Yes, I persist with Ruiz and Erasmus, who are time travelers, but more on that later.
In fiction, they could be time travelers. They could be cross dressers; they could be anything the story requires. Indeed, we could muck up the method of telling the story, which brings in the notion of narrative, with all sorts of wizzy ideas, such as temporal exploitation.
Ruiz imagines a man named Dave. A filmmaker will make a film of Dave reading a book. This will involve closeups and the film will end with an image of the book Dave is reading. But what Ruiz imagines is a multiple of Daves. If one watches the film closely, one will notice that after a few seconds of capture that the Dave in the film becomes another Dave, though it will be difficult to detect. The viewer will think that the Dave reading a book after five seconds is the Dave that started at one second. But it’s not the same Dave, but another Dave. The first Dave, let’s call him 5 Second Dave, is replaced by 10 Second Dave. 5 Second Dave is really a Dave from 200 years into the future. Through some time distorting apparatus of the future, he returns to a time twenty years prior to the film and places a camera in the future filmmaker’s field of view, thus prompting the filmmaker to think to himself, “I want to be a filmmaker.”
The viewer will think that 5 and 10 Second Daves are one Dave and that the Dave at 23 Seconds in indeed Dave, also. But this is not the case, Ruiz continues. No, the camera goes for a closeup but the man behind the book is not a Dave but a stand-in for Dave, because 23 Second Dave has two objectives: he must move through time and somehow cause 5 Second Dave to decide to move into the past and provoke the eventual timeline presented in the first part of the film and thus eventuate the arrival of 10 Second Dave who will appear to a man 400 years in the future and pay him to take his place before the camera as he must move ahead a thousand years and prevent the destruction of a bridge in China, which depends upon a button being pushed by the great great great great et cetera grandson of 5 Second Dave, who can only appear on the scene depending on the actions of who we might term 23 Second Filmmaker, who’s reaching down at some moment in time for his lover trapped on a ledge below him. He lowers the camera strap; the lover reaches; they will make love soon and produce important freedom fighter offspring in the future.
He says, “Grab it. It’s almost time for 10 Second Dave to move into the future and I must capture his stand in. The audience must not know that Dave is not behind that book. If I don’t make it there just at the right moment, the faith of the audience will be shaken and I think that that bridge will crash killing the future freedom fighter’s mother.”
Ruiz thought this might work pretty well. Now he’s imagining the audience. The audience by watching the film will never know what’s happening in reality as the film is a mask, a fiction; they will see Dave reading a book and never guess how busy he actually is.
