The Hidden Hand
Time travel stories are generally wrapped up in the question of free will, either by suggesting that the future is set in stone, or by stressing the importance of even the most seemingly insignificant action on the course of history (the butterfly effect). Time Crasher stories can do this as well, but they add a layer of uncertainty about basic human agency. Time Crashers rarely embark on their journey intentionally, and almost never do they (or the reader) understand how the trip is happening. Time Crashers are puppets with visible strings that lead to nowhere.
Who, after all, is pulling the strings? The obvious, extradiegetic answer is the author or authors, who know that the genre conventions allow them to leave the process unexplained. But the resulting uncertainly makes Time Crashers a particularly noteworthy post-Soviet genre; as I have argued in Plots against Russia, the media and chattering classes are always looking to assign intent and blame to malign, shadowy forces. Consumers of Time Crasher tales, on the other hand, are tacitly encouraged to accept a cosmos that is either random or mechanistic, with nary a satanic schemer in sight. They have heeded the advice of the Wizard of Oz, paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.
But sometimes the plot device that sends the hero on his cross-time journey gives a glimpse behind the scenes, because, like the fabled Wizard, that plot device is actually a person. This is the case in Valery Rozhnov's four-part miniseries Back to the USSR (Nazad v SSSR) (2010). Already more than a decade old, Back to the USSR is, like most of our examples so far, unlikely to be celebrated as a cinematic masterpiece, even if multiple creators are at pains to claim authorship. [1] A cliché-ridden melodrama about Anton Rodimov, a thirty-something, hard-partying oligarch who can no longer bear the emptiness of his consumption-driven existence, Back to the USSR offers its hero the standard alternative afforded the protagonists of the Time Crasher genre: the opportunity to go back to a simpler, purer time. His best friend sends him to an AA meeting where he meets a man called "Stalker," whose offer of the adventure of a lifetime turns out to include time travel. Beaten in an alley by thugs, Anton wakes up in 1975.
The usual hijinks ensue: Anton doesn't believe he's really in the past, but is quickly befriended by a beautiful young woman named Natasha, with whom he of course falls in love. He spends some time in a mental hospital, but escapes, and even finds himself mistaken for the son of a local party official destined for great things. Along the way, Anton discovers the joys of a simpler life in a simpler time, before a second head injury sends him back to the present.
There is only one thing that distinguishes Back to the USSR from the many stories it resembles: Anton discovers that it was all a lie. He never traveled in time. The entire scenario was arranged by the Stalker at the behest of Anton's best friend, who was desperate to shake him out of his alcoholic torpor. The people he met, Natasha included, were actors hired to make the illusion seem real. Anton eventually tracks down Natasha while she is performing on stage; the one thing that proves to have been real was their love.
So Back to the USSR turns out not to be a Time Crasher story at all. Instead, it is the story of people pretending to be in a Time Crasher story, placing Back To the USSR in the generic company of other quasi-therapeutic mind games set against the backdrop of late capitalist anomie, such as The Game and Fight Club. [2] Besides the lack of actual time travel, this very different genre has much more stringent requirements for verisimilitude and explanation. Audiences might accept some vague handwaving involving fog, head injuries, or explosions to justify actual time travel, but could not be expected to accept a scenario in which a trip to the past somehow fakes itself. There has to be a somewhat plausible mechanism, as well as a reason to bother.
Curiously, the revelation of the miniseries' prosaic nature only highlights the story's resemblance to a more fantastic genre, namely, the fairy tale. The Stalker is a variation on one of the most common folkloric tropes identified by Vladimir Propp: the magical helper without whom the hero could never solve his problem. In Back to the USSR, the helper role is doubled, since the Stalker is merely the agent of Anton's true helper, his friend. At the same time, the magical helper's function might seem less benign on a meta-level: he is the reason we have spent nearly four hours being deceived about the actual plot. We are also forced to reevaluate our assessment of the accuracy with which the series recreates 1975, since now it no longer has to completely convince the audience at the same time it convinces the hero. Any anachronisms committed by the filmmakers can be chalked up to the inadequacy of the Stalker as a reenactor.
In pretending to be a Time Crasher tale, Back to the USSR ends up using the idea of time travel as a moral and psychological justification for the historical reenactments that have become increasingly popular since the Soviet collapse. The simple fact of occupying the role of Soviet subject is an antidote to the spiritual rot of neoliberal Russia. The plight of the alienated individual (here, Anton) is one of context and relations; in placing himself in a world beyond the cash nexus and interacting with people who are supposedly motivated by something other than money, he can become a better version of himself. Never mind the fact that the people he meets are actually actors doing work for hire; he experiences them as people who are not at all mercenary, and Natasha's love for him turns out to be more than a mere act. Even Soviet faux-sincerity is better than what the real world has to offer.
If, by the end, Anton has found true love through fake time travel, then the Stalker and the best friend are more than just magical helpers; they are practically fairy godmothers. Like Cinderella, Anton meets his prince(ss) under false pretenses, but manages to rescue a happy ending from the wreckage of fantasy. Is Back to the USSR anomalous not just for its plot twist, but for the visibility of the fairy godmother's magic wand?
Propp's structuralist approach to fairytales, which supplied us the term "magical helper," maybe turns out to be a magical helper in its own right. Propp identified the various functions that make up the basis of a given fairy tale, but may be absent from a given iteration of the story. Cinderella might have two sisters in one telling, and three in another; one of them might hack away at her oversized foot to try to fit it into the slipper, while others may not. The Time Crasher genre is a hybrid of both "legitimately" authored fiction (published by presses or produced by film studios) as well as a vast amount of online amateur fan fiction that occasionally crosses over into the mainstream, and is, in any case, highly formulaic--a bit of structuralism (in carefully measured doses) might be illuminating.
And this is why Back to the USSR is so valuable. Who would be more cognizant of the underlying formula than authors who are essentially parodying it? There are actual Time Crasher stories that have a magical helper figure like the Stalker. Save the USSR , for example, has a mysterious figure who sends the hero back to the 1970s and then disappears from the novel. Boris Akunin's play, The Mirror of St. Germain, on the other hand, involves swapping two men from New Years Eve 1900 and New Year's Eve 2000, and has the titular St. Germain (among others) playing a similar role. Continuing in our Formalist/Structuralist vein, these stories lay bare the device behind the time travel in this genre. The magical helper figure is in the deep structure of the Time Crasher narrative.
Even in Time Crasher stories with minimal or no explanation for time travel, the magical helper is implicit, in that the trip to the past is usually beneficial both to the traveler and to the world. The Time Crasher, as we have seen, tends to become a better person through his experience, attaining a moral clarity that his home time period would obscure. While in the past, he either ensures that history moves along its proper course, or changes it in order to create a better future.
Thus the apparent randomness of the travel as experienced by the Time Crasher must be understood as evidence not of the arbitrary nature of the universe, but of a benevolent (fictional) cosmos striving for improvement. More than that: it is the cosmos's way of negating the evils of our present. Whether that present is understood as a harsh, meaningless world of late capitalist savagery, or (as is more often the case), the result of the concerted efforts of evil forces, the implied magical helper is acting in the best interest of both his hero and his world. As the instrument of the author's often tendentious world view, the helper's ability to right all wrongs is a wish-fulfillment fantasy familiar from fan fiction: the magical helper is the hidden hand of Mary Sue.
Notes
[1] Valerii Rozhnov wrote and directed the film, but Oleg Ulanov claims that the studio plagiarized his then-unpublished novel Unusual Travel Agent (Agenty nestandartonogo otdykha, eventually released along with a sequel). Rozhnov not only denied the allegation, but produced his own novel based on his screenplay.
[2] See Nikita Fedotov, “Dvoinoi Obman”