trying to destroy the tyrannical government. He faces many of the ghosts of his own past, the choices that led him to join a fascist party, and finds himself in V’s former prison cell. He asks himself: “I look at this mad pattern but where are the answers? Who imprisoned me here? Who keeps me here? Who can release me? Who’s controlling and constraining my life except . . . Me? I’m free. Free!”
When it comes to time travel, we are our own jailers. Our imagination, or lack thereof, built the prison walls and we, of our own volition, tread upon a fated path that will lead to a gallows. This illusion of safety provided by Eternity or the TVA or the god-emperors of Dune is a prison built by human hands, not an all-powerful god like Eru in LotR. We jailed ourselves by telling ourselves that there is always only one way forward. Or we are tricked into thinking that someone else’s vision of the future (perhaps refracted through reactionary nostalgia) is the only way. And I think this is where Edelmen misses the mark. We should not stop thinking about the future. We can think about the now and the future at the same time. We can care about people alive today and think about how to make sure everyone has a better tomorrow. It’s scary, daunting, potentially doomed to failure, but not impossible; it’s a challenge.
I think this desire for freedom--physical, social, temporal--is natural, our birthright as breathing and thinking beings. It is governments, cultures, schema, and the whole rest that fetter us. The social contract we signed (before birth . . . which doesn’t seem legally binding) says that we sacrifice freedom for safety, to avoid, “a war of all against all” as Hobbes put it in Leviathan. But V wants to give the world anarchy: not chaos, anarchy. In a speech, V says, “Anarchy means ‘without leaders’; not ‘without order. With anarchy comes an age of ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order” (p. 195). He says this of a social/political structure, but this thinking can also be applied to our approach to the future, too. We need not remain on the track laid out for us. We require the courage to jump the track, and the hope that things won’t fall completely apart.
I suspect most would bristle at the idea that their life, down to its smallest detail, has been orchestrated by a petty bureaucratic enterprise. Or that all of existence can be wiped away with the flip of a switch because it didn’t fit a pencil pusher’s ideal. But how would that be different from more grander terms like fate or destiny? Anarchy places an awesome responsibility in the hands of the people, just as accepting that a multiverse of divergent timelines may lead to ruin or wonder. Indeed, an infinite number of timelines will inevitably lead to both an infinite number of times. It is not hopeless, just risky, and no less risky (for some of us) than other paths that lead to total subjugation or extinction.
Much like how the freedom of anarchy stands opposed to the false order of fascism, so too do many of the characters in these time-based works of fiction choose the freedom of a timeline beyond the control of others that would, with the best intentions, see humanity caged. What is risked, what is always risked, is nothing less than everything. Literally everything. It’s the end of human civilization (though we’re doing a pretty good job of wiping ourselves out as is). But what we stand to gain is glorious: true freedom, true peace, a true utopia. What we gain by fighting for those alive today and daring to hope for a future, and acting and organizing around those hopes, is the shot at a better tomorrow. Not a better tomorrow: that’s far from guaranteed, just the opportunity for one. That’s the best we can hope for.
As V lays dying, he says this: “By turn of the century they’ll know their fate: either a rose midst rubble blooms, or else has bloomed too late” (p. 245). This is the choice we face. I choose hope. Always hope. Hope in the face of fascism. Hope in the face of collapsing timelines. Hope in total darkness. It may not be enough, but for some of us, it’s all we have. I think it was that famous philosopher George Michael (or Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or) who said, “I gotta have faith.”
