Time and Time and Time Again....

Our physical presence here on Earth is linear. We cannot reverse aging, and we experience things chronologically. The mind, however, bears no such shackles. Through memory and study, the past is always within reach. Through imagination, no future is beyond our envisioning. The mind can accomplish great things. My mind tends to accomplish weird things. For no reason in particular, and not having heard either song recently, while driving I found myself singing the lyrics to AC DC's “You Shook me All Night Long” to the tune of Harry Chapin's “Cats in the Cradle”. It was a surprisingly good fit. Try it on for size. Instead of “My child arrived just the other day”, substitute “She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean” and take it from there. I guarantee you won't regret it.

My mind does some strange things sometimes, and I wonder if the principal that told my mom I was ”not right in the head” wasn't some kind of prophet. While my mind blends disparate songs, Adrien Brody's Jack Starks seems to be able to transcend time itself with his mind, in the film The Jacket. Wrongfully accused of murder, and unable to recall the events due to a head injury suffered during the Gulf War, he finds himself committed to an asylum where he becomes the subject of an inhumane experiment. Injected with drugs and bound in a straightjacket, he is left isolated inside a morgue drawer where his doctor hopes he will sort his memories out. Instead, he seems to find escape into the future. Whether this retreat is all psychological or actually accomplished is something the filmmakers imply is open-ended. Personally, I think there's enough evidence presented for the viewer to know what is and isn't real, but I'm not about to spoil that here. It was a very cool movie, with a great cast and atmosphere. Having only seen Brody in the slightly disappointing The Village, I'm inclined to see more of his work now.

I think what I liked the most about The Jacket was the premise. Implausible though it may be, it appealed to me because it was a different kind of time travel story. Movies like Back to the Future, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and The Time Machine, in which some technological creation is needed to accomplish the feat of time travel, have their place, but I have an appreciation for movies that find new methods. Films like The Jacket, Twelve Monkeys, and Donnie Darko don't need to spend a lot of time explaining the method of travel. It is the resulting paradoxes, and the psychological impact on the protagonists, that drives films such as these.

Time can be an implacable foe. It's relentless in its progression, and doesn't stop when we do. It can slip away when I'm not looking, and suddenly I'm working late, starving, and still not done with all my work. Time is tricky. Anything worth having, be it the right job or the right girl, should be approached with the same precision needed to disarm a bomb. Move too fast, and you scare them away. Move too slow, and you'll lose to someone else. Even driving involves an understanding of time. If my dad hadn't sped up when I saw a van speeding toward us on the right wasn't stopping, it would have killed me instead of clipping our rear bumper and spinning us 180 degrees. In the physical world, time is something we have little control over. But our mind can reverse

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Time can be an implacable foe. It's relentless in its progression, and doesn't stop when we do. It can slip away when I'm not looking, and suddenly I'm working late, starving, and still not done with all my work. Time is tricky. Anything worth having, be it the right job or the right girl, should be approached with the same precision needed to disarm a bomb. Move too fast, and you scare them away. Move too slow, and you'll lose to someone else. Even driving involves an understanding of time. If my dad hadn't sped up when I saw a van speeding toward us on the right wasn't stopping, it would have killed me instead of clipping our rear bumper and spinning us 180 degrees. In the physical world, time is something we have little control over. But our mind can reverse and move forward through recollections and projections.

Clearly, my old principal must have been wrong about me.