other time machines

Now I’m a thirty-six hour human. Today I watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I’ve saved this dubious honor until now. While a film review of Bill and Ted’s may not be the most relevant thing I could do, I am, after all, stuck in the past. Apart from having the production value of an after-school special, I think there is something worthwhile lodged between Napoleon cheating at bowling and Socrates trying to pick up chicks in big sweaters at the food court. The basic plot is that Bill and Ted receive a time machine to kidnap historical figures for an oral presentation in high school history. The ability to cast the figures of history rather than study them creates a ridiculous complicity of history to the stadium-rock spectacle of the present. While minor hijinks ensue, particularly with that rascal Genghis Khan- the past, present and future all play along, requiring essentially no translation. Beethoven jams to Iron Maiden (obviously) the English princesses make flawless prom dates, and all historical figures happily assume animatronic roles in an oral presentation complete with a light show. The presentation is effortless, the entire span of human history is a theme park, and it couldn’t suck harder. Plot in almost all time-travel movies lands in a cul de sac of boredom and paradox. Bill and Ted even get to enjoy the success of their band Wyld Styllions before learning to play the guitar, being admired from the future and knowing it. But in the end of the film, we are back in Ted’s garage, and they are making the same music video they were in the beginning of the film. Ted interrupts it, amazed at how they could have had such adventures and see no change in their lives. I think we are all with Keanu on this one- he is more messianic as Ted than as the Buddha or “the one” or whatever. Since we have dissembled history, what next? What epoch follows the understanding that no epochs really exist? The prophet Ted sums up the eery stillness of our era well. “Bill, strange things are afoot at the circle K.”