Trauma in 21st-Century Time Travel Cinema

Kwasu D. Tembo unites approaches from disciplines as wide-ranging as physics, mathematics, cinema, philosophy, and media theory to pose critical questions concerning time, change, and (un)becoming in contemporary time-travel cinema.

In his analyses of 21st-century cinematic time-travel narratives, Tembo situates human life in time as a palimpsest, with time acting as scriptor and stylus. A time machine, then, functions as a fantasy that allows for this pace to be slowed or accelerated so as to appear entirely suspended, with the potentials of the “Now” (re)opened to the traveler.

As the manipulation of time lends the traveler increased agency—and perhaps the conditions to see themselves more clearly amid a claustrophobic sea of information and content—Tembo contends that we must carefully consider the psycho-emotional affectivity of both the motivations and the potentially traumatic consequences of such a jarring shift in perspective. The results lend critical insight into human understandings of how we experience time and, ultimately, what these understandings permit and disallow in terms of how (it is) to be in time.