“The future isn’t what you thought”:

Evolution, Degradation, and Scientific Romance in Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979)

Abstract

In Nicholas Meyer’s 1979 science-fiction fantasy Time After Time, H.G. Wells, played by Malcolm MacDowell, travels from Victorian London to twentieth-century San Francisco in pursuit of Jack the Ripper. His quest to save utopia takes several unexpected turns, not least of all because all of his concepts of self and society have proved erroneous. In life and work, H.G. Wells’s utopian speculative fiction was informed by a Victorian idealism rooted in socio-economic theories in turn rooted in concepts of biology and physics, which now seem as quaint as the idealism itself. The twinned forces of evolution and degradation inform a great deal of Victorian writing, particularly speculative and scientific study. Meyer’s film differs from ‘straight’ or ‘direct’ adaptations of Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) in many important respects, but at its core is the philosophical and ideological conflict between utopian and dystopic visions of human ‘progress’ as in 1979 Jack the Ripper is less ‘deviant’ than the upright Wells, and adapts to modernity with much greater ease. The film is also a late 1970s romantic comedy, which re-asserts traditional masculine and feminine roles through the use of the Victorian frame, even as it touches upon the New Hollywood zeitgeist of contemporary adult relationships in the light of new feminism.