MovieChat Forums > Feedback (2002) Discussion > Timeloop: explanations?

Timeloop: explanations?

posted 20 years ago by FlorisV
4 replies | jump to latest

The Mick character warned about an endless timeloop that would occur when you would phonecall yourself in the past. I did not understand this.

It made me think of the shortstory "By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein. In this story, such a timeloop happens. A person travels back into time and warns himself of a timeloop, in vein. I did not entirely dig that shortstory because I thought it seemed flawed, plotholed.

Back to Feedback. Why would you end up doing the same thing over and over again? No matter what change you try to make to the past when you are in the future? If you phonecall yourself in the past, can't you just give instructions on how to avoid bad things to happen? And what is a timeloop exactly?

Furthermore, the timeloop that Mick warned of did not happen in the film, did it now? The main character DOES call his past self, just in time to avoid his girly's death. And it works! So what's the deal with this "loop"? Can someone please explain?

[–] koteo 20 years ago

Hi Floris,
What is meant by a loop is this: Let's say you get up at 7:00 a.m. and get ready to go to a job interview at 8:00 a.m. and you think that wearing your red shirt is going to make a good impression only to find that your potential new boss hates red and therefore doesn't hire you. Now you take your timephone and call yourself a few hours in the past and tell yourself that you should wear your blue shirt to the interview because that will surely get you the job.
This is where you create "feedback", because now you put on your blue shirt and go to the interview and get the job. But what happened to the version of you wearing the red shirt, the version that made the timecall to you telling you to wear the blue shirt? That version of yourself suffers the effects of "feedback" and is destroyed. He no longer exists, he is destroyed in the resulting "feedback" or "short-circuit" or "loop".
Here comes the kicker, the version of you wearing the blue shirt only does so because he received a timecall from the relative future telling him to wear that blue shirt. He needs to remember that in order for this version of events to stick he needs to make sure that that timecall needs to be made. He needs to call himself after the interview and tell himself to wear the blue shirt.
It's a little mindbending but fun to think about. I hope this helps.
-Teo

[–] Ibutton77 20 years ago

Well, to tell the truth, according to the chronological system posited in Feedback, time loops aren't (normally) a problem. The types of problems you're referring to, koteo, would have prevented this plot from working if they applied — since none of the times that someone called to prevent a death did they do so again once everything worked out.
In this movie, it appears as though once you get a timecall, you are free to change the future and then not worry about making the timecall again. Time won't "undo itself". Making a timecall changes the past in a permanent way that does not get erased if the timecall ends up not getting made after all.
On the other hand, making a timecall does apparently mess with the timeline that you're currently in, which adjusts itself painfully to accomodate the changes you've wrought, as demonstrated after the last time call (gunman vanishes, Lenny-in-the-hotel goes into spasms). This almost doesn't matter since it causes no ill-effects in the past, which is the only thing you'll remember at the end of the day...... unless you are talking to yourself on the phone. Mick said the problem was that you would be "changing your own past while you were still on the phone".

You'll notice that after the first timecall, Mick died in the alleyway but didn't undergo spasms or anything. I would imagine that the timeline he was in would have to wait as long as it took for the message to get to Mick-in-the-past before it began changing. Eg, if it took ten minutes after the timecall for Lenny to call Mick's hotel, it would take ten minutes after the future-end of the timecall for that timeline to begin to degrade. If that were the case then Mick's warning makes sense: If you call yourself in the past you risk your timeline degrading while you're on the phone, interupting the very message you're trying to send. This won't "destroy spacetime" or anything dramatic like that, but it would prevent your efforts from being effective.

I think it worked out for Lenny because his message was short and he blurted it out quickly enough that future-Lenny was done saying it before past-Lenny could perceive what it meant. I doubt they could have carried on a sustained conversation or anything, and it's not something I'd have attempted (assuming I knew all this) unless someone's life was on the line and there were no other options. I wouldn't have risked it over the roulette game for instance :)

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[–] AMS-4 19 years ago

What's funny about this, is that "koteo" is the writer/director of the film...

[–] dss-6 18 years ago

Do you mean that it is implied in the film that Lenny forgot to call himself after he has killed the boss and saved his girlfriend, and that's why Mick still died after they retrieved the box?
Another thing--don't the two future selves (i.e. the blue shirt and red shirt me's) have to call at exactly the same time so that it would be just one phone call, not two?