A Soft Time Machine: Reflections on the Movies We Love

Garden State (2004) - Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

I think movies are like portals to a lot of us when we're children –– opportunities to step out of our little-kid lives with all their frustrating limitations for a moment and explore the world on a larger scale. Then we get older. We acquire adult worries and responsibilities. Society convinces us that escaping into our imaginations this way should be less of a priority. And we forget.

For some reason, I never quite made that tradition the way I was "supposed to."

Yes, I'm an adult. Despite deliberately avoiding certain types of responsibility, I've still managed to accumulate my due share with big, heavy adult-level worries to match. But I never stopped seeing movies as magic gateways to another version of the world that often made more sense to me than the real one did.

Garden State is one of many movies I feel that way about as a middle-aged adult, and I just so happen to have it on in the background as I write this. Like a lot of my fellow Gen Xers, I first saw this film in my 20s and processed it a certain way.

That version of me was still just getting started on her adult life. She was still the type of person who could feel entirely original again by doing something weird, spontaneous, and random. But she also wanted to be the type of woman someone would dive into a pool for, despite not knowing how to swim. 

I also recall relating to the feeling of gazing into an infinite abyss on a rainy day with a long, sprawling future ahead of me that was still nothing but a question mark. I loved knowing that you never know what's at the bottom of such an abyss. It could be anything, including something amazing that you haven't even dreamed about yet.

I notice different things about the film as a full-grown adult who's only a sneeze away from 50 at this point. My future isn't much of a question mark anymore, although that may just be part of the illusion that comes with "getting old." But I still relate to the idea of wanting something meaningful that you can't quite define, even if you don't have a name for it or know how to ask for it. 

Apparently, that's not something you ever outgrow. It just changes shape while staying two steps ahead of you. One way stories can grow and evolve with you, continuing to meet you where you are, no matter how old you become.

A Strange Kind of Time Travel

Movies are the closest we may ever come to time travel. But they don't transport us into the past so much as they bring the past into the present. Sitting down with a film I used to love years ago is like opening a sealed letter I once wrote in invisible ink. My current self reads it over the shoulder of the girl I was. Both of us watching, both of us moved.

I remember where I lived when I first watched Garden State. I recall the layout of my apartment, the shape of my thoughts. I remember the leather book collection I loved and the white feathered angel wings I had hanging over my bedroom door. I remember how it felt to be wide open and unsure, craving beauty and meaning I didn’t yet know how to name. And I remember the way movies helped me understand a little better. 

I still think that.

But now I understand something else, too. The person doing the watching is part of what turns a beloved movie into a time machine. The story stays the same. I am what changes.

Relating Across Time

One of the fears people don’t always talk about as they age is the quiet fear that stories will stop speaking to them, that certain books, certain films, certain songs will become inaccessible once you’ve finally crossed the invisible threshold into adulthood. That you’ll forget what it meant to want something profound and magical out of life.

But that never happened to me. I’ve discovered I still relate. I still see myself in the wide-eyed, the lost, the soft-spoken dreamers fumbling their way toward something true. And I often relate with more nuance, more warmth, more layered understanding. I don’t just see myself in the characters so much as I see myself in the shadowy spaces between them.

Some of my favorite scenes in Garden State hit differently now. Like the one where Andrew and Sam scream into the abyss together, not because they’re fixed, but because they can’t be. Not yet and maybe not ever. Watching it again, I realize I'm no longer screaming along with them. I've already been there and done that (lots of times). I'm now watching them scream in full awareness of the fact that maybe they'll never be fixed... and that's just part of life.

It’s strange and wonderful to carry both perspectives at once –– the girl inside the story, and the woman watching it from the outside.

The Stories That Stay

Some movies are bookmarks. Some are balm. Some are keys we don’t know how to use until later. All of my favorites are like time capsules that help me remember things I felt and thought at the age I first saw them. 

There are films I watched when I was young that didn’t mean much to me at the time, but that unfolded years later like letters meant for future-me. And there are films I thought I understood, only to discover new, lushly decorated rooms inside them after living more life. That’s why I love rewatching things. Not because I expect them to change, but because I have.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how magic isn’t always thunderclaps and transformation. Sometimes it’s just... resonance. A scene that opens a window in your chest. A line that stays with you longer than it logically should. A sense of being seen by a story, even if it was never written for you in the first place.

That’s why I try not to dismiss things that move me, even if they’re not “important” in the eyes of the world. Sometimes the smallest movies, the gentlest songs, the most awkward stories carry the deepest echoes.

* This reflection is part of the Feast of the Wandering Pen, a lunar writing journey about reflections, storytelling, and self-actualization.