ABSTRACT
This essay approaches the subject of time-travel from two perspectives: that of philosophy—J. W. Dunne’s metaphysics of time; and that of film, specifically, the idea of traveling back in time that Richard Matheson explored in his 1975 novel Bid Time Return and his screenplay of that book for Somewhere in Time (Szwarc, 1980). The reason we bring these together is because Matheson’s ideas about time, attention and identity partly originate in Dunne’s philosophy. And yet Matheson’s is no straightforward implementation of Dunne’s work, a mere illustration of a philosophy. Rather, his novelistic and cinematic readings both apply and resist Dunne’s views, creating a distorting mirror—a refraction rather than simply a reflection. Given that Dunne’s metaphysics mostly concerns travel into the future, it may also seem perverse that we should emphasize its influence on a much more Proustian work, that is, a study of travel to the past, as Matheson offers. All the same, placing Dunne’s ideas alongside those of Matheson does reveal the latter as a veritable metaphysics at work beneath the sentimental gloss of Somewhere in Time—a metaphysics of both time and space, in particular, of dimensions or scales.
