When people liken movies to video games, they mostly mean it as an insult along the lines of:

One notable exception, familiar to anyone interested in the intersection of media, is Run Lola Run, a film whose link to video games has been imagined in generally positive terms. Its recursive narrative mode, in which we see three different attempts to solve the problem of Manni's missing 100,000 DM, has struck reviewers, fans, and scholars alike as a reflection of the save, reload and retry experience of playing action-oriented video games. Here, rather than taking the blame for the immobilization of Jennifer Garner's face, games get the credit for inspiring a fresh and compelling film experience.

It's also pretty clear that Run Lola Run invites the viewer to reflect on the nature of our passage through time. On one hand, its appeal comes from the way it offers viewers an experience of a social and spatial network so sensitive and complex that each for each of us, the present is linked to an array of widely different futures, and its complexity is such that we can never have full control over our own paths. (The roulette wheel featured near the end of the film's third cycle is the emblem of this logic -- the path of the roulette ball is of course not random in any magical sense, it's just the physics of the ball bouncing around in the wheel. But it's a sufficiently complicated system that no one can guess or control the outcome, so it's good enough.)

The other pleasure of the film is its indulgence of the fantasy inspired by our sense that we move inexorably forward in time, namely, the desire to go back and take another path at some earlier point in life. Lola and Manni get this chance, and, by the end have their lives and an extra 100,000 DM to show for it, reinforcing perhaps the idea that going back in time is the boon we've all instinctively imagined.

In the world of video games this sensibility is at some level inherent in the save/reload logic that so pervades the form, but it's especially tangible in games that are tied to specific periods of real-world time that the player is able to re-imagine. A sports game like the Madden football series gives players the chance to reshape football seasons to their liking (See, I told you they should have run the ball more -- I did and look: they won the Super Bowl!), and historical/war games present players with the chance to generate a variety of alternative history scenarios. In all of these cases, the implication is that the present -- at least in the diegetic world of the game -- is a nexus of decision and chance, essentially neutral in its openness to what may come.

Of course one of the most popular narrative routes to this kind of consideration is the time-travel story, which smoothes out the narrative oddities of a film like Run Lola Run, while providing viewers the chance to experience a character returning to a past present moment knowing what happened the first time around. It's interesting to note, though, how often time travel films and TV shows end up being cautionary tales that seem to be trying to warn people away from the prospect of going back and having another go at the past. Your average person on the street might not be able to tell you, oh, the nationality of the 9/11 hijackers, but ask them if it's a good or bad idea to mess with the space time continuum, and they'll set you straight.

While Star Trek might get credit for the most thorough working through of the perils of continuum-fouling, I'm going to argue that our national prudence in regard to going back to the past to try something new can be traced to 1985's Back to the Future. As irresistible and ubiquitous as fast food, Back to the Future arrived to warn us that it's not all extra bags of money when we go back to the past. Of course, Marty McFly (Was it really only 20 years ago that a really popular film could feature a main character named Marty McFly? Yes it was.) and his family do end up with a lot more money after his trek to the past and back, but as the movie makes clear, that really only constitutes the family's full participation in the social and economic present of the 1980's.

And, despite what a casual listening might suggest, Huey Lewis' hectoring musical cry, "Gotta get back in time," refers not to a desire to go back to the past, but rather an urgent obligation to get back to the present.

(Back in time for what, we don't know, but an early scene makes the point that Marty is often late for school, so that might be it.)

The central device, of course, through which the film reveals the danger of tampering with the past is the photograph of Marty and his two siblings. As Marty foolishly disrupts of the initial trajectory of history by encountering his parents, his brother and sister visibly fade from the photographic image. The premise seems to borrow from the sadistic logic of thugs, terrorists, counter-terrorists (e.g., 24's Jack Bauer) and other purveyors of threat, real and fictional: Mess with history, McFly, and your family gets it. While it would be 9 years later that Timecop would illustrate this point with the threat of Jean-Claude Van Damme roundhouse-kicking temporal miscreants "back to the future," Back to the Future had put us on notice.

What strange irony, then, that in the post-9/11 moment, a version of the film for television broadcast was re-edited to remove references to the Libyan terrorists who are the source of the plutonium that runs Doc Brown's time machine. This re-editing included digitally erasing the word "terrorists" from the letter Marty writes to warn Doc that he will be killed by the disgruntled Libyans, an action that mimics the visual logic of the fading siblings so closely that when I think about it, I feel like I've taken the new drug Huey Lewis elsewhere imagined in song. Especially as the visual shift dizzyingly inverts the logic of presence in the film. The brother and sister fade because their existence is progressively less likely, while the terrorists fade because by 9/11/01 they existed more than they did in 1985.

This is on one hand an intriguing result of the film's endurance across time (an idea K Klingensmith discussed yesterday in a different way -- the chance to re-edit the content of the film makes its endurance different than the postcard's persistence as object) -- a vicarious trip back to 1985, when terrorists were harmless enough to be a plot device in a Michael J Fox movie. At the same time, it turns out to be emblematic of the struggle of political memory that has dominated the post-9/11 period. Hypothetical returns to past moments abound, as the 9/11 Commission and other bodies ask more or less formal versions of the question: Could "we" have stopped it? And more lately, of course, there are the varieties of question that ask if "we" would have invaded Iraq if we had known that the intelligence about the weapons was so badly wrong.

From those who still support the decision to invade Iraq, the question is avoided, as we're chastised about "rehashing" the debate about the Iraq war, about imagining that past moment as a place from which we could have taken another path. That desire is made out to be silly, childish, impractical, and as such, is made fit the supposed divide between solid, sober conservatives and head-in-the-cloud liberals. For those who oppose the war, though, there is something tantalizing about the idea of filling the Delorean's trunk with newspapers reporting the dismal results of the search for WMD's and heading back to before the war. Even as we might fear that, in fact, that past moment was not open to change, that no amount of proof would have kept the invasion from happening, it is important not to give up on our sense to imagine change, difference, divergence. To imagine a present in which the United States has not taken the course it has is a vital part of keeping a hand in the present -- and in part that means believing that something else could have happened before, that after a time trip back to March 2003 those newspaper photos of Bush's mission accomplished, Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld offering his pragmatic reflections on the army you have, and all the rest would just fade away.