I’ve read the source story and watched the movie, and now spent a day writing in detail an analysis of both, taken together, specifically about the metaphysics. I’ve written almost 7000 words and I’m not done. And reading the thread here added more stuff I have to cover. Maybe I’ll post a link when I’m done but I doubt anyone world read that kind of obsessive analysis. I take those metaphysics very seriously.
Should I clarify that IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE?
(you can skip this following part and jump lower after the separation)
I’m not going to add spoiler tags, everything I say is a spoiler, so be warned. The movie has been out for some time, so I guess it can be discussed openly.
The problem of trying to analyze both the short story and the movie is that the result is a kind of interpolation of ideas. Stuff that has its own origin in the short story, carries over to the movie BUT without being introduced there. So it’s like elements that are coherent in one story appear in the other and create contradictions.
The short story is of course autonomous. It wasn’t written to be expanded later on. So all its intention begins and closes there, and it works to frame the problem. And one expects that the movie adds stuff and so messes what was originally an elegant construction. But not quite, because the original story has at least two significant “holes”. One on the science side, the other on the metaphysical side.
The movie, because it’s far less explicitly technical and throws more deliberate, worldly plot into it, actually sidesteps the problems of the original story. It doesn’t completely avoid them, because they are ingrained in the concept, but they are only implicit and not directly referenced. So, in a certain way the movie works BETTER, as the problem of the short story was directly in your face (if you are rigorous).
I was able to actually build a kind of speculative explanation that works for the movie. But only by introducing completely new elements to it. So it’s the very opposite of “canon”. I’m just saying the story can be massaged into something that makes sense, but only by adding lots of ungrounded speculation to it. The problem isn’t this though. The problem is that this overall hypothetical explanation, directly CONTRADICTS the original premise of the short story. So it essentially negates its most important core: the original idea that inspired the story in the first place.
That’s the overall problem: that the permutation of ideas going back and forth between short story and movie has created a fundamentally incoherent whole where individual parts make sense on their own, but CONSTANTLY CONTRADICT EACH OTHER. Some idea that makes perfect sense given a specific context, is brought together with other ideas that require different premises. Parts of the movie that have sense only if you examine the context of the original story, but that miss in that original story, and parts of the original story that do not make sense in that original story but that might work in the context of the movie.
You can’t imagine how deep I went into this mess.
Here’s a specific description of one of the problem:
The problem of the movie is that it introduces a concepts entirely absent in the original story: time travel (or at least information traveling through time). Of course when you postulate “time-as-a-solid” (determinism) it’s an obvious contradiction when you then introduce time travel: because as “Back to the Future” teaches time travel relies on the postulation that time can be changed.
Either it can be changed, or it can’t. Either time is a solid, or it’s a variable. What the movie does is presenting a paradox as if it’s meaningful. Revelatory. But it’s instead the very opposite. The problem is framed incorrectly to INDUCE error. They make a mistake and then pretend the mistake is transcendental. Nope, what you see in the movie is a dishonest “intuition pump”. A problem framed in such a way you’re induced to believe a LIE.
To prove this point we have to rely on the short story, where the “mechanics” of the alien are more explicitly detailed. The overall concept that the writer used for the story is that the universe is deterministic, time is symmetric. Time-as-a-solid. Unchanging. A bit like Rust Chole in True Detective. But the core “scientific” idea is that the aliens are “holistic” beings who experience time non-linearly. All at once. It’s not anymore a sequence. It’s a fixed whole, set in stone.
Now here the true core: in the short story human beings and aliens have radically different physics, but this is described explicitly as having two different points of view ON THE SAME SUBSTANCE. Both human beings and aliens exist is the same shared universe. The rules of this universe are IDENTICAL for both human and aliens, because the universe is one and the same. What creates the dramatic difference is that human and aliens experience it differently. But again, the substance is one, seen from different perspectives.
Okay?
The hypothesis that time is a solid is an hypothesis that EXISTS. It might be that our universe indeed operates on that premise. Our own real universe. That means the possibility that time is fixed already. We experience it sequentially, but it is fixed. The substance is fixed but we have a different way to experience it. Experience is a way to “interpret” a fixed, unchanging substance.
If time is fixed it means that what happens is fixed. Experience of it can change, but the object of that experience is always one. That’s why we are offered those kinds of aliens. Those aliens CAN’T time travel. That’s why those aliens are presented as passive entities that are bound to their patterns. They are chained to their time. They experience it as a whole, but have no power to “act”. Again because we postulated the thing we observe is the SAME thing, but seen from a different perspective.
That applies to us. Your life can theoretically be experienced in a sequential way, or “holistically” as a whole, the way it would appear to an alien. Okay? But it’s the SAME life. You can’t time travel as a human being. And you can’t time travel and change things as an alien either. Because what you observed never changed. The thesis here is that you are watching (from different perspectives), not acting. You are experiencing differently, but you cannot interact. That’s why the whole premise is that the aliens, TOO, cannot interact. They are bound to their actions.
Can you see that the fact the woman USES information from the future, altering the past opens a contradiction in the premise of the whole thing?
If we accept time travel then we accept that the rules of time as we see them can be broken. But didn’t we postulate that we are only dealing with experience of the same substance? If time travel exists then human perspective is invalidated: something impossible happened. Something that cannot be explained. We established that both alien and human perspectives HAVE to be valid, at the same time. Because, again, they are perspectives on the same unchanging thing. And if we invalidate human perspective to allow time travel then we didn’t modify perspective, we did modify substance.
This contradiction in the movie CAN actually be fixed. But only in a very fanfiction way. The idea is: the moment you embed alien consciousness (perception) with human, you obtain neither one or the other. You obtain a THIRD. So the idea wants that the woman, once she gets in touch with aliens, acquires some brand new power that is the result from the synthesis of both alien and human. A power that neither humans nor aliens had. She can time travel because she becomes a new “being”. Because human and alien perspectives exclude each other, if you put them together time “explodes out”. You breach the very fabric.
This actually happens logically, and it’s directly embedded in the short story, even if the short story had no trace whatsoever of time travel. It happens because the short story makes a glaring mistake. The mistake is then embedded in the movie, because the movie carries over the overall concept, and then SOLVED hypothetically by movie because the movie on one side breaks the premise of the book, but because the premise of the book was broken it actually FIXES IT.
I mean: the movie is broken. But since the movie took a story that was broken in the first place, the result is that the movie’s own incoherence can be used to fix the original flaw in the short story.
IT’S INSANE.