Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1999 CM Media, Inc.
The Sticky Fingers of Time (1999)
All time-travel movies are hooey, but some of them are good hooey, and “The Sticky Fingers of Time” is one of them.
Like any good con artist, writer/director Hilary Brougher dances around the pitfalls of complexity and paradox and gets it all over with before you have too much time to think.
Her refreshingly novel little film is an unlikely combination of feminist theory and David Cronenberg’s small-scale, low-budget sci-fi with some “Spaceballs” thrown in. Describing the plot could literally take longer than watching the movie; in short, it involves a 1950s mystery writer who spontaneously time-travels to modern-day New York only to discover that she and her next incarnation must join forces to solve her own murder.
Meanwhile,
the writer’s newspaper science-editor boyfriend (played by “Henry Fool’s” gaunt
hero James Urbaniak) bounds in and out of the
narrative, uttering would-never-fly-on-“Star Trek” witticisms such as,
“Watching fusion is like catching God fucking.” A deliberate allusion to the
White Rabbit of “
This is a light, very enjoyable lark that doesn’t need to be ball-and-chained to any sort of label. Still, it’s inescapably feminist—not in some dogmatic way (though, being a man, I detected several phallic/castration images) but in its overall viewpoint and expression.
Sci-fi has long been a male province (in creation, and supposedly in consumption). Women are just starting to break through in the area of sci-fi filmmaking, and the viewpoint has been at times startling (as with the recent “Conceiving Ada,” which imagined computers as a solution for destroying the barriers of gender, class and time itself).
As the
final scene of this film (concerning a collaborative storywriting
attempt) makes clear, it’s about the generally feminist approach of textual
revision, rewriting and de(re)construction. Its
references to other genres (hard-boiled fiction, sci-fi, “
The idea of exerting one’s will to change, and even rewrite, history relies on the device of “nonlinear time”—the characters can bounce into any point in time (past, present or future) but can only do so once. They end up living “out of order.”
Which is to say that Brougher imagines time as a movie—the classic nonlinear form—the actions of which can be edited and re-edited into any desired order. There’s an implicit claim here that cinema is the outstanding feminist medium; I eagerly await more proof of that.
As someone not much interested in dogma, I’ve always considered that feminism is important only as humanism, something that reflects light onto us all. And that’s where this film really shines.
Its point is a subtle one, but one so rare as to be revelation in this genre. Male sci-fi writers have often used the genre to imagine people becoming something extra-human. Brougher does something much more daring and valuable; she uses sci-fi to imagine people becoming themselves.