Sunday, June 28, 2020

The Fox & the Forest (1950)

A desperate couple, William and Susan, use a new time travel service to escape backwards to 1938 (of all years), evading their own participation in the machineries of a horrible far-future war. They attempt to disappear among the carnival crowds in Mexico but are doggedly pursued by agents of the travel service, determined to bring them home and fold them back into the service of war: "The inhabitants of the Future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave."

There's been a joke going around of late, essentially: It's a certainty humans will never invent time travel; we'd have doubled back to fix 2020 by now. Argue all day long about what timespans might need fixing in what order should we ever actually gain the technology to spin clock hands in our favor, Ray Bradbury's dialog above holds particular sting in a year with a global pandemic spreading and so many blockheads refusing to wear a simple, precautionary mask as we all plunge helplessly forward in time. Ready or not, here comes the Future...