Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 5B
b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
In 10th grade English, as our final book
of the year, my class cracked open Kurt
Vonnegut’s 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-
Five.” After a grueling year of classics
like “Gulliver’s Travels,” “All Quiet on
the Western Front” and “The Canterbury
Tales,” I assumed that “Slaughterhouse-
Five” would be more of the same long-
winded stories that had populated our
classes up to that point. The title reminded
me of “Animal Farm” and filled me with
expectations of complex allegories or
tedious legends from a slaughterhouse.
But as I read the first few chapters, I was
surprised to find that “Slaughterhouse-
Five” was, well, good.
Now in college, I remember very few
things from that first time I read Vonnegut’s
novel. I remember something about aliens
and a celebrity named Montana. I remember
descriptions of the Dresden firebombing,
which at the time I didn’t realize was a
true historical event. Most importantly, I
remember a description of an idea of time, one
that may have come from the book itself or
possibly my teacher attempting to explain this
complex idea. The way to think of the timeline
of someone’s life, according to Vonnegut’s
ideas and my teacher’s careful explanation,
is not as a straight line, as we tend to think,
but similar to a book. When you hold a book in
your hands, you hold the entire story, start to
finish; every event in the book has already been
written. While we are logically programmed
to read the book from start to end, this is not
the only way to experience its events. You can
open the book to any page, any time in the
story and you will be able to experience that
event even if it is done out of order. This is the
idea of time as a fourth dimension, beyond the
three dimensions of space.
Vonnegut’s novel itself is utterly perplexing
in many ways. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is
partially first-person, narrated by a stand-
in for Vonnegut, and partially third-person,
with a grand sense of omniscience. In the
introduction, the narrator tells you exactly
how the book will begin (“Listen: Billy Pilgrim
has come unstuck in time.”) and exactly how
it will end (“Poo-tee-weet?”). It’s a novel
impossible to place into a single genre, filled
with war and aliens and inherent human
grief. It toes a line between historical fiction
and science fiction that few authors have
accomplished. But what is most perplexing is
the way that “Slaughterhouse-Five” proposes
the concept of time, a proposal that forever
changed the way I thought about time.
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in
time,” the narrator tells us at the beginning of
the first chapter. Billy’s journey throughout
the novel is not linear, but spastic, bouncing
between events in his life without rhyme or
reason. These jumps tend to be triggered at
particularly desperate or traumatic moments
and often result in skipping full decades. This
is connected to Billy’s experience as a soldier
in Dresden, Germany, where he survives being
a prisoner-of-war as well as the destructive
firebombing of Dresden in 1945. After the war,
Billy is hospitalized for PTSD; it’s around this
time that he starts becoming unstuck, and the
two things are clearly linked.
Even if being unstuck is the product of a
psychiatric disorder, it’s still fascinating to
consider. Despite his position in time, Billy
also believes that he was abducted by the
Tralfamadorians, an alien race that keeps him
in a zoo. Importantly, the Tralfamadorians
see in four dimensions; rather than the three
dimensions of space that humans remain
limited to understanding, the Tralfamadorians
see our three dimensions plus time. According
to the Narrator, this means that they view the
idea of life and death differently: “When a
Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is
that the dead person is in bad condition in that
particular moment, but that the same person
is just fine in plenty of other moments.” This
view of time means that one can view their life
much more holistically; rather than focus on
the loss of one moment, the Tralfamadorians
find the life in previous moments. This ties to
the common Tralfamadorian saying: “So it
goes.” What has happened has happened, and
what is going to happen will; so it goes.
Films, books and other media dealing
with time travel often try to explore the idea
of changing the past or the future. Plotlines
are based around acting on questions like
“What would I have done differently?” and
“How do I prevent this from happening?”
I’ve sometimes heard questions like “would
you kill baby Hitler” thrown around, often
jokingly and with little regard for the reality
of the space-time continuum. In Vonnegut’s
proposed version of time, however, these
questions are irrelevant. Changing the past
means that this version of the future would
not exist, and if we’ve learned anything from
Disney Channel’s “That’s So Raven,” it’s that
trying to change the future usually results in
making it happen.
I should clarify that I don’t believe this
means we don’t have free will, nor that we
should believe that actions don’t have real
consequences. In the novel, Billy becomes
fatalistic, believing that all events and actions
come down to destiny. I don’t agree. Instead,
it’s about trying to find a balance in between
these ideas — finding a way to live in the
moment without dwelling on a past or a future
over which you have no control. It’s the idea of
viewing time not just as a long line stretching
somewhere into the future, but into something
a bit more elastic in both directions.
Vonnegut’s concept of time
KARI ANDERSON
Daily Arts Writer
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
I tie “Interstellar” to the concept of time
because of how rooted it is to a specific time in
my life. I was 18 years old when I first watched
the movie in my AP Literature and Composition
class. I knew nothing of it other than that it
starred Matthew McConaughey and came out
in 2014 — my freshman year of high school.
When we watched it, I was a month shy of
graduating. I can’t tell you the run time, or
at what point I truly felt myself reeled in, but
I bawled my eyes out and forgot about the
assignment all together.
I am currently 21 years old and the same still
stands: I will, without a doubt, bawl my eyes out
to “Interstellar,” though it doesn’t feel the same
way it did three years ago. I don’t know if this
is a cliche or not, but the older I get, the more it
dawns on me how stagnant
artwork itself can be while
its meaning is personal
and ever-evolving. I think
that’s because we are ever-
evolving — which brings me
back to the movie in question.
The running theme (in the
most figurative sense) of
the movie is time — running
time, the physics of time and
lost time. The movie takes
place in a mid-21st century
America plagued by blights
and dust storms. Culture
has regressed into a post-
truth society in which the
younger generation is taught
that events and ideas like
the moon landing and space
travel are hoaxes. The story
is told through the lens of
farmer Joseph Cooper, a
former NASA pilot. After accidentally tracing
geographic coordinates to a secret NASA
facility, Cooper is recruited to pilot Endurance,
a team of volunteers tasked with finding an
alternative earth. Alongside this ambition are
grave risks, namely the time variance between
space travel that occurs far more rapidly than
that of Earth’s.
There’s a moment before Cooper’s ascent to
space in which his daughter Murph protests his
departure. Cooper brushes this off by joking
that he might be back on Earth by the time him
and Murph are the same age. This joke sours
by the time Murph reaches his age and he is
(spoiler) not back. After watching a stream of
videos that accumulated from his son Donald,
Cooper watches the 23 years he lost flash before
his eyes. He gradually moves from embracing
these moments to crying at the realization that
his children have grown up without him. Every
time, I cry as Hans Zimmer’s “Main Theme” for
“Interstellar” plays in the background, knowing
what is to come. I lose it once the music stops;
looking up at the screen before him, Cooper
finds an adult version of his daughter calling
him a “bastard,” still visibly upset for his
leaving.
I think about this scene a lot because I’ve
been in Murph’s place. I grew up not seeing
one of my parents a lot, and this is an anger I
still wrestle with as an adult. Can a parent truly
care if they can’t be physically there for you?
This was my question as a child. I wouldn’t
say the reasoning for my situation parallels
that of Murph’s, but it strikes me how much
my reaction does. Murph’s last memory of her
father was centered on the anger she felt toward
him, and these feelings endured into adulthood.
This is probably something I’m pulling from
a psychology class I’ve taken at some point,
but memories feel more tied to emotions than
they are to actual events. The one thing I am
certain of is that art means different things to
different people because we’ve all had different
experiences. I’m curious
about how things would
be different if I were a
parent rather than a child
at the time I first watched
the film.
I’ve never considered
“Interstellar”
profound
for its plot. For one thing,
it’s a bit too esoteric for
my understanding. I don’t
have much of a knack for
physics. The plot holes
are also glaring given the
complexity of its synopsis.
But I don’t think this
demerits the heart and
brilliance of this film; I
praise the movie more
so for its delivery — the
way it elicits specific
emotions and navigates
relationships.
I discovered this film around the time when
I first caught on to the link between love and
time. I spent all of high school in love with a
friend who wasn’t right for me. Whether or not
they felt the same way is something that matters
less and less each day — another attribute of
time. But when I think back to that person, I can
only remember her the way I loved her. This is
the power of love, and “Interstellar” captures
it well. At the movie’s core is a love story
between a parent and a child. Cooper spends
days on an exhibition that ages him beyond his
comprehension, but he does it out of love and
emerges out of it still in love with his children.
Murph is frustrated with her father throughout
the duration of the film, but it’s also out of love
and the way her 10-year-old self understood his
departure. Despite the time and turbulence,
the one constant of “Interstellar” is love and
its extensions across different experiences. As
my understanding of love changes more and
more with age, I find that I can at least keep
constant the way I felt in that moment of certain
experience.
‘Interstellar’: Love and time
DIANA YASSIN
Daily Arts Writer
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
B-SIDE: BOOKS NOTEBOOK
B-SIDE: FILM NOTEBOOK
I discovered this
film around the
time when I first
caught on to the
link between love
and time. I spent
all of high school
in love with a
friend who wasn’t
right for me.
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