Time Travel and the Rejection of Politics
Revisiting history is inherently political. Every choice made about representation, characterization, and plot contributes to a vision of the past that cannot be considered neutral. But the politics at stake are usually more about the author's present day than about the time to which the heroes travel, as the World War II Time Crasher films clearly show. But just as every utopia contains an implicit anthropology ("humans are X who need Y to be happy"), every Time Crasher story embodies theories of history, politics, and human agency. [1]
There are reasons why so many Time Crashers end up on the battlefield, reasons beyond both questions of entertainment and the crucial role wars have played in modern Russian history. For all their complexity, wars are particularly conducive to a simplistic model of cause and effect; for the Time Crasher, they are, at best, Gordian knots waiting for a sword to slice them in two. The fantasy of traveling back to a historical war rests on the identification of specific turning points when a single intervention can change the course of history. But how does this work in peacetime?
It seems to work for the Soviet Union, or rather, the authors of Time Crasher stories have little trouble making it work. The Soviet government portrayed in these stories is top-heavy, hierarchical, and, most important, devoid of modern politics. What passes for politics is more like palace intrigue: who is plotting against whom, who can come out ahead. The extent to which this is an oversimplification of actual Soviet governmental structures is a question I'm happy to leave to historians, but at the very least it is worth noting how easily the Soviet Union gets represented in such a fashion. All it takes to right the wrongs of history is to assassinate the appropriate target.
I have no excuse for using this image. It has nothing to do with the post. I just love it so much
When I try to imagine going back to the second half of the twentieth century to steer America on a path that I think would be better, it is hard to come up with a reasonable agenda. Prevent Ronald Reagan from being elected, perhaps, but how would I do that? Get the FCC not to cease enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 in order to prevent the rise of Fox News? Even Arsenyev's favorite device, political assassination, would have problems beyond the crucial question of morality. What would the electoral and political consequences have been if John Hinkley had succeeded in his attempt on Reagan's life? Liberal procedural democracy, for all its many flaws, does not provide many obvious levers for a Time Crasher to pull.
Successful Time Crasher interventions have a built-in bias against political complexity, one that suspiciously reflects the ideological leanings of the genre's most prominent practitioners. The authors of Time Crasher stories tend to prefer an illiberal, hierarchical, centralized form of government, one that is easy to project onto the Soviet past. Procedural politics is replaced by conspiratorial scheming, whether by the evil (often liberal) cabals that must be defeated, or the guardians of righteousness who know better than to let legal formalities or ethical scruples prevent them from doing what is best for the country.
This disdain for complexity points back to the central premise of the genre itself. Time Crasher stories have no patience for internally consistent, plausible explanations for time travel, just as they have no interest in procedural politics. The broader time travel genre, by contrast, uses detail and nuance as part of the appeal. ("Just how does time travel work here?" "What are the possible unintended consequences?") The complexity of the time travel posited by a story is in direct proportion to the complexity of its view of politics.
Note
[1] I'll save human agency for the next post.