Plot synopsis
Art student, Ben, breaks up with his girlfriend and cannot sleep so gets a job working nights at a supermarket. To make his nightshift go faster, he imagines that time has slowed right down to the point where those around him have been frozen in time.
In this paused world, Ben can walk freely and unnoticed. He says, “Nobody would even know time had stopped. And when it started back up again, the invisible join would be seamless except for a slight shudder, not unlike the feeling of someone walking over your grave.”
Ben undresses paused women in the supermarket and moves their bodies around the aisles. Sometimes, he sketches their naked bodies. And when he is ready, all he has to do to start time again is to click his fingers.
Ben can also slow down time so people move in slow motion. He says, “I often wonder what it would be like to spend the rest of my life with the world on pause: to live out the rest of my life between two fractions of a second.”
After four weeks without sleep, he says that the experience “had done nothing to slow the effects of time … the days joined the fast-flowing river of time. The bad news is that time flies – the good news is that you are the pilot!”
He also observes that, “You can speed it up, you can slow it down, but you cannot rewind time. You cannot undo what is done.”
While kissing his new girlfriend, Sharon, he stops time so they can then both move around the paused world together.
He tells her, “Love is there if you want it to be, you just have to see that it is wrapped in beauty and hidden away between the seconds of your life. If you do not stop for a minute, you might miss it.”
My comments
Ben is slowing time down for those around him, but not for himself. This is highly unlikely because if he was moving through the dimension of time faster than the others, his clock would be ticking faster than theirs. And according to relativity, you would expect him to be moving through space more slowly. However, he is moving much faster through space, as they are all frozen (or moving extremely slowly) relative to him.
By freezing those around him, Ben is ageing while they are not, so this is the opposite of cryogenic freezing, which is a form of future time travel.
At one point, he discovers that he is not the only one who can stop time. The movie, Clockstoppers (2002), also addresses this concept. See also the film reviews of A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Lost Horizon (1937), which discuss similar concepts.
Summary of time travel
As Ben’s clock is ticking slower than those around him, he is moving backwards in time relative to them. As the time gap between them increases, he is ageing faster than them. This means he is moving faster than he would have done, if he had not changed time.
When he clicks his fingers, he travels backwards in time but never back beyond the moment when the freezing began. Therefore nothing from his past can change due to these timeouts.
As he never goes to his past, we would assume the past is undefined. However when he says, “You cannot undo what is done,” he is referring to the actions that passed before the freezing began. So, the model of time used in this film has a closed past.
After he returns, he is creating a different future for the others by the things he has done to them during the frozen period. This causes both their future timeline and also his to diverge.
In the following diagram, the time freezing begins at the origin and then he skips back to the point when it begun and rejoins those around him on a new diverging timeline.
Category of time travel
Psychological: mind power.
Model of time
Closed past, open future with a diverging timeline.
