The Lake House and Other News

First things first: I have a short story published in the most recent edition of Werewolves Versus! It's been an incredibly exciting process, and I'm really happy with the final result. It's a bit of a change from my normal work, sort of "horror-lite" as I've been calling it? But I had a lot of fun writing it.

The theme for this edition is Werewolves Vs Suburbia, and there are fifteen stories, comics, and pieces of art centered on that theme. My story is centered on a (seemingly) charming, nuclear, 1950s family looking for a new house, who may not be all that they appear. You can buy the whole book online here: https://argylewerewolf.gumroad.com/l/wv09

Okay, so second thing. My boyfriend and I are fans of time travel movies, and we watched The Lake House (2006, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock) last night. I had some thoughts on it. Obviously, there will be spoilers, but it's been 15 years, I feel like we're well past the statute of limitations on this one.

The romance was, eh. I don't particularly enjoy romantic movies, especially not awkward Hollywood romantic movies, which is probably why we've been sleeping on this movie for 15 years. Keanu and Sandra exchange two or three letters, and immediately fall in love. I try really hard to avoid doing this with my characters, because it just doesn't feel very true to life.

After I finish my current book (Rock Mesa 2) I'm going to be writing what is effectively a love story. I only have vague details at the moment, but I know that I want to take basically the whole book to develop the relationship.

I get that the point of The Lake House was that they loved each other and couldn't be together, due to time travel reasons, and they had to speed through establishing the relationship for the sake of Plot, but it still felt really sloppy to me. I didn't like it.

The "time travel", on the other hand, I found interesting. They themselves couldn't travel through time, but their messages could, and anything that could fit in the mailbox. There were some points that really made me wonder how causality under these rules worked, and whether or not Keanu Reeves had any agency in the past. I'll explain.

Keanu and Sandra are living in two linked timelines, exactly two years apart (which brings up another interesting question that I'll leave until later). The things that happen in Keanu's timeline are not felt in Sandra's timeline until that exact moment, but two years later. Sometimes.

First, we see Keanu stick a map in the mailbox to take Sandra on a "guided tour" of Chicago architecture. At the end of the tour, he spray paints a message on an alley wall for her. That message appears to have been partially covered, like it's been there for two years. Makes sense.

Later, he plants a tree in front of her apartment building, and the tree immediately appears, two years later, having not been there before. This suggests to me that he is capable of changing the timeline, and he does have some agency to affect future events.

Still later in the film, we see that their paths cross a few times in the past, with Keanu knowing her from her letters in the future, but her not knowing him at all, as she has not read his letters from the past yet. But Sandra remembers this happening, before it "happened" two years ago. This suggests that it was more like the first style of thing, a persistent event that was present in her past, and was always present in her past.

So did Keanu have agency to go to Sandra's birthday party and meet her, or was that pre-ordained? By the way, overthinking time travel movies is part of the fun of time travel movies.

I've always subscribed to the theory that time is "sticky", and that it's difficult to meaningfully change the outcome of an event, even if you can alter the specifics. To use a popular example, if you go back in time and kill Hitler, the nazis will find some other charismatic sociopath.

Through that lens, Everything that happened in Sandra's past already happened the way it happened because Keanu's timeline existed, and her interference in her own past caused her past to be the way it was, which then non-causally shaped her future, causing her to write those letters, which then made her past the way it was, etc.

But this really does take a lot of the agency out of the movie. Saying things had to happen the way they did because they already did isn't really fun. Which leads me to the ending.

The movie starts with Sandra, a doctor, trying and failing to save the life of a man who gets hit by a bus in downtown Chicago. I was proud of myself for seeing it coming a few minutes before the movie makes it overtly obvious, but that man ends up being Keanu Reeves, in the timeline two years before hers.

So Sandra runs to the mailbox at the lake house, tells Keanu not to get hit by that bus, he reads the letter, and he doesn't cross the street. That makes the entirety of Sandra's timeline invalid, because she never would have done any of the things in the movie if it weren't for that triggering event. Except she did. But she couldn't have. But she did.

I love time travel, y'all.

So that flips the whole dynamic. What if Keanu's timeline is the one that has all the agency and Sandra's is the one that's following along? The things that happened in his timeline have now happened because they already happened to him, and the fact that she wasn't "there" anymore to send the letters didn't matter because he already had them?

Or what if I'm spending way more time microdissecting the nuances of time travel in a movie that's just supposed to be about two straight people kissing than the writers ever did?

It's probably that one, if we're being honest.

Which does lead me to my last point, which is less of a point and more of an interesting plot hole. The movie takes place from Valentine's Day 2004/2006 to Valentine's Day 2006/2008. The reason for the slashes is because what year it is depends on whose timeline you're in.

Which is what I find interesting about this, and I didn't think about it until my boyfriend pointed it out. 2004 was a leap year. On February 29, 2004, it would have been March 1, 2006, and the timelines should have been a day off the rest of the movie. What linkage was going on between the two timelines on the extra day?

Yeah, I know, I'm overthinking it.