The suspension of disbelief and other impossibilities in Deja Vu.

I just saw Tony Scott's new science fiction mainstream blockbuster: DEJA VU, with Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer (among others). If you haven’t seen the movie, you won’t get this, plus this is a spoiler, so you may not want to read on if you are a fan of bad Hollywood scripts.

OK...Firstly, a bit about time theory. Time has yet to be pierced by any scientist despite what some would have you believe, and despite theoretical evidence, we just do not yet know the true nature of the universe as it relates to time and the nature therein. The main time ideas are that time is a stream or wave or singularity of reality that expresses itself on the unwritten blank surface of the CDR that is existence. Another is that time is the moment of expression not unlike a stylus of a record player (or DVD laser) in a reality that has been and will always be written from beginning to end. That life and death are interchangeable and once you are alive, you are written into the script that is reality replete with credits and everything…so to metaphorically speak. And the sub-concepts of time can be expressed in how we would effect or affect time should we ever create a way of traveling back or forth.

Ideas that are based upon what kind of reality there truly is dependant upon how we react to it and vice versa…or at least that is the idea in countless science fiction novels and stories. Take Stephen King’s short story “The Langoliers.” I wont cover the story other than to say that a plane filled with passengers (and a couple crazies) accidentally travels into the recent past via a rip in time/space and they find out the hard way how the “stale” past is re-absorbed into the ether that is nothingness…By ravenous nasty balls of teeth, which express the end of reality as an echo of the present and a points to a God filled universe that is handy enough to re-use the fabric of time/space to make the new stuff just ahead of the time wave intersection point that is reality. Such new stuff is encountered when the passengers fly back and land just a bit ahead of the reality wave, where they get that “fresh paint” feel from the world.

The idea fundamentally is a religious one because it suggests an ordered universe where the past is eaten to make way for and or recycle energy into the future…a constant wave machine, riding the light of reality on the recycled mass of existence with a little run off behind and ahead.

Since we know that there are black holes; at least theoretically, and we know that intense gravity affects light, and we give credence to Einsteinian theory of time dilation in mass and gravity, then at least at some point, we can look into the past. At some point in the universe, out there, a millisecond or five minutes or whatever is still there as we observe the event horizon of a black hole…if we could. So, what of that? Does that mean that time exists in the past? Or that the last moment you just read the previous question is now lost into nothingness?

A competing theory is that reality is consciousness but that one has little scientific basis and lacks credibility, but I will at least consider it. Imagine a universe (and I use the word UNIVERSE to mean everything there is currently, including all the multiverses if there are any and god herself, should she actually exist) completely built like a train set or a model. Every piso muon every atom every molecule everything from the start (my feeble mind suggesting there would be a start because I am a primitive primate and need a reference in my thinking) to finish, all there, all expressed, all finished, the lives the deaths the moments in time, all there. And then there is the moment that passes over it like a stylus or a wave or like an explosion of energy passing through the onion that is all things. So imagine we travel back in time. It’s there, but there is no energy. We arrive but we instantly die because no molecules are moving, no atoms are moving, everything is a still life, and we can’t breathe let alone move. Or perhaps we can, walking around, moving things, touching and breaking and even perhaps stealing from the past. But since the wave of reality is somewhere in the future, the past is harvested of its diamonds and pearls and no one is the wiser, since nothing changes because the universe is stingy with its energy and will not bother remaking the entire future just because someone went back to rape the past of goodies. Imagine the army of the dead you could raise.

But say that the universe is generous and indeed tremendous. Imagine a universe with a hard drive so big, it is on forever record, taking in universal snapshot after snapshot from one infinitesimal moment to the next, log rhythmically expanding the size and weight of the universe at each moment over and over through time, so that all things exist in energy and “life” at every moment of existence, time undone. So you can go back in time, kill yourself, and come back and it’s like it never happened because the universe is like a movie and you just cut a small bit of film emulsion but the film stayed in tact. Imagine going into the past, hunting dinosaurs and never having to worry about stomping on butterflies because it won’t matter? That theory is a bit hard to swallow. And worse, the divergent timeline theory.

In this idea, an entirely separate expression of the universe is created when the time stream is altered by a time traveler. And since observation changes the observed, you don’t even have to eat something or kill something or do anything, no interaction necessary…instant multi-verse. Again, kind of out there. Too much energy.

What makes the most sense is that what we perceive as “now” is the energetic wave of existence, and there is no past and no future. Both are concepts. And when we finally are able to breach the light speed barrier and stand easily on the event horizon edge of a super black hole and peer into the smeared time around its crescent, we will simply see the smearing of light. Nothing more. And when we are able to beat light to the destination by stepping through a stable wormhole to the surface of another planet, there won’t be two of us; it will just be the trick of the light.

SO… how does all this have to do with the movie Déjà vu? Well, in it, ‘cooler than you’ young Turk scientists create a stable wormhole (not unlike A. C. Clarke’s concept in The Light Of Other Days) that sees four days and six hours into the past. With these amazing machines, they can move around through walls into people’s homes, and listen in and watch every moment, even able to move the wormhole into someone’s chest to watch their heart beating…theoretically, anyway.

Let’s assume you have seen the movie so I don’t have to go through plot point problems. Here are some observations…

1. They use this technology to find the culprit of a nasty terrorist act, not to warn the people, even though they know they could at least try.

2. Doug Carlin, played by Denzel Washington sits watching this electronic expression of the past, and shines a hand held laser into the apogee of the stable wormhole, and the person in the past sees it, but the very act shuts down the hardware. A laser is no different from the ambient light and albedos of the room as they all sit there watching the wormhole. It is just a bit stronger and focused. Either the subject in the past can see and hear and smell them or it (she) cant. A laser pointer would not pierce the veil there, and besides…it was a video screen replete with character generated text from the computer interface it ran through whenever the camera angle on the past (or more accurately, the stable wormhole event horizon) was moved or expressed at another location. It was all computer controlled and therefore, impossible to pass light or information to the past, even if it was possible under different circumstances in that story and idea of a wormhole.

3. It became clear early on in the movie that the people running the equipment for the “first time” where already experiencing the time alterations of the as of yet unperpetrated incursion into the past. Meaning, they had already been there, time and the universe are already written and they have no free will to change any outcome. Further, from the moment they created a time machine, they doomed their experience into a causal loop.

4. Causal loop and the energy it would need to run aside, the intrepid bunch, send a piece of paper back into the past, yet again knocking out the power grid they draw from and instantly, they are back in business. Not to be a nitpicker, but those outages blow the crap out of hardware all over the place and it takes hours and in some cases, days to repair. They did that about four times in the movie and had limited time. A small petty point to be sure, but a valid one. It wasn’t like Superman’s Crystal EMP blast, it was their power draw. So…NOPE.

5. They spend all this money on a stable wormhole and magically happen to have a chamber that scans objects like a Star Trek transporter, and they use it to send back a note to the past. First off, if you think the energy used to stabilize a space fold is heavy, think of how much you would need to run a computer and accompanying hardware that can scan every nano particle of matter in a sheet of paper and send it through to the past. You would need a nuclear reactor of immense size just to run it, and about five hundred years of hard science to get to the point of computers being able to handle such a task. But wait…they eventually send Denzel.

6. Back to the note. Here’s an idea: “ATTENTION POLICE! I HAVE PLANTED A BOMB ON THE FERRY. IT WILL BE IN MY RED CAR. I LOOK LIKE JESUS. SHOOT ME.” End of movie.

7. But no. They don’t do that. They send Denzel through time. And when he gets there, he is stone cold dead. That’s right; anything with an energy field gets flat lined. So they drop him on a gurney in a surgical ward with the forethought to write REVIVE ME on his chest. Here’s the problem with that. If you know anything about medicine, you know that paddles only work when there is still brain activity. If all electrical impulses are completely knocked out, Denzel arrived completely and totally brain dead. Shocking his heart would do nothing about his total lack of brain activity. Defibulators work because there is still brain activity but the pump has shut off. It takes moments for the brain to degrade the moment the heart stops under normal temperatures. The brain does not get a jumpstart from a deliberator. If it dies, it is dead. End of story. No encephalic energy means the synapses of all connections just broke the covalent bond between Potassium and sodium chloride exchange through the myelin sheath of each and every neuron. If the energy is removed, the electrolytic reaction is done. Blood pumping or not, static electric charges do nothing to get that up and running. So, he’s D.E.A.D.O.A.

8. But in the story he is not dead; he gets revived, and attempts to save the girl…who has already died in the future which is the present. But he has a hard time staying away from the course of pre-existing determinations. He goes to her house, creates the mess we see in the beginning of the movie…he even tells her to change her dress since the one she puts on is the one she dies in, but she doesn’t. And then instead of calling himself, or someone who could stop a mad bomber, he takes it upon himself to stop the bomber and when the girl says the obvious, “call the police” the writers use a cheap line of dialogue “no time, they wouldn’t get their acts together in time to stop it.” Wanna make a bet? THERE IS A BOMB IN YOUR BUILDING. One call or even note from the future…five minute of evacuation later, movie over.

9. And about paradoxes. The writers of this movie kill the Denzel version that went into the past, not by the bullet that passes through vital territory and out his scapula and we are supposed to think he’s all better on the inside because she puts some gauze on his owies on the outside…no, he dies saving everyone, exploding in the car he drives off the ferry, and she manages not only to get away from the sinking car but far enough away from the blast radius to be unharmed. Her organs somehow were not turned to jelly from the blast wave. So, Denzel past-walker thus prevents himself from meeting himself and having to explain to the working universe why there are two of him, or avoiding exploding the universe since the universe does not like paradoxes (as the theory goes), or at least blowing the mind of Mr. Washington’s character. The problem with that was that the paradox existed the moment he was sent back in time. Or the moment they created the machine.

10. One last word on time and wormholes as it relates to Déjà vu. If we were able to create a time space tunnel, folding space and cutting a small hole into it, it is much more likely that we would not see anything on the other side. The very act of piercing the fabric of space/time does not open up a hole to see into the past or future, even if they are there. It rips into whatever matter is on the underside of our reality. Imagine cutting a hole through your inner tube to see the other side of your tire. You would see the inner latex tube and a whole lot of air. You would need to make two stable wormholes not just one. And that takes teamwork from the past, which kind of negates the whole idea. In Arthur C. Clarke’s The Light of Other Days, it is explained a bit better, but even in that book; at least they understood that such a concept was of mathematical and energetic impossibility for some time to come.

So, we put in the line, “thank god we created the BLANK machine.” Well, great, now we can smoke in the O2 rich atmosphere of a futuristic space station. If they can do it in THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, I guess Tony Scott can do it in Déjà vu.

That’s all I can think of right now.

D