Trauma in 21st-Century Time Travel Cinema

In this book, Kwasu D. Tembo utilizes ideas from physics, mathematics, and media (specifically cinema, philosophy, and theory) to explore questions concerning time, change, and (un)becoming in contemporary time-travel cinema.
When it comes to 21st century cinematic time-travel narratives, what is at stake is a struggle for time. One of the central ideas of this book is the notion that human life in time is like a palimpsest, with time being the scriptor and stylus, the Mark-maker. A time machine is a fantasy that allows for this pace to be slowed or accelerated so much as to appear as if it is stopped or suspended, and with these operations, the networks of the potentials of the "Now" be (re)opened to the traveller. Tembo argues how time travel in 21st-century media allows the traveller to slow down, potentially with the chance to see themselves more clearly, in the age of ever-increasing, ever-inescapable content.
In thinking about the experience of time and its relation to trauma, we must ask and think about not necessarily the mechanics (how) of time-travel, or at least not alone. We must necessarily also consider, with care, the psycho-emotional affectivity of why one might want to travel in time (in the first place). The answers Tembo offers are extremely indicative of human understandings of our experience of time - not simply what it is in a logically causal sense, but what it permits and disallows in terms of how (it is) to be in time.

Kwasu D. Tembo is Lecturer in the Security Lancaster program at Lancaster University, UK.