↖️↗️ #233 - Two roads diverged
Fighting the future, sometimes with help from the future.
Possible futures and counterfactuals can present a cautionary tale for viewers, or a very real danger for fictional characters. Let’s look at what a writer should consider with the world building, the stakes, and the message to the audience.
The X-Men travel through time a lot. Andrew Gladman singles out “One Man’s Worth” from the original X-Men animated series as the most compelling storyline where Marvel’s mutants traveled back from an alternate future to prevent disaster. Come for the Storm and Wolverine shipping,1 but stay for the interviews from the comics artists who adapted this two parter into the Age of Apocalypse event.
The Terminator franchise loves its mix of fate, free will, and ludicrous paradoxes. OneTake attempts to explain it by using a theory that sees a time loop extend from a single, never ending circle, into a slinky, constantly giving birth to its next loop.
While there is always the threat of a grim future where AI annihilates most of humanity, each Terminator film plays with the idea that a warning from the future has the potential to redirect events for the better. Juha Nieminen looks at the question of how it all fits together from another angle, considering the possibility that all of these timelines run concurrently with each other, branching off every instance that a time traveller arrives in the past. Filling in some real world(?) physics around things like the Grandfather Paradox, Lorenzo Gavassino publishes a paper answering the big questions: Is it possible to meet yourself by traveling backwards through time? Is it even possible to alter time when traveling backwards?
Sometimes the alternate future (or present) comes from a historical pivot point meant to be significant to the audience instead of the characters in the story. Margaret David takes a wide-ranging look at some of the popular films that played with the idea of an alternate reality, and what this can help an audience explore. Going deeper into one of the films David mentions, Emma Ward unpacks Inglorious Basterds to find that this counterfactual story about an elite group of Jewish-American soldiers machine gunning Hitler into a chunky red mist contains depths beyond its pulp thrills:
Inglourious Basterds doesn’t present a historical narrative that is any more accurate, but, unlike other Holocaust dramas, it doesn’t pretend to. While Tarantino cannot rewrite film canon as easily as he rewrites history, Basterds paints a different picture from the established Hollywood norms, one that relies instead on Jewish resistance, anger, and deliverance. In their brazen acts of defiance, Shosanna and the Basterds not only topple a regime that enforces Jewish submission, but also overturn a cinematic history that maintains Jewish passivity. Inglourious Basterds operates on these two levels for its entirety; it both imagines a different story and examines the ones we’ve already told.
The Twilight Zone was built around alternate versions of the present, future, and past, usually in service of a morality tale. Matt Zoller Seitz discusses the way these skewed universes allowed the show to focus on the problems and evils of the real world (with plausible deniability).
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Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link, Austin Kleon shares 100 quotes from his commonplace notebook that help him to write.
What else is inneresting?
Simone Giertz had a vision of a better world: one with a chair you could put not quite dirty clothes on and still sit in.
Maxine Peake narrates Transmissions: The Definitive Story about the history of Joy Division and New Order. Standout episode: The one that spends its entire runtime on the iconic single Blue Monday.
Rhett Miller on the reply board he made to communicate after throat surgery left him temporarily speechless
“MAYBE” got a lot of use, as did “ICE CREAM,” obviously. I ended up never once utilizing “PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE,” but I’ll admit that it brought me some comfort just knowing it was there.
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team.
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Post-Credits Scene
Ororogan? Storverine? No, it’s got to be Lororo.