When “the best place to be” was “here” and “the best time to be” was “now”. Part I.

The Erasure of Historical Consciousness in Time-Travel Films of The 80s and 90s

Abstract

Tamás Csönge’s two-part study examines how, in the popular culture of late capitalism, the notion of an absolute present has come to colonize both historical past and imagined future through the lens of time-travel films from the 1980s and 1990s. The author argues that the disappearance of historical consciousness and the withering of utopian imagination–hallmarks of a closed temporal horizon–become most strikingly apparent precisely in narratives that foreground the relativity and interpenetration of temporal planes.