Alter the Past

The entire premise of X-Men: Days of Future Past is altering the past to create a new future/present. I don't want to include too many spoilers, but I will say the dude stealing away behind/between Wolverine and the young Professor X is William Stryker. Nothing like meeting your nemesis when he's a younger punk!

Rather than chatting about the movie itself, I am once again fascinated by and enamored of yet another view of time travel. Our culture, for the most part, believes time to be immutable and only running one way.  In science fiction, time often shows up as fluid. Sometimes it's immutable; sometimes it's changeable; sometimes it's a combination of the two ~ some incidents are fixed in time (like the death of JFK, the U.S. Civil War, the rise of Adolph Hitler....) and some are not. What a wild concept!

What do you think? Is time travel possible? Would you be interested in it? Why or why not? Do you think you can alter the past? Why would you want to?

Heroic Journey

In May of 2003, X2: X-Men United was released. I saw it at a matinee one Saturday ~ and later that same day, I picked up a friend and went to see it again. I recommended it to every person I knew ~ with caveats for those who have issues with violence. Was it the greatest movie I'd ever seen? No. Not even close. It was Wolverine's story arc that captured me: the Hero's Journey, a modern-day Hercules.

Like Hercules, Wolverine is massively strong, in a bull or elephant manner. Like Hercules, he is looking for a way to prove himself to, well, mostly to himself. He is a protector of the weak and a righter of wrongs. He takes on impossible feats to protect others, to right wrongs, to prove himself worthy of Olympus. Or in the case of Wolverine, worthy of Professor X and the X-Men.

What drew me to his story was its mythic quality. Wolverine is the consummate hero, yet racked by insecurities and even fears of his own strengths. Mythic stories always seem beyond us ~ except the Hero's Journey. In these stories we see a reflection of what is possible, of what we can do, of how our very weaknesses become integral to our strengths. We all walk that Hero's Journey. Not Wolverine's. Not Hercules's. Not each other's. Our own unique variation on the story. We are attracted to heroes because of their imperfections, their flaws. They make us recognize that we have strengths too, that we have the potential to be heroes.

To what Hero's Journey are you attracted? What positive characteristics do you have? What are your imperfections? How can or do you use these to make you stronger?