At the Threshold: Science Fiction Portals as Agents of Liminality
The time portal jump in The Tomorrow War (Amazon Prime) is notable not for the special effects, but for the facial expressions of the hapless jumpers.
Untrained, inexperienced, and unfit for action, the recruits stand in the time portal, nervously awaiting the moment they will be transported to the future to battle alien invaders. In those few seconds before the jump, close-ups of the characters’ faces reveal expressions of confusion, wonder, trepidation, despair, resignation, and even determination.
Just before the device starts sucking them up, one by one, into the tumbling uncertainty of time travel, the characters realize they are leaving their familiar lives forever and leaping into the unknown. Whatever happens — and the odds favor they will die — change will be unavoidable and permanent.
The Tomorrow War prolongs the moment, and movie viewers get a glimpse of an aspect of the science fiction portal that is often overlooked: liminality.
Liminality, or the Space Between
Liminality may be defined as a “middle space” between two states of existence. The term is usually used in anthropology when a person prepares to undergo a rite of passage and in sociology to describe a transitional state when a civilization changes. But, liminality also has implications in psychology and philosophy since it mostly refers to the emotions and perceptions people experience as they undergo significant events and milestones in their lives.
The concept of liminality was first described by French ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957) and expanded on by British anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983).
In literature, including television and movies, liminality is represented by the characters’ states of mind as they deal with the conflicts before them. Liminality in science fiction and fantasy blurs borders between past and present, between old and new, between human and technology, between what-has-happened and what-is-to-come.
In terms of the Hero’s Journey, or the monomyth, popularized by Joseph Campbell in his book, The Man with a Thousand Faces, the liminal space takes place at the threshold between the Known World and the Unknown World. The hero either voluntarily crosses the threshold, willingly taking on the challenge, or else finds himself or herself pushed or pulled over the threshold into the confusion and danger of a different environment.
The Hero’s Journey is the typical pattern of most science fiction stories, and with little wonder: science fiction focuses on exploration of the unknown and on the human experience when placed within circumstances where the rules of society and (often) physics are turned upside down.
We see that in The Tomorrow War. The characters have been conscripted in the fighting force and compelled to take the trip into the future. They don’t know anything about the aliens they are about to fight, except that only a few people, around 30%, come back from the mission. If they don’t know if their efforts will help or if their present society will be the same if they return. More importantly, they don’t know if they are equipped physically, mentally, or emotionally, to face the inevitable dangers they will face. Will they turn out to be heroes or cowards?
Doorways, Gates, Wormholes, Transporters, and More
The portal is a familiar trope in science fiction and fantasy literature, movies, and TV shows. It’s a convenient plot device, allowing the characters to travel through time, dimensions, alternate universes, and fantasy worlds, where they will face adventure, conquer villains, and save the world. Entire science fiction stories are made possible only by the existence of a portal — Star Trek: Deep Space 9, for example, or the Stargate TV series franchise.
The existence of a portal eliminates the problem of traveling long distances in a spaceship or trying to explain time travel with some sort of machine. You just enter, and poof! You’re instantly somewhere else. It’s technomagical!
And magical it is, because although there’s often an attempt to explain a scientific theory or process behind it, how the technology actually functions is fuzzily explained, if it all. Sometimes it’s described as a device or process based on ideas of quantum physics or string theory, like Sam Beckett’s jumps through time in Quantum Leap. Or it’s a stable wormhole (Deep Space 9) or an Einstein-Rosen bridge (Star Gate.). Most often, there’s no explanation given about at all. The portal just is.
But whatever makes it functional, the science fiction portal is always more than just a transportation device. It’s about change — whatever happens because of the character’s passage through the portal produces a significant and usually permanent change, either to the familiar world (pre-portal) or to the characters themselves.
Portals, Liminal Spaces, and the Science Fiction Mythos
The portal has become so familiar in science fiction mythos that its presence is usually taken for granted, and the characters’ passage through the portal is often treated nonchalantly. Case in point in the Star Trek transporter, which becomes a focal point in the story only if it malfunctions. A notable example of malfunction is the episode titled “Tuvix” from Star Trek: Voyager, in which a transporter accident fuses together the cerebral but dispassionate Vulcan Tuvok with the emotional, easy-going Neelix. By the time the transporter is fixed, the fused character, Tuvix, has become a new and distinct character, posing both the ship’s Doctor and Captain Janeway with a difficult ethical choice of whether to reverse the process and split Tuvix back into Tuvok and Neelix. (Spoiler: It happens.)
The episode highlights the main significance of liminality: it is dependent on both destruction and creation. An old world or old self must be altered, deconstructed, or even destroyed before the new world or new self can be constructed. The old and new are in constant conflict, and it can only be resolved by the passage through the portal.
Presented well, the portal in science fiction stories isn’t just a transportation device to get from one place to another, but a literary element that develops characters and themes in a way that allows the audience to contemplate the liminality and its meaning to the human condition.
Science fiction and fantasy are well suited for liminal spaces precisely because they create storyworlds that seem drastically different from the ordinary world we experience, yet, at the same time, contain enough familiar elements that we can relate to them. We like science fiction because it asks, “What if…?” and allows us, the audience, to explore the possibilities of different ways of living, behaving, thinking, believing, and interacting.
While the liminal state produces uncertainty and anxiety, it also provides space for reflection and opportunity. Bjørn Thomassen, in his book Liminality and the Modern: Living through the In-Between, describes it this way: “Liminality refers to moments or periods of transition during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction and deconstruction.”
It’s no surprise, then, that in many science fiction stories, it’s the portal — a device, passageway, or process that allows the user to travel in time, space, or dimension — that creates the liminality. The portal is an agent of change, both negative and positive. As we learn in most science fiction tales, the possibility of growth or progress carries with it unavoidable risks. To stand at the threshold of the portal and take the jump is to embrace the future.
The Tomorrow War, starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin, and Sam Richardson, is now streaming on Amazon Prime. It was directed by Chris McKay and written by Zach Dean.
