What If Time Travel Could Take You Back to Your Worst Memory?

Most of us already own a time machine. It switches on somewhere around two in the morning, when the ceiling fan is the only thing still talking, and it has a favourite destination. Mine usually drops me into a room from years ago, where I said something careless to a person who deserved far better from me. I know every detail of that room. I couldn’t tell you what I ate last Tuesday.

Cinema loves time travel as a thrill. There are DeLoreans, paradoxes, a hero racing a clock. The version I keep thinking about is smaller and much crueller. Imagine the machine works, but it has only one setting: the worst moment of your life. It might be the worst thing that happened to you, or the worst thing you did. Would you buy the ticket?

The man on the railway tracks

Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy (1999) opens with a man named Yong-ho standing on a railway line, arms open, screaming that he wants to go back. The train arrives. Then the film does something I still find hard to sit through. It grants his wish, moving backward through twenty years of his life, chapter by chapter.

What we discover is that there is no single worst memory waiting at the end. There’s a failed business, a marriage gone sour, and years as a police officer who tortured people without much thought. Further back, there’s a young conscript in Gwangju in 1980, firing a rifle in panic and killing a schoolgirl. Each wound sits on top of an older one. By the time we reach the riverside picnic where it all began, with Yong-ho young and gentle and nervous around the girl he likes, the innocence on screen is almost unbearable. We know where he’s headed. He doesn’t.

That’s the first thing the film taught me about the fantasy of going back. We imagine our worst memory as one door we could walk through and fix. Lee suggests it’s more like a corridor, and you can’t find where it starts.

Hiding in the rooms we’re ashamed of

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Joel pays a company to erase his ex-girlfriend Clementine. Halfway through the procedure he changes his mind. Desperate to keep her, he drags her memory into the places the technicians won’t think to search. Those places are his humiliations: a childhood afternoon when other boys bullied him into smashing a dead bird with a hammer, and moments of shame he has never told anyone about.

I’ve always found this one of the most honest ideas in modern film. Our worst memories are terrible, but they are also strangely private property. They are ours in a way that our happy moments, shared and photographed and retold at dinner, rarely are. Joel hides the person he loves inside his shame because shame is the one room nobody else has a key to.

So maybe we wouldn’t travel back to fix the worst memory at all. Maybe we’d go back to check that it’s still there, still ours.

When the past returns on its own

Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) turns the question around. Kris Kelvin doesn’t travel anywhere. The past comes to him instead. A strange ocean planet reads his mind and sends him a copy of Hari, the wife who took her own life after he left her. He gets the rarest thing in fiction, a second chance with the person he failed.

It goes badly. He’s tender with her, then frightened of her. He tries to get rid of her, then begs her to stay. The new Hari begins to understand she isn’t real, and her grief starts to echo the original’s. Tarkovsky holds his camera on these scenes for so long that you start to feel complicit. The repeat doesn’t repair anything. It just shows Kelvin, and us, how little we’ve changed.

I think about that whenever I rehearse what I’d say if I could go back to that room. The words I imagine are kinder. I’m not sure the person saying them would be.

The gentler versions

Not every film is this unforgiving. In Arrival (2016), Louise Banks learns that she will have a daughter who dies young. She chooses that life anyway. Grief becomes something she walks toward with her eyes open, because the love on the way there counts for more than the ending.

Richard Curtis’s About Time (2013) is softer still, almost a comedy, but it lands somewhere unexpectedly wise. Tim can return to any moment of his life. Eventually he stops bothering. He learns to live each ordinary day once, attentively, as though he had come back from the future just to enjoy it.

Neither film erases the pain. Both suggest the real use of revisiting the past might be acceptance rather than correction.

What I would do with the ticket

I’d probably go. I’m not proud of how quickly I answered that.

I wouldn’t try to stop myself from saying what I said. I’m fairly sure, after Yong-ho and Kelvin, that it would come out anyway, in some other form, on some other day. I’d stand quietly at the back of that room and watch the younger version of me. He was tired, defensive, and too afraid of looking foolish. I’d try to look at him the way the camera looks at Yong-ho by the river, without contempt.

Then I’d come home, and switch off the fan.