I have a particular affinity for time travel movies. And I don’t mean the ones where adventurers go 10,000 years into the future or back to the time of the dinosaurs. I specifically love the ones involving a trip backwards in time where people change their destinies and learn about themselves and their families.
My favorite movies of all time are those of the "Back to the Future" trilogy. The first time I saw Part I on TV when I was nine, I immediately made my mom go to the video store to rent the other two; since then I have seen each movie a crazy amount of times, and my sixteenth birthday part was BTTF themed. Last night I watched "Peggy Sue Got Married" again with my roommate, partially inspired by a recent re-viewing of BTTF, and fell in love with it. Another notable mention in this category is the time-travel part of season 4 of Felicity.
I think that my fascination with these sorts of stories comes from the poignancy of seeing how the nature of people’s entire lives can be traced back to specific moments or actions. It addresses the unpredictability of life – you never know when that definitive moment is going to come or what its consequences will be. That’s where faith helps me out. It’s the belief that in those moments of great decision-making and importance, there is something greater and all-knowing guiding me and making sure that everything will work out.
In "Back to the Future Part I," (in which the definitive moment is George and Lorraine kissing at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance) Marty McFly’s time travel and interference with his young parents results in a better life for his whole family when he returns to 1985. In both "Peggy Sue Got Married" (key moment = getting it on with her boyfriend on her 18th birthday) and Felicity (key moment: choosing Ben over Noel), the protagonists learn that their original decisions, wrong as they may have seemed in retrospect amidst pain and confusion, actually were preferable to the alternative. These stories tap into universal fears and concerns, and to me they convey a valuable lesson: Faith means not having to travel back in time to figure out that where you are is where you are meant to be.
Comments (1)
"That’s where faith helps me out. It’s the belief that in those moments of great decision-making and importance, there is something greater and all-knowing guiding me and making sure that everything will work out."
If you truly believe this, then your belief system would seem to contain strong elements of Buddhism (karma, reincarnation, and ultimate enlightenment) or Christian eschatology (resurrection and entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven).
Limiting this discussion to the present world, however, it's hard to imagine, for example, that those who were tortured to death by their oppressors would say (if they could) that "there [was] something greater and all-knowing guiding me and making sure that everything [would] work out."
Posted January 23, 2008 9:50 AM
Posted on January 23, 2008 09:50