Dark and Slaughterhouse-Five: Past, Present, and Future
“Why do people say that anyways? ‘To have time.’ How can you have time when it clearly has you?” — Jonas Kahnwald
Time travel plays such a persistent role in pop culture and beyond. It’s one of the most explored ideas — and convenient plot devices — in movies. It’s one of the most thought-provoking motifs in books. It’s also something I bet everyone has once pondered: can one turn back time and change things? I sure still want to travel back in time and tell my past self not to watch Cats, but alas, as Doris Tiedemann says, the heart does what it wants.
(spoilers for Dark and Slaughterhouse-Five ahead)
I remember picking up the first episode of Dark in 2017 when it was first released on Netflix. I remember the suspenseful music, the mysterious atmosphere of the setting, and the complex, interwoven relationships. For some reason, I never returned to it until September of last year, and to be frank, I’m glad I could experience all 3 seasons without the otherwise tedious wait. Especially given the pandemic, it served as a pertinent gateway into self-reflection as many — myself included — deal with both regret and uncertainty.
Dark adopts many popular set-ups: the missing child, the unfaithful partner, and, of course, time travel. The motives of its characters are thus immediately clear: to find the child, to find the outsider, and to — after discovering time travel — accomplish those goals once and for all. As the seasons pass, we realize that this fictive universe is cruel; the predator becomes the prey, and the benevolent become vengeful. For Jonas and Claudia, trying to prevent their fathers’ deaths is to cause them. For Ulrich and Katharina, trying to save their loved ones from being trapped in the past is to be trapped in it themselves. Through time travel and its laws, we discover with the characters themselves that whatever they strive to achieve, time produces an opposite result, the one that has always occurred, over and over again. In the show, they call it the Bootstrap Paradox.
At school, we read Slaughterhouse-Five in English class. Like Dark, it explores our desires to change things past when the present brings unbearable suffering. In his satirical humor, Kurt Vonnegut explores time travel as a mental escape from the horrors of warfare. One of the most influential anti-war books, Slaughterhouse-Five introduces an alien species called the Tralfamadorians, who see time in a circle where everything that has happened had always happened. The protagonist of the story, Billy Pilgrim, is a timid American soldier in the Firebombing of Dresden in WWII. As he meets with the Tralfamadorians, he learns of their perception of time and is deeply influenced by it, to the point that he becomes apathetic towards the horrors of war — because they are, as he begins to believe, destined to occur.
The similarities are immediately clear: both stories tackle fate, human nature, suffering, and free will. Adam and Eva are, in essence, the Tralfamadorians of Dark. Although differing in approach, Adam and Eva believe in the inevitability of events in their worlds, in the idea that everything is inseparably connected by deep pain and desires. Pain begets desire, and desire leads everyone to their fate as time dictates. Like Noah says:
“Most people are nothing but pawns on a chessboard led by an unknown hand.”
And, like Vonnegut describes Billy Pilgrim:
“Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”
Indeed, the very philosophy — or truth — of the Tralfamadorians, Adam, and later Billy, is that everything is meant to be, occurring all at once. To them, the death of millions on Earth is as irrelevant as falling dust. As a timid Billy converses with the alien species, he sees the value in resorting to apathy in the face of warfare. Similarly, as Adam and Eva witness the inevitability of events occurring ad infinitum, they realize the futility in one’s attempt to change things that have already happened. Adam, Eva, and Billy all share the same idea — at least for considerable portions of the stories.
Both works allude to the original human couple Adam and Eve. Both revolve around a bleak world where all attempts to save lives are to no avail. Both feature protagonists who are consumed by the cruelty of their worlds upon witnessing death, pain, and loss that occur endlessly.
Yet in slightly differing ways, through their bleak outlooks in time-traveling worlds, these stories convey sincerely hopeful ideas about human nature.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy has always wanted to escape from the battlefield. He wants no part in the tension and suspense. After witnessing and experiencing the cruelty of war — wearing jackets of dead soldiers and seeing candles and soap made of fat — he creates this species in his mind, a coping mechanism to feed his psychological resistance. What is the best way for me to rid the burden, stress, and suffering of war? Billy’s answer turns out to be his creation of the Tralfamadorians, or, in abstract terms, absolute apathy. Because everything that occurred and will occur cannot be changed and simply is, he bears no responsibility for the firebombing, the crashing of planes, or any other event that he has witnessed throughout his life. He becomes a mere witness of the evils of the world. Eventually, however, his truth becomes clear to us and to him: his very struggle to reconcile suffering in war attests to his wish for peace, but the harsh reality of warfare imbue in him a hopelessness great enough to eliminate his attempts. Rather than trying to understand, internalize, and therefore ease the suffering he sees along the way, Billy decides to resort to apathy.
As much as it is a Sci-Fi, Dark is, at its core, a story about how far one can go for family. Like Keller Dover in Prisoners, which I discussed in my first blog, many — indeed, most — of Dark’s characters share one goal: to save their family. In fact, what Ulrich does is so similar to what Dover does in prisoners: nearly murdering hope of finding their missing children. The same applies to Claudia, Katharina, Jonas, and even some of the more sinister characters like Noah. Along the way, they witness the cruel game time plays with them. Few of them resort to apathy, but when they do, they believe that nothing can really be changed, no matter how hard they try.
Yet even that is a desire in the world of Dark. Adam and Eva both acknowledge the desires from which they cannot escape, yet they work meticulously to either destroy or preserve the knot. What they do contribute to preserving the way things are as much as falling dust.
After endless suffering, the conglomeration of the desires of the two worlds come together to end it once and for all. Tannhaus’ family is saved, but he’ll never know about how — he cannot have the desire to spend his life trying to get his family back. He is left forever in the Dark.
Through Slaughterhouse-Five and Dark, Kurt Vonnegut and Jantje Friese tell two time-traveling stories that go hand-in-hand.
Through time travel in the former, we learn that we must want peace bad enough. We’ve seen suffering in the past. We see it now. And we’ll likely to face it again and again in the future. We must not turn a blind eye. We must use hope as a weapon against it.
Through time travel in the latter, we learn that wanting — and acting on those wants — can eventually get us there. We won’t prevent all suffering along the way, but we do eventually succeed. Like Doris Tiedemann says, “the ways of the heart cannot be explained.” We all want to keep family safe and close. We either prevent ourselves from wanting, like how everything resolved the knot, preventing Tannhaus from dedicating his life to his time machine in an attempt to bring his family back from the dead, or we march on.
Back to the real world: there will always be a trigger for us to act. The paradise that Adam describes does not exist here. The Serenity Prayer, which both works refer to, best sums up the pertinent philosophy we need right now:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always know the difference.”
Like Jonas says, time still has us. We cannot change the events of last year. We do, however, have the shared desire to return to normalcy, to extinguish injustice, and to cherish and be more grateful for what we still DO have. We have desires that are strong enough, courage firm enough, to change things for the better.
If so, let’s act now.
