Reading is FUN-damental!

[ Part 1 -> Part 2 -> Part 3 -> Part 4 -> Part 4b -> Part 5 -> Part 6 -> Part 7 -> Part 8 -> Part 9 -> Part 10 ]

There are several essays in this book that I think of as “deep cuts,” in that they’re not the ones I’d mention if I were describing the book to someone. “Through a Glass, Blindly” is one of them. It’s not non-entertaining, but I’ll admit I sort of mentally went to the restroom while reading this.

That didn’t come out right at all, but you know what I mean.

One reason I zoned out during this one is that Klosterman starts out talking about Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It’s a great movie, certainly worth discussing, but at this point I’ve read so many essays about it that any piece of writing I encounter nowadays that mentions Vertigo immediately takes on the intellectual flavor of Dinty Moore beef stew.

“Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.”

What interests Klosterman about Vertigo is the first twenty minutes:

Jimmy Stewart plays an ex-detective who’s hired to tail a woman, played by Kim Novak. He follows Novak around town as she engages in a series of actions that appear to have no clear purpose. She buys flowers and visits the grave of someone named Carlotta Valdes. She goes to a museum and studies a painting (of someone also named Carlotta). Then she walks into a hotel, but when Stewart follows her in, the clerk insists she was never there. All of this intrigues Stewart, and he eventually becomes unhealthily obsessed with this mystery woman.

Klosterman’s contention is that what draws Jimmy’s interest (as well as the viewer’s) isn’t so much Novak’s actions as the fact that her motivations are totally unknown. We don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing, or what she’ll do next, and not knowing increases our excitement and involvement in that character.

“Yet if these windows were TV screens — if these people had placed cameras in their apartments and broadcast their mundane lives on purpose — I would immediately lose interest. It would become dull and repetitive. Everyone knows this, and everyone feels the same way. But does anyone understand why?”

Earlier in the essay, Klosterman talks about watching people at home through their windows, which is interesting (to Klosterman) because the people do not know they are being watched. Presumably, if these people knew they were being watched, they wouldn’t like it, even if they’re just sitting on their couches, reading.

Klosterman has a tendency towards solipsism that crops up now and then, like when he assumes the universality of his responses. I don’t know that it’s true that mundane lives shown on television would be dull to people. Or at least, it wasn’t true in 2000, when the U.S. version of Big Brother debuted.

Although I never watched the show — which followed a group of people confined to a house 24 hours a day, under constant surveillance — and neither did anyone I knew, I and most of my online friends obsessively watched the live streaming feeds from the house. Unlike the broadcast episodes, which were edited in typical reality-TV style, the live feeds were unedited and therefore had no narrative or guarantee of anything interesting happening. Most of the time, all we saw was people sitting around watching TV. And it was fascinating!

And of course, even before that, there was the Internet phenomenon of JenniCam, which was nothing more than a relatively ordinary girl — as ordinary as someone who does this can be — with multiple webcams scattered around her apartment, permitting voyeurs around the world to watch her every action, from eating cereal to having sex, totally unfiltered. Jennifer’s life was thoroughly mundane, yet fascinating to millions of people who paid for the privilege of peeking through her windows.

So I think Klosterman is kind of begging the question here. Yes, people who are only interested in peeping at people who don’t know they’re being watched, are not interested in peeping at people who know they’re being watched. But people also are interested in peeping at people who know they’re being watched — something Klosterman should know, as a huge fan of The Real World — particularly when that view is unscripted and unfiltered.1

“Unknowing feels good to your body, even when it feels bad to your brain.”

Although Klosterman’s perspective here is overly narrow, his argument isn’t wrong in itself. We are thrilled by the unknown because not knowing what’s about to come at you is stressful, and that stress induces an endorphin- and adrenaline-fueled rush. We are simultaneously frightened and attracted, and we enjoy being suspended in that tension. Furthermore, fear mingled with physical attraction can result in romantic attraction, which explains why Jimmy Stewart becomes obsessed with Kim Novak.

Klosterman tells an anecdote about having lived in an apartment where he was able — could not avoid, actually — to see into the window of the woman living in an adjacent building, an experience he likens to a nonverbal relationship with an extremely mysterious roommate. He found this woman endlessly fascinating because he had no idea who she was or what she was actually doing, outside of what his narrow viewpoint permitted.2

Most of my personal experiences with voyeurism are fleeting and dim in my memory.3 I suppose I’ve glimpsed neighbors through their windows from time to time. I agree with Klosterman that it is inherently fascinating to see people when they’re totally unaware of being seen, even if they do nothing remotely interesting. I think what I get out of those glimpses, mostly, is a sense of validation — I’m not (that much) weirder, or more boring, than anybody else.

Klosterman goes on to discuss Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which for me is sort of the Chef Boyardee’s Beef Ravioli to Vertigo‘s Dinty Moore. However, Klosterman’s take on the film is interesting.

In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart is a photographer laid up in his apartment with a broken leg. He spends his recuperation wheelchair-bound, hanging out with his wealthy socialite girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly,4 and peeping through binoculars at the residents of a neighboring apartment building.

The problem with Rear Window, according to Klosterman, is that what Stewart sees through his neighbors’ windows is “too lucid”:

“It does not feel like he’s watching strangers; it feels like he is watching a collection of one-act plays. Miss Lonely-hearts (the pill-eating spinster) stages imaginary dinner dates in her kitchen and cries constantly. Miss Torso (the bombshell ballerina) has cocktail parties and invites only men. A struggling musician sits at his piano and writes silly love songs, thinking out loud as he plinks out melodies. There is never anything confusing or non sequitur about how Stewart’s neighbors behave.”

This is true. The neighbors’ lives as seen through Stewart’s binoculars comprise entertaining micro-stories within the main storyline, but that’s the problem: they’re stories, with coherent narratives. We never wonder what’s happening in anyone’s apartment, because it’s always straightforward and clear. Nothing random or meaningless occurs. They’re vignettes with no resemblance to anything one would realistically see from Stewart’s vantage point.

I’ve never found Rear Window all that compelling, for reasons I could not define, and I think Klosterman’s analysis nails it. The narrative is too rational; the plot is programmatic where it should be chaotic. Klosterman describes voyeurism as a Lynchian experience, which recalls the scene in Blue Velvet in which Kyle MacLachlan hides in a closet, watching a batshit insane Dennis Hopper violently dry-humping Isabella Rossellini while inhaling gas. Although far weirder than anything Stewart sees in Rear Window, the randomness and lack of narrative coherence in that scene somehow feels more true to life.5

“It was a little past eleven o’clock. We were listening to ELO. During the chorus of “Don’t Bring Me Down,” we noticed a bachelor friend of ours exiting the newspaper building; he had been working late on a concert review and was going home. He did not see us, so we decided to follow him.”

As far as I’m aware, there was nothing about my personality in high school that was particularly attractive to voyeurs or stalkers. However, I had close friendships with at least five people, none of whom socialized with each other in any way, where one of our primary social activities was surreptitiously following other people, and/or staking out their residences. I was always the driver, probably so that my friend could fully savor their unsavory behavior without distraction.

With two of these friends, the thing we did was follow certain teachers after school. They would drive off in their Toyota Celicas or Camrys (for some reason, fully three-fourths of the teachers at my school drove either Celicas or Camrys) and we would be at a discreet distance behind them.

Usually, they’d just drive home, and that would be that. Once in a while, though, they’d run errands — in which case we’d wait with absurd anticipation to see what stores they shopped at — or go to a house that was not their own. (WHAT THE!)6 The only thing we saw that even approached scandalous, though, was seeing our Latin teacher — imagine a blander, more soft-spoken version of Stephen Tobolowsky — emerging from a liquor store carrying a big bag full of booze.

As banal as these experiences were, they were still incredibly exciting for some reason. The friend Klosterman followed didn’t do anything particularly notable, yet for Klosterman “it was a wonderful, memorable night.” He later offers the example of an old man building a bookshelf at 3 a.m. (boring), versus secretly watching an old man building a bookshelf at 3 a.m. (interesting). Why?

For Klosterman, it’s about mundanity: the meaningless act of watching a meaningless person perform meaningless activities makes Klosterman aware of his own meaninglessness. And because we live in a culture that expects, even demands, lives full of meaning, purpose, and significance, it’s gratifying to peer into another person’s life and see its insignificance. Their ordinariness is comforting — we are all the same — and relieves the constant pressure we feel to be special and important.7

“Seeing the secret lives of others removes the pressure of our own relative failure while reversing the predictability of our own static existence.”

This is true for Klosterman, and it may be true in general, but I don’t know that it describes the thrill that voyeurism aroused in me and my friends. I think that, for us, stalking and peeping was a way of asserting power over our targets. It’s saying to someone, “I can see you, but you can’t see me.” You, the oblivious watched, are at a disadvantage. I, the watcher, have power over you, because I have knowledge you don’t (that I am watching you), and because your obliviousness makes you vulnerable. It is an ancient, primal thrill.

Following our teachers was satisfying because they were authority figures, and stalking them reversed our power roles. Staking out the houses of people we had crushes on was satisfying, because to be infatuated with someone is to be powerless before them, and stalking them helped restore a measure of control.

Next: Chris Gaines, we hardly knew ye.

[ Part 1 -> Part 2 -> Part 3 -> Part 4 -> Part 4b -> Part 5 -> Part 6 -> Part 7 -> Part 8 -> Part 9 -> Part 10 ]

If there’s a central theme of Eating the Dinosaur, it’s this: public opinion is a motherfucker. Once people decide who you are, what you are, what your brand represents, it’s almost impossible to get out from under your assigned narrative. (Unless of course you can write yourself a second-act redemption, à la Drew Barrymore or Robert Downey, Jr.) And as we’ve seen from the tragic examples of David Koresh and Kurt Cobain, defying your public image can actually be deadly.

As much as we deride the idea of “branding” and being “brand-conscious,” our relationship with our culture is symbolically mediated via branding to an extent most people — or at least people who like to think of themselves as objective judges of things and/or people — would hate to admit.

The classic example, of course, is wine. Every so often there’s a story about how the “so-called wine experts” can’t actually tell the difference, in blind tastings, between red and white wine, or cheap wine from the expensive stuff.1 These stories reveal that the experience of wine is primarily subjective and symbol-driven. “Red wine” and “white wine” each represent an array of qualities and associations that may or may not have anything to do with the actual liquid sitting in front of you. A wine presented to you as a Bordeaux will prime your expectations in a different way from one billed as Australian.2

I’ve always thought it would be interesting if music critics were required to evaluate new music without knowing the names of either the artists or the albums. At least a third of any given album review will consist of an appraisal of a band’s career to date. The last five R.E.M. albums, for example, could never be anything but uniformly mediocre, because drummer Bill Berry retired to become a hay farmer, thus crippling the band creatively. No review of any post-Berry R.E.M. album failed to view the album’s music through the “declining years of a once-great band” filter.

Any of those albums, presented as the premiere release of a shiny new band, might be praised as a “promising debut” (albeit one that was highly derivative of R.E.M.) Rock album reviews are never objective, because the sound is never (and possibly cannot be) judged strictly on its own merits. The music is never not measured according to the artist’s previous output and overall career arc, which, along with whatever narratives accrete onto their personal life, comprise that artist’s identity.3

“Ralph Sampson was the worst thing an athlete can be: Ralph Sampson was a bust. And though I know why that happened and I know why it’s true, I struggle with what that means. It seems to exemplify the saddest thing about sports and culture.”

Let me state up front that I have minimal interest in any form of sports as a spectator activity.4 I feel that watching sports — and not only watching sports, but memorizing sports statistics, and tracking and discussing the histories and attributes of individual sports teams and athletes — is fundamentally a waste of time. (I say this in full recognition of the fact that most of the things I enjoy and spend time on would probably be considered a waste of time by most sports fans.)

This goes for football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and pretty much anything else you see discussed emphatically on TV in garish high-def by unhealthy-looking middle-aged men, to the strains of ostentatious music played on brass instruments or Top 40 country songs sung with exaggerated rural accents.

For this reason, I find the two sports-based essays in this collection (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Ralph Sampson” and the comparatively concisely-titled “Football”) a bit of a slog. That’s all right, though, because Klosterman, a man of the people, usually finds some way to make this material palatable to someone like myself.

I’ve never heard of Ralph Sampson, but he seems to have been an extremely talented, promising young basketball star. Here is Klosterman’s description:

“Sampson was better designed for basketball than any human who has ever lived: He possessed the maximum amount of dexterity within the longest possible skeletal structure. In my imagination, he still seems unstoppable — an elegant extension of Darwinian engineering. He is more unstoppable than Michael Jordan; he’s Jordanesque, but constructed like Jabbar. He’s Jordan with a skyhook.”

That’s pretty impressive-sounding, and I don’t even know what a “skyhook” is.

So, what happened to Ralph Sampson? According to Klosterman, he was destroyed, effectively, by a lethal combination of high — and inaccurate — expectations, and an unwillingness by the basketball world to accept Sampson for the player he was, rather than the player they wanted.

In Klosterman’s view, Sampson became, in the world of televised sport, “a tall, emotive, representational nonhuman slave,” which I take to mean that, despite Sampson’s amazing gifts as a basketball player — gifts that made him extraordinary among ordinary human beings — once he entered professional sports, he was reduced to a product. Whatever wonderful abilities he had to offer didn’t matter. Whoever he was as a human being didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what the basketball industry wanted from him, and what the fans wanted from him.

His options were to either appease those desires, or be damned. Whatever he wanted or whomever he wanted to be — the pursuit of which is normally extended to human beings in a free society — was obliterated by outside interests. When Sampson failed in that purpose, he was promptly and casually discarded.

Klosterman uses the example of Britney Spears (and Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton) to expand his point:

“Every day, random people use Britney’s existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy…. They allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money.”

The assigning of identity to public figures via gossip is a game the people play, in order to fill the void of their lives and to create a sense of community. I can see the truth in this, given the popularity of celebrity gossip sites, and the vast amounts of time people spend commenting on them. My awareness of Lindsay Lohan’s personal problems is one of a handful of things I can say I have in common with at least half a billion people on the planet Earth.

The point of this aside is, I think, twofold. One, Klosterman establishes that there is such a thing as global consensus in the first place — why it exists, its cultural function. Two, he points out that people are fundamentally irrational, unhappy, and psychologically fucked up. The people, that is, who hold the fates of human beings like Kurt Cobain and Ralph Sampson in their hands.

“So this is the first part of the two-pronged explanation as to why Ralph Sampson busted: It was because other people were wrong about him. And this happens to athletes (and nonathletes) all the time. But it’s the second part that’s more complicated; the second part has to do with why certain minor athletic failures are totally unacceptable, even while other athletic failures are mildly desirable.”

Hell is other people.

So, moving into Why Ralph Sampson Busted, Prong #2, here’s a sports story that can intrigue even a sports non-fan:

“In the unwritten Wikipedia of world basketball history, Benny Anders is little more than a footnote.”

Benny Anders? I have no idea. He was, like Sampson, a promising young basketball star in the 1980s, whose career flamed out, and who subsequently disappeared completely, an amazing feat (assuming he’s not dead, or really, even if he is dead) in the Google Era.

Unlike Sampson, Benny apparently was not a nice guy, but an “outlaw”:

“On his first day as a Houston Cougar freshman in 1982, Anders showed up at the gym wearing a T-shirt that said outlaw. He claimed this was his high school nickname in Louisiana, and he said he got it because he killed people. His era with the Cougars would end less than four years later, partially because he brought a handgun to practice.”

Besides being a bit of a character, Anders was a classic underachiever — he obviously had talent, but didn’t appear to give a shit about doing anything with that talent. He did just enough to suggest that he could do a lot more. His technique never progressed beyond raw potential. And then he bailed.

So what’s notable about Anders, and why he’s remembered, is that vague hint of promise, which, after his abrupt disappearance, ballooned into the stuff of sports legend. Whatever he might have actually accomplished if he’d held onto his career is eclipsed by what he potentially could have accomplished.

“Benny Anders is not coming back. But he doesn’t need to. When you have unlimited potential and an unwillingness to pursue that potential, greatness doesn’t need to be achieved; as fans, we only require glimpses of a theoretical reality that’s more interesting than the one we’re in.”

Unlike Sampson, Anders didn’t stick around long enough to fail anyone’s expectations. As a basketball player, Anders failed completely — he abandoned the game and, apparently, the planet. By any objective measure, Sampson was much more successful than Anders.

Yet, in the public eye, Anders is remembered fondly where Sampson was forsaken and forgotten, not in spite of his failure but because of it. People were in love with his potential, and by disappearing, Anders ensured that his potential would last forever.

“Some claimed he was last seen in South America. Others said Chicago. Still others insisted he continues to play ball on the streets of Louisiana, eating glass as a three-hundred-pound not-so-small forward.

While visiting my hometown many years ago, I met up with a friend of mine from high school. This friend was surprised to hear from me, not just because I’d called him out of the blue, but also because there had apparently been a rumor circulating among my former classmates that I was living in Alaska as a cod fisherman.

Since in reality I was working as a minimum-wage temp at a cell phone company in Seattle, I thought this was pretty fucking cool. In terms of your high school legacy, the only legend that endures forever, unchanging, is the guy people expected to become successful and/or famous, but instead mysteriously vanished in a swirl of rumors.

When people barely remember their high school class valedictorian, and the school sports hero ends up as a paunchy middle-aged car salesman, they’ll all still talk about that one guy that nobody knows what happened to. So to even mildly resemble someone like that felt totally rock & roll.5

I’ll stop here, even though the essay continues for something like twenty paragraphs. Suffice it to say that Klosterman really hates what happened to Ralph Sampson.

Next: Klosterman watches the watchmen.

[ Part 1 -> Part 2 -> Part 3 -> Part 4 -> Part 4b -> Part 5 -> Part 6 -> Part 7 -> Part 8 -> Part 9 -> Part 10 ]

So far, you’ve written nearly 15,000 words about Eating the Dinosaur. That’s more than you wrote on this blog in all of 2012. Whence comes this newfound verbosity?

A lot of it is probably Modafinil-related. The thing that’s great about this stuff for writing is that, when I sit down to write, I immediately start writing. There isn’t that initial period of trying to gather up all my scattered thoughts and form them into something coherent. If I stop to focus on something else, I can come back and pick right up. Before, if I had an hour to write, I’d spend 30 minutes of the hour just getting my thoughts sorted. And if I stopped for any reason, that’d be it — I’d lose the thread forever.

Also, I find it a lot easier to write a response to something than to just generate thoughts out of nowhere. I like to have something to bounce my brain off of. So, I guess I’m using the Chuck Klosterman book as sort of a writing prompt.

Why did you pick this particular book of essays to discuss? It was published in 2009, so it’s not especially timely. Why not, say, the posthumous collection by David Foster Wallace that came out last fall?

I actually went back and re-read Consider the Lobster after I re-read Eating the Dinosaur, and I recently finished the posthumous DFW book [Both Flesh and Not]. I’m on an essay kick right now.

I found I just didn’t have a whole lot to say about either DFW book. They’re entertaining, and Wallace is obviously a fantastic writer, but his essays are like these perfect, hermetically sealed packages. They’re so exhaustive in their coverage of their subjects that I can’t think of any response that wouldn’t be totally superfluous.

Klosterman I think is a messier, looser writer, so when he writes about a topic, you feel like you can also engage with it and respond to his thoughts. I guess he’s more accessible that way. His essays are to DFW’s what blog posts are to academic papers.

Also, it doesn’t hurt that Klosterman’s topics tend to be pretty lowbrow, on the whole, even if his thoughts on them aren’t. I’m ashamed to admit that I probably have more to say about Garth Brooks than I do about the state of the prose poem.

Wallace is an iPhone, and Klosterman is an Android phone?

Sure, whatever.

I know you’ve only covered three out of the book’s thirteen essays so far, but are you happy with what you’ve written so far? Does it look like what you thought it would look like when you started this?

[laughs] If I knew beforehand that I was going to end up writing 15,000 words before I even got past a fourth of the book, I would have said fuck this shit. So far I’m averaging one essay a week. At this pace, it’ll be the end of May before I’m done with this thing.

But are you happy with the content so far?

I’m happy with the fact that I’m producing it. It’s been a long time since I’ve written on a regular basis. When you stop writing for a long time, you kind of forget how to write. You sit down and try to compose something, and you can produce sentences, but it’s like the sentences won’t fit together correctly. Forget trying to write anything complex or mentally demanding. I wrote a few things last year that I looked at and thought, “Oh my God…what is that thing…for pity’s sake, put it out of its misery!”

But yeah, I’m OK with what I’m posting so far. I’m putting a lot of work into these pieces. I’m trying to create something that sounds right and has something to say. I’m not as lazy about it as I used to be. Some of them are longwinded as hell, but I’m trying to be true to the topics and also to my style.

Some of the entries probably ask more from the reader than many are willing to give. Like, for instance, this fake interview. As you write these, are you thinking about how they’ll be received?

I think it’s more like I’m scratching a mental itch by writing these, but as long as I am, I think it’s just polite to make the scratching as coherent and readable as I can. So yeah, I do think about it, but fortunately, there are only, like, five people reading this, and three of them are search engine bots, so the stakes are fairly low.

Next: Something about sports, I guess.

[ Part 1 -> Part 2 -> Part 3 -> Part 4 -> Part 4b -> Part 5 -> Part 6 -> Part 7 -> Part 8 -> Part 9 -> Part 10 ]

This was going to be a detailed discussion of the final section of “Tomorrow Rarely Knows,” in which Klosterman examines the 2004 time travel film Primer, but I’m stymied for two reasons:

(1) I haven’t seen Primer since its DVD release in 2005 and, although I watched it at least twice, possibly three times, it’s the kind of film — along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and pretty much every film Peter Greenaway has ever made — that you might understand after a couple of viewings, but if you don’t give yourself booster viewings every so often, the understanding slips out of your brain.1

(2) My attempt to watch Primer last night was blocked by a reluctant wife. “Is this film going to tell me anything important about life?” she says. How do I know — I can’t even hold the basic plotline of that movie in my head for two hours! (Also — that’s the standard now for whether or not we can watch a movie??? I am totally going to remember this when the next Hunger Games movie comes out.)

So, in the interests of moving things along, I’m going to forego (re)watching Primer, and just respond to Klosterman’s observations. If you haven’t seen it, though, you should. Primer is a pretty amazing science fiction film, and, by the way, one that must be watched completely stone cold sober (or even better, augmented with nootropic drugs).

If you doubt me, take a look at this infographic that lays out the plot. This labyrinthine timeline is, believe it or not, actually enormously helpful in understanding the plot, which should tell you something about what it’s like to actually watch this movie.

“What’s significant about the two dudes in Primer is how they initially disregard the ethical questions surrounding time travel; as pure scientists, they only consider the practical obstacles of the endeavor…. They’re geniuses, but they’re ethical Helen Kellers.”

As briefly as I can manage: in Primer, a pair of entrepreneurial engineers build a time machine that can transport them about six hours into the past. They use the machine, initially, to make money off of the stock market, but things get complicated as they begin to use the box for their own selfish reasons.

Made for only $7,000, Primer is a perfect example of a filmmaker making a tiny budget work in the film’s favor, by making its limitations integral to the story. It features possibly the least impressive time machine I’ve ever seen in a film — it’s just this big box with wires attached to it — but this actually enhances the mundane realism of the film’s depiction of time travel.

The time travelers are nondescript, unremarkable engineers in white dress shirts and ties. The setting is a generic suburban “City” overrun with corporate parks. Likewise, the characters’ motivations are trivial and unimaginative. Having stumbled upon possibly the most significant invention in history, they use it for minor self-enrichment and petty interpersonal conflicts.

While Primer’s perplexing narrative puzzle makes for a maddening but compelling intellectual challenge, you don’t have to untangle the plot to appreciate the human story: what happens when people who have spent their lives floating in the moral and ethical vacuum of the modern American technocracy are suddenly confronted with a device whose function has real, and potentially catastrophic, ethical implications? (Spoiler: nothing good.)

When the complications really get going, with multiple copies of time travelers being created and then set to screwing each other over to advance their petty schemes, the world of the film becomes even more impersonal and dehumanized. As Klosterman puts it, “their sense of self — their very definition of self — is suddenly irrelevant.”

If I had to sum up Primer in one sentence, I guess I’d say that it’s a story about why humanity can’t have nice things.

“I used to have a fantasy about reliving my entire life with my present-day mind…. I imagine the bizarre things I would have said to teachers in junior high. I think about women I would have pursued and stories I could have written better and about how interesting it would have been to be a genius four-year-old. At its nucleus, this is a fantasy about never having to learn anything.”

LIFE 2.0 CHECKLIST (PARTIAL)

• Don’t dig a hole under the fence of your nursery school.
• Don’t punch that one kid.
• Do punch that other kid.
• In general, punch a lot of kids, and get punched a lot. There will never be fewer repercussions from physical violence than right now, so enjoy yourself. Also, you will avoid becoming the type of repressed, frustrated adult male that the novel and film Fight Club were created for.
• Convince your dad to buy the VHS machine, not the Betamax, despite the latter’s obvious technological superiority.
• Good novel ideas: frustrated writer takes winter caretaker job at hotel, goes bonkers; abused boy is recruited by wizard school; extremely pale teenagers fall in love, one of them is a vampire; randomly assembled nonsense about Merovingians and Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene.
• When your friends go apeshit over this new movie called “Star Wars,” be all “Meh, it’s just a ripoff of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress.”
• In high school, make friends with that one new girl everyone thinks is a narc. She isn’t a narc, but her brother ends up writing fucking Lethal Weapon.
• Alternatively, just write fucking Lethal Weapon.
• The other new kid that everyone thinks is a narc? He actually is a narc. Report him to the wasteoids under the bleachers and score some brownie points, or at least some free weed.
• Smoke a lot of weed. Don’t worry about it. Just do it.
• Also, try to have a lot of sex, but only until around 1983.
• Assemble list of awesome rock bands of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Be into them before anybody. If asked, become their manager.

Next: An interlude.

[ Part 1 -> Part 2 -> Part 3 -> Part 4 -> Part 4b -> Part 5 -> Part 6 -> Part 7 -> Part 8 -> Part 9 -> Part 10 ]

Marching onward through “Tomorrow Rarely Knows.” The end is in sight!1

I’ve now typed fifteen hundred words about time travel, which means I’ve reached the point where everything becomes a problem for everybody.

Klosterman lists and discusses eight dilemmas commonly associated with time travel. Most of these are based on the idea of a single, but not necessarily fixed, timeline.

Disclaimer: I’m fully aware, by the way, that everything I’m about to say below will sound (and probably be) ridiculous, in accordance with my previously stated assertions regarding talking about time travel. So, onwards!

1. If you change any detail about the past, you might accidentally destroy everything in present-day existence.

Self-explanatory, and definitively covered in that one Simpsons episode where it rains donuts.

2. If you went back in time to accomplish a specific goal (and you succeeded at this goal), there would be no reason for you to have traveled back in time in the first place.

This is the scenario in which, according to the “Hitler’s Murder” paradox that Klosterman cites, if you went back in time to kill Hitler as a baby, thus preventing WWII and the Holocaust, you would also eliminate the reason you went back in time in the first place.

(Klosterman goofs up a couple of times here, first by calling it, in print and on the audiobook, the “godfather paradox” — it’s called the grandfather paradox — and then by incorrectly attributing this idea to Chuck Palahniuk. This paradox does figure prominently in Palahniuk’s novel Rant, but the concept has been around for many decades.)

So, what would happen if a time traveler went back and killed baby Hitler?

This is assuming he could. One theory holds that the universe would not permit such a paradox to occur, so either the traveler would be destined to fail to kill Hitler, or fate would ensure that history would not be changed by the traveler’s actions, as on an episode of the 2002 Twilight Zone revival series, in which a time traveler successfully kills baby Hitler, replacing him with another baby, but — TWIST! — that baby grows up to become the person we know as Hitler.

However, if the plan worked and Hitler was definitively killed, thus eliminating his contributions to history, including the Nazis, the Holocaust, and Godwin’s Law, what then? Here’s the scenario that makes the most sense to me:

Let’s say the traveler is sent back in time from 2013 to 1889, the year of Hitler’s birth. The first consequence is that, once he arrives in 1889, the traveler becomes part of the world of 1889, and any actions he takes affects and creates history going forward. He remembers the world of 2013, and historical events preceding 2013, and those memories are fixed in his mind, even if many of those events no longer occur.

The traveler successfully kills Baby Hitler, then jumps into his time machine and zips back to 2013. What does he find?

Most likely, he’ll come back to a world drastically different from the 2013 he left. History will have unfolded very differently from what he remembers. The 2013 he remembers doesn’t exist, since it was the result of a very different sequence of events. It’s very possible that the traveler never existed in this timeline, or that time travel itself was never invented. (I believe the latter is the most likely, for reasons I’ll give later.)

I don’t believe the grandfather paradox is possible, because I subscribe to the idea of a single, but not fixed, timeline. Here’s the best illustration “I” can come up with (thanks, Hannah!) for what I mean:

Let’s say you’re working on an incredibly long-winded, wordy blog post, and you’re writing it in a text editor. About 3,000 words in, you realize you’re heading down a blind alley, and decide to back up to the first paragraph and start again. You go back, delete everything after the first paragraph, then hit save.

The document, in this example, is the timeline. Time travel is when you go back to an earlier point in the document. Some time travel theories hold that the entire document is still there, so you can make revisions earlier in the document without losing everything else. But I think what happens is that when you go back, everything after that point gets deleted, and there’s no Undo.

So you resume writing, and what gets written after that might resemble what was originally there, but it almost certainly won’t be an exact match. More likely, you’ll end up with something very different from what was there before.

Getting into even weirder territory, here’s a potentially disastrous consequence of the Kill Baby Hitler scenario. The traveler leaves 2013, enters 1889, kills Baby Hitler. The traveler’s timeline is overwritten as history proceeds from that point. As the centuries pass, the timeline diverges dramatically from the one we know, but we still eventually come up with a time machine.

So then yet another traveler goes back in time, to avert some tragedy — let’s say the assassination of President Henry Ford during his 1932 reelection campaign. This second traveler, entering 1932, overwrites the revised history the first traveler created, resulting in a third timeline that once again, decades later, culminates in the invention of the time machine.

And so yet another traveler goes back in time, creating a fourth timeline that overwrites the previous three.

And so on and on and on. Humanity becomes trapped in a loop, as history cannot proceed beyond the moment that a time traveler activates a time machine set to the past. Each trip creates a new timeline leading up to that point where a time machine is invented, and someone travels into the past. It happens over and over and over….

Until….

A timeline is created in which humanity doesn’t invent a time machine. (Or invents one, but doesn’t use it. Or only uses it to travel into the future.) That’s the only timeline that can continue to exist, because every timeline with time travel inevitably gets overwritten.

I believe this is the reason why we’ll never invent time travel. Or rather, why we’ll never experience a universe in which time travel exists. The existence of time travel throws us into a continuous loop of timelines being created and erased, over and over, until a timeline occurs where time travel never happens.

What’s more, we can never know that this is happening, because for “us” in any given “now,” there has never been time travel. From our perspective, the timeline we inhabit is the only timeline that has ever existed.

So in a way, Klosterman is right: time travel, though theoretically possible, is effectively impossible, because only a timeline without time travel can exist.

One odd side effect of this theory, by the way, is that it allows for the presence of time travelers — but not time travel — throughout history. Going back to that first traveler who goes to 1889, if no other time traveler in any of the succeeding timelines jumps back to before 1889, that first traveler, if he remained in 1889 and didn’t (or couldn’t) leap forward, will not be overwritten, and will continue to exist.

But if someone in that timeline’s future goes back to 1887, for instance, that will wipe out the 1889 traveler by erasing the timeline leading up to that traveler’s trip.

(Although of course it’s possible, though unlikely, that this succeeding timeline still ends up with a time traveler going to 1889. Even in this case, though, it wouldn’t be the same 1889 traveler, even if it were the same person, since they would be coming from the 1887 traveler’s timeline.)

So, if by some chance every time traveler jumped back to a date after the previous traveler’s trip, and remained in that time, all of them would continue existing — until someone finally ruined it by going back to the Big Bang and overwriting everything.

This could be the basis of the admittedly weird-sounding conspiracy theory that the Large Hadron Collider is being sabotaged from the future. If it’s true that discovery of the Higgs Boson could lead to time travel, then the first thing a time traveler really ought to do is jump back in time and prevent the particle from being discovered in the first place.

I could keep going with a few thousand words about how this all connects with the Many Worlds Theory, but I’m pretty sure we’re all extremely ready to move on.

3. A loop in time eliminates the origin of things that already exist.

The “Bootstrap,” or “Back to the Future” paradox: Michael J. Fox goes back in time to 1955, and unwittingly (via cousin Marvin) gives the song “Johnny B. Goode” to Chuck Berry (who wrote “Johnny B. Goode,” but not until 1958). Since Berry apparently didn’t, in fact, originate “Johnny B. Goode” — Fox gave it to him — and Fox didn’t come up with “Johnny B. Goode,” either, who wrote “Johnny B. Goode”?

This is not actually a paradox according to the theory of time travel I subscribe to (see #2). Chuck Berry writes “Johnny B. Goode.” Michael J. Fox travels back to a point before Berry wrote it, and gives him the song. Therefore, the new timeline’s Berry didn’t write the song. However, the song was still written by Chuck Berry, in a 1958 that no longer exists.

In the new timeline, Fox can be credited, more or less, with originating “Johnny B. Goode,” based on his memory of the song from his (now obliterated) timeline. Which kind of sucks for Berry, but since he’s totally unaware that he actually wrote this song in a previous timeline, it’s all good — as far as he knows, he appropriated it from some white boy at a high school dance, and is gratified by this rare opportunity for cultural payback.

4. You’d possibly kill everybody by sneezing.

This is actually just #1, reworded, but whatever. Traveling into the past, you bring with you a modern disease that humanity hasn’t developed an immunity to, thereby killing everyone. Or, you die from a vintage disease like smallpox.

This is definitely possible, and could happen at some point, but hasn’t yet, obviously, since it hasn’t. Unless deadly pandemics like the Black Death and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic can be attributed to time travelers. Maybe!

5. You already exist in the recent past.

This is the always-unsettling notion that, if you traveled back to a time within your lifetime, you might meet yourself.

There’s a science fiction novel I read as a kid — I remember nothing about it except that it had something to do with time travel — that posed the dilemma that time travel violates the “conservation of mass” law of physics, that matter cannot be added to or removed from the universe. If you go back in time, you’re removing your mass from the (present) universe you’re in, and dumping your mass into the (past) universe you’re visiting.

Much of the plot was consumed with the characters grappling with this concept, and, in order to prevent the universe from unraveling, figuring out how to transport the equivalent mass of the time traveler out of their universe and into the traveler’s universe. This could be why I don’t remember a whole lot about this novel.

If you don’t get hung up on the details, though, “meeting your future self” is rich soil for story ideas.

My favorite tale based on this premise is Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Touch of Petulance.” In this story, a newly and happily married young man encounters an old man, who claims to be him. He’s come from the future to warn him that his cherished wife will, in time, become so shrewish and aggravating that, once day, he’ll snap and kill her.

Naturally, the young man dismisses the crazy oldster and his wacky stories. But what’s that he sees on his wife’s pretty face? Could it be…a touch of petulance? (This premise would resurface in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hell’s Bells”.)

Another story that isn’t time travel-based, but has to do with meeting your Doppelgänger, is Harlan Ellison’s “Shatterday,” one of his best, creepiest stories, about a man whose exact double shows up out of nowhere one day, and begins gradually taking over his life. The kicker is that the double actually is a better person than the original, and more deserving of his identity. Depressing ending. You’ll love it.

Some stories try to resolve or bypass the complications of meeting yourself (and the whole conservation of matter problem). Quantum Leap had its hero, Sam Beckett, changing places with people in the past, “leaping” into their lives and indentities while the “leapee” was transported out of that timeline. (I believe he physically exchanged bodies with them, rather than switching minds, but I was never totally clear on the process.)

This is essentially the same concept as mental time travel, one of my favorite tropes. It’s used to great effect in the film Peggy Sue Got Married, in which Kathleen Turner, attending her 25th high school reunion, is transported back in time into her high school self.2 Of the myriad time travel methods, I like this one best, since it bypasses most of your thornier time travel dilemmas.

6. Before you attempted to travel back in time, you’d already know if it worked.

This one is kind of nonsensical, so I’m going to ignore it.

7. Unless all of time is happening simultaneously within multiple realities, memories and artifacts would mysteriously change.

This one is basically the Looper theory of time travel, although of course it also applies to Back to the Future. According to this model, there’s a single timeline, but all points along the timeline, past and future, exist simultaneously, and changes to the past/present affect people from the future even if they, via time travel, are physically in the past/present.

The classic example from Back to the Future is when Marty McFly, in 1955, starts to fade out of existence because his father George doesn’t stand up to bully Biff, and therefore won’t end up marrying his mom. And in Looper, there’s a scary scene where a looper is being tortured into revealing the whereabouts of his future self, who’s at large somewhere in the film’s present day. As the present-day looper is mutilated, the effects of the mutilation appear on the fugitive future-looper’s body.

This time travel conceit has never, as far as I know, been handled correctly, because of one significant issue that is never acknowledged.

Take Back to the Future, for instance. The film posits that Marty, who has traveled to 1955 from 1985, shows the physical effects of events occurring in 1955 that affect his development in the future. When his parents’ romance appears unlikely, Marty’s hand starts to disappear, because the chances that his parents will fall in love, marry, and conceive Marty become slimmer. As the chances of him being born grow more precarious, his physical form in 1955 actually reflects that diminished probability.3

So, okay, let’s accept for the sake of argument that this is all possible. What we’re being asked to understand, then, is that Marty, while physically in 1955, is entirely his 1985 self — no matter who/what that 1985 self is, depending on how that self develops as the circumstances of his birth and upbringing change.

Let’s say that, because Marty’s parents got together in a totally different way, there’s some chain of events that lead to Marty’s mother taking thalidomide while pregnant with him (I know the historical dates don’t fit, but bear with me). As a result, Marty is born with a prominent birth defect (although one that doesn’t prevent him growing up in a way similar enough to his original life so that he can travel back in time).

That means, according to the time travel theory the film is premised upon, the moment George McFly knocks out Biff and kisses Lorraine, Marty should suddenly change appearance to reflect the birth defect he now possesses. Although he is not in 1985, he is completely malleable based on everything that occurs while he’s in 1955.

Are we good on this? Okay! So here’s the thing. If Marty is 1985 Marty, wholly and completely, no matter who that is at any given moment, then, when George and Lorraine finally kiss and fall in love, altering the timeline, why doesn’t Marty instantly gain all of his memories of his life and that of his family in the new “happy” timeline?

Likewise, why doesn’t Marty instantly lose all of his memories of his life and that of his family in the old “unhappy” timeline?

In the time travel model I support, this isn’t an issue, since in that scenario Marty — the Marty who travels to 1955 — would be unaffected whether his parents got together or not. This Marty would retain all of the memories he arrived with, since he would not be of the new timeline growing out of the film’s 1955 events.

But in a film that proposes that Marty is affected by 1955 events, because he is at any given moment the product of those events, it totally violates the film’s own rules when Marty doesn’t actually become the Marty of the “happy” timeline. He should immediately forget his former existence, and now only know himself to be the son of the successful, happily married, affluent Yuppies we see at the conclusion of the film.

Looper makes an even bigger deal out of the premise that Bruce Willis Joe, who has traveled back to 2044 from 2074, changes physically based on his actions and those of Joseph Gordon-Levitt Joe in 2044 — since those changes ripple up the timeline to affect Bruce Willis Joe in 2074, and therefore Bruce Willis Joe in 2044.

So then, when Bruce-Joe arrives in 2044, and he and JGL-Joe (who’s tasked with killing Bruce-Joe, but fails to do so) engage in their cat-and-mouse game, why doesn’t Bruce-Joe, at any given moment, know exactly what JGL-Joe is thinking or planning? Not only would Bruce-Joe know JGL-Joe’s thoughts and intentions, but he’d also remember the outcome of all of JGL-Joe’s actions, since he is JGL-Joe, just older.

The film treats the two Joes as individual people, but they are in fact the same person. That sounds self-evident, but in a different time travel model they might be different, distinct individuals.

For instance, going back to my preferred time travel model, a Bruce-Joe that went back from 2074 to 2044 would have memories of the original timeline leading up to 2074, but once he was there, and interacting with JGL-Joe, everything would change, and events would progressively diverge from Bruce-Joe’s memories. He might remember what he originally thought or intended when he was JGL-Joe in the original 2044, but the JGL-Joe he’s interacting with in the new 2044 would have totally different thoughts and intentions.

But in a universe where Bruce-Joe is always part of the same timeline as JGL-Joe — no divergence, no overwriting, no multiple time streams — Bruce-Joe is the same entity as JGL-Joe. They are not two separate people. The only reason we see them as two people is that this is the only way we can perceive Joe simultaneously as his present and future selves inhabiting the same physical and temporal space.

The most explanatory way to portray Joe in Looper might be as kind of a, um, human centipede, with JGL-Joe at one end and Bruce-Joe at the other end. In between the two would be a series of increasingly older Joes, representing his state across the years between 2044 and 2074. Whatever changes happened to JGL-Joe would ripple down the line to Bruce-Joe, including all of JGL-Joe’s thoughts, experiences, and memories. At the other end, Bruce-Joe would have all the knowledge and memories of every Joe from JGL-Joe onwards.

That’s why Looper, while an entertaining enough film, makes no narrative sense whatsoever.

I’d love to see a film or read a story that actually took into account this aspect of the “past/future self are one” time travel model. If one exists, please drop me a line and let me know. I think it’d be fascinating to explore the interaction between two characters who are essentially the same person at two different ages, not in the usual way this scenario is presented, but where the older version changes dynamically based on how their interaction affects the younger version.

Older: “Damn it, I’ve got lung cancer now because of our lifelong cigarette habit!”

Younger: “What the! In that case I’m quitting right now!”

Older: “Well done! I no longer have lung cancer!”

Younger: “Let’s celebrate with a martini!”

Older: “Dammit, now I have cirrhosis and I’m an alcoholic!”

Younger: “Fuck! All right, I’m going dry! Not another drop!”

Older: “Liar! I remember what I was thinking when you…er, I…said that! I was thinking of an excuse to sneak out to Malarkey’s!”

Younger: “Ahhhhhh…I’LL KILL YOU!”

Older: “Eh? You’d only be killing yourself, you idiot! I’m you! I already know you don-” [VANISHES]

Younger: “Thank God. Now where’s that gin.”

8. The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.

Finally, we get to the time theory I find most intellectually challenging, because of everything it implies about predestination and free will, and also because just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

Most of the time travel discussion so far assumes that the past and/or future can be altered. But what if time is absolutely fixed and unchangeable, and, while you can travel through time and interact with all time periods, nothing you do in the past can change the future, because your actions are already part of the timeline?

I’ll call this the Twelve Monkeys model, because Klosterman uses that film to illustrate this concept, and also because it’s an awesome film.

In Twelve Monkeys (for some reason, any time anyone talks about Twelve Monkeys, they’re required to note that it’s inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée, so I’ll note that Twelve Monkeys is inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée), Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time, from a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has been ravaged by a deadly plague. He’s been tasked to obtain a sample of the original virus, that will be studied in hopes of developing a cure.

The scientists who send Cole back acknowledge that the past cannot be altered; Cole’s mission isn’t to stop the plague, just to retrieve the virus. Of course, this doesn’t stop Cole from trying to stop it anyway, but his actions not only fail to prevent the global outbreak, but actually set in motion the events leading to the outbreak.

From our individual points of view, there is no apparent reason why we cannot exert some measure of control over future events. We make choices and decisions. We shape and plan our actions. We project our imaginations into the future and make decisions that anticipate coming events.

But then, so do characters in novels. From their perspective, they live in their own present, can only guess at future events (Dune novels excepted), and behave according to their assigned motivations. As far as they are aware, they are fully autonomous beings who possess free will, whose fates are not predetermined.

Yet, as readers, we know better, because we have the entire novel in our hands. Whatever a character, on page 50, thinks they’re going to do, we can turn to page 55 and know exactly what they did. The novel is completely static; the story is set and unchanging.

A story about a character’s death might have that character trying all sorts of desperate measures to avoid dying, but if the story ends with their death, that’s how it ends — the character’s efforts alter nothing; they’re simply part of the narrative.

Applying this to real life will lead to all kinds of horrifying existential questions. If characters in a novel live in the delusion that they have free will, or even minimal control over their destinies, oblivious to the fact that their entire lives have already been pre-written, printed and bound, what makes us think we’re any different? What is there to suggest that any of our choices aren’t just part of some predetermined narrative — even those choices we make in the awareness of that possibility, in presumed demonstration of our autonomy?

And if we do accept that our every action, thought, and decision is predetermined and immutable, what then? What purpose does that knowledge serve?

I suppose that, while this knowledge can’t change anything in your life or anything you do, it can perhaps change your attitude towards those things. Knowing that I do not have free will, and therefore, I am not fundamentally responsible for my decisions and actions, is somewhat reassuring, if not exactly comforting.

To be sure, I still make choices, and strive to make the best choices I can according to my judgement, wisdom, ethics, and morals. But to the extent that I have any kind of soul or basic essence of self that can be held accountable by a cosmic higher power, I’m essentially off the hook. Without free will, I can’t be held accountable for what are, in effect, involuntary actions, except of course within the context of the narrative (i.e., as a human among other humans in society).

In a novel about a character who commits murder, that character can be judged and punished within the world of the novel. As readers, we can react to the character’s actions and what they represent. But it would be irrational for a reader of a novel to hold that fictional character responsible for its actions. Everything the character is, thinks, and does is a manifestation of the author’s imagination. A fictional character has absolutely no choice or influence in its own portrayal.

Perhaps our belief in a predetermined universe can bolster our confidence in our actions and choices. I am exactly who I am supposed to be. I am where I am supposed to be. What I do, I do because it is, simply, what I do. No more and no less. There is no need for me to justify my existence. Whether there’s an ultimate meaning to the universe doesn’t concern me. I’m here because I’m here.

Throughout Twelve Monkeys, Cole has a recurring dream/flashback. In this dream/flashback, Cole, as a child, is standing in an airport terminal with his parents. He is looking at a man lying on the ground, bleeding. A woman kneels beside the man and tends to him.

Each time Cole has this dream/flashback, as he moves through the world of his past, what is initially a jumble of fleeting impressions takes on more detail and form. He encounters people who he then sees and identifies within the dream. Elements of the scene keep changing — or are they being corrected?

At the end of the film, Cole, attempting to stop the man who intends to spread the deadly virus around the world, is fatally shot by police. As Cole dies, cradled in the arms of his lover, we see a young boy watching from the crowd — it’s young Cole, of course. The dying man in Cole’s vision was himself.

I can’t think of a better metaphor for life. Something you see, as a child, only in the vaguest, blurred outlines, understanding little of what you’re seeing.

And as you see it again, growing up, details begin to resolve and become recognizable. Blank areas fill in. Misperceptions are corrected, one by one.

You grow older, and the picture begins to come into focus as the significance of the things you’re looking at, the connections between them, become more apparent.

And finally, at the end, you see it, all of it, as clearly as you’re ever going to. And then — of course! — there you are. Tiny and almost indiscernible against the crowd, but there’s no mistaking. Yourself, as a child, watching you.

One last time, you see yourself through the child’s eyes, and this time you understand everything.

Next: Ethical Helen Kellers and the most confusing film ever made.