Issue 11: Time After Time
Hey there!
We’ve already hit February, the weird and in-between month that’s really winter but almost-not-quite spring. For this issue, we both combat that weird in-betweenness with two different kinds of time travel. Alex gets nostalgic for The Pacifier, and Claudia delves into the shifting identities and bittersweet time travel of Charlotte Sometimes.
Alex on The Pacifier
Whether or not The Pacifier is a good movie is a question I have zero interest in answering. The truth is, I saw this movie too young and imprinted on it too deeply to care if it objectively works—though I have to admit that most capital G, capital M Good Movies engage my mind, whereas The Pacifier bypasses intellect and goes right for the heart.
The Pacifier is about Shane Wolfe (Vin Diesel), an emotionally constipated Navy SEAL who babysits a family of orphaned, unruly kids. Like in most action-hero babysitter movies, plot exists solely to force Shane into as many goofy and/or emotional set pieces as possible. There’s a murder, hand-waved political intrigue, a super-powerful encryption key hidden under the garage (of course!), and a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t remember because it’s not that important. The Pacifier isn’t trying to hold up under vigorous plot scrutiny, but it is a case study in the power fantasy that holds up every action-hero babysitter movie.
This power fantasy is a G-rated cousin to the love of a good woman trope in rom-coms. The babysitter may be gruff, tough, and rude (and he probably straight up hates children), but underneath it all lies a soft, battered heart just waiting to be reawakened by the spunky lovableness of the kids he’s forced to care for. Sure, the kids also have the power to make their babysitter’s life hell—and in the first act they always do—but the best of these movies don’t rely on mean-spirited hijinks for too long. Instead, they dig beneath surface-level brattiness to unearth deeper, emotional motivations. They give their kids the power to change not only the uptight buzzkill who might actually be their new best friend, but themselves, too. Action-hero babysitter stories run on extravagant wish fulfillment and even more extravagant personal change.
But by their nature these stories are also janky in plot and uneven in tone. Take one of The Pacifier’s most emotional scenes, where Zoe (Brittany Snow) finally admits to the pressure she feels after her dad’s death: “I just want to be strong for Lulu and Peter and Tyler and Seth and my mom.” When Shane counters that it’s a huge burden for one person to carry, Zoe nods. “I know.” Their conversation is honest and vulnerable, even subtle—and it’s slotted between the scene where Lulu beats up a rival troop of Boy Scout knock-offs in a Costco parking lot and the scene where Shane discovers the secret underground garage lair.
Doesn’t extravagance require some tonal whiplashes, though? And for all the goofiness surrounding Zoe’s last significant interaction with Shane, she out of all her siblings gets to see his damage—Zoe only opens up to Shane after he reveals his own lonely childhood. She won’t connect with him until he’s tried to connect with her. Which may make the entire scene sound manipulative and sinister (Zoe has tricked Shane into diving into a sewer; she definitely has it in her), but really it’s the resolution of their power struggle, from borderline dangerous pranks to mutually respectful conversation, and the rare quiet moment given to two grieving people. Throughout the movie, Shane’s tried to force the kids’ obedience without bothering to earn their respect. When he shares, and Zoe shares back, they go beyond respect. They show that they care for each other.
The Pacifier delivers gooey emotional catharsis beneath the hardened crust, honest feeling beneath over-the-top action and goofy comedy. It may not be a good movie—and action-hero babysitter stories are pretty much never considered good movies, let alone Good Movies—but it is a movie with a good heart, a movie that’s willing to go wonky. The Pacifier understands that change is hard, and grief can turn us into monsters, but this movie has always reassured me that I have the power to change and connect with others, even at my most vulnerable. Plus, it makes me laugh. Sometimes wonky is even better than good.
Claudia on Charlotte Sometimes
I started 2022 excited to spotlight some of the shiny new middle grade I’d read last year. But you can’t control what your muse will come up with, and instead mine led me to Penelope Farmer’s 1969 time travel novel Charlotte Sometimes.
When you look up Charlotte Sometimes, one of the first things you’ll learn is that it’s the inspiration behind the Cure’s 1981 song of the same name. Farmer's book is an excellent match for the Cure’s gothic, moody sensibilities, as it is itself deeply melancholy, and even a bit countercultural, acting as a subversion of many of the tropes of children’s time travel fiction.
As a literary device, time travel typically acts as a way for characters to learn about themselves and grow through their knowledge of the past, whether it’s through visiting their family or community history (Time Sight and A Traveller in Time are two good middle grade examples) or making a new home and family for themselves in the past (the definitely-not-for-kids but still excellent Outlander series). In Charlotte Sometimes, this focus is turned obsessively inward, with protagonist Charlotte wrestling with and even questioning the concept of identity itself. The longer she spends in 1918, the more she finds herself taking on the characteristics of her counterpart Clare Mobley, making her wonder if she is becoming Clare—or if she ever had a separate identity to begin with.
The novel begins with Charlotte’s sense of self already disrupted, since she’s just left her home and younger sister to come to boarding school for the first time. The first night, she falls asleep and wakes up in the same school, but half a century earlier, near the end of World War I. By communicating through a diary, she and Clare discover that the bed is what draws them into each other’s times. Then one day when Charlotte is in 1918, she and Clare’s sister Emily are moved to board with a local family, and Charlotte is trapped in the past.
Without the push-pull between 1918 and 1969, Charlotte’s perception of the dividing line between her and Clare becomes even murkier, “that part of her which still thought of itself as Charlotte” becomes “tighter and smaller until it lay deep down in her like a small stone in a large plum.” Even Emily begins to have trouble distinguishing the two, telling her, “[Y]ou seem like Clare now.”
The brilliant thing about the novel is that this question of who Charlotte is is never fully resolved. Charlotte and Emily finally manage to get back to their old bedroom so the girls can switch again, and Charlotte is able to return to 1969. But this doesn’t so much answer the question as complicate it. If she had been unable to return, she would have still continued to see herself more and more as Clare, and even in her time the effects of the life she slipped into still linger. Thinking about the toy soldiers an adult Emily sends her, Charlotte muses, “It seemed odd that it belonged to her more as Clare than as Charlotte. . . . she could never entirely escape from being Clare.”
In Charlotte Sometimes, lived experience, not legacy or taste, or appearance or preference, is the closest we can come to pinning down our essential selves. That’s a very sophisticated conclusion for a novel written for middle schoolers. Some might say too sophisticated—in a lovely blog post for Tor.com, Jo Walton argues that “It’s a book that happens to be about a child,” but its themes are too adult to really appeal to children. I see Walton’s point (Charlotte Sometimes is certainly not for every child), but I have to disagree. At its heart, the novel is about the moment when children begin to realize that their lives are more than a string of random incidents, that their actions will ripple through time and become part of who they are and who they will become. Can you remember the first time you realized that your life mattered? I can’t, but I think ten or eleven-year-old me would have. Nothing is more childlike than that.
Thank you so very much for reading! See you in March with Issue 12.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia