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I have loved you so long A survey of time travel romances

This weekend, the film The Time Traveler's Wife debuted in third place at the box office, right behind CGI-enhanced blockbusters and G.I. Joe. Pretty decent for a melodramatic flick about a dude who can't help zipping between moments in his life, much to the dismay of the lady who loves him. It's not typical summer popcorn fare, but the film's popularity speaks to our enduring fascination with time travel romances.

The great Southern American dramatist Tennessee Williams once opined, "Time is the longest distance between two places." When those loci on a map (or a clock) refer to two hearts separated by a chasm of yearning and hoping and longing, the distance between point A and point B can seem even more vast.

The Time Traveler's Wife is the latest in a long line of quantum-leaping cinematic love stories. While the films in this category frequently defy the limits of logic, they do tend to adhere to certain tropes. First, the films often include some insidious retrograde attitudes toward gender roles, and the era-jumping party is almost always a man whose female paramour is left to wring her hands in her own sad pocket of space-time. Secondly, there's always an uncomfortable frisson of boundary-crossing sex. Chaos theory -- the notion that the tiniest shift can affect the course of history -- is either the premise on which the entire plot hinges, or ignored entirely. And following from that last point, these films always, always make some delightfully bizarre allusion to hard scientific principles, which I'll call "scienceyness" (after Stephen Colbert's term "truthiness").

Here is a sampling of some key entries in the canon.

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