Wait, What Year Is It?

One very interesting aspect of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is the way that the author uses technology to blur retrospective time, projected time, and present time. The passages discussing the 80’s begin as retrospective time, our narrator, Wade, is looking back to a time that James Halliday, the creator of OASIS, was obsessed with. It is clear that this is retrospective time, because Wade is living 30 years into our future. Wade tells us, in giving us a retrospective view of James Halliday’s life, “he also had an extreme fixation on the 1980s, the decade during which he’d been a teenager. Halliday seemed to expect everyone around him to share his obsessions, and often lashed out at those who didn’t” (55). As a grown man, Halliday is obsessed with his teenage years, and his mind is a vault of pop culture and trivia from the 1980s. As Wade describes the 1980s, they are clearly not happening in his present time. He describes floppy discs and Dungeons & Dragons and we as readers recognize that these passages are an example of retrospective time.

However, it is after Halliday’s death, when he reveals the existence of the Easter Egg, that retrospective, projected, and present time become blurred. Wade tells the reader from the start that the 1980s are a time that he projects himself into in order to cope with his difficult home situation. “I selected an episode of Family Ties, an 80s sitcom about a middle-class family living in central Ohio...I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family” (15). This is not unlike what the reader experiences in The Martian, when Mark Watney projects himself into the 1970s via sitcom episodes and music in order to allow himself to temporarily escape from the cruel reality of his situation. The way Wade uses 80s sitcoms are an undeniable comparison. In this case, it is clear that the 80s are an example of projected time. Halliday himself projects himself into the 80s in his death video, for example: “Halliday appears to have digitally re-created the funeral parlor set [from a scene in the 1989 film Heathers] and then inserted himself into it” (3).

Wade tells us that after Halliday died and circulated copies of “Anorak’s Almanac,” there was a huge cultural shift. The event of Halliday dying, in my opinion, is what blurs the difference between retrospective, projected, and present time in the novel. “This led to a global fascination with 1980s pop culture. Fifty years after the decade had ended, the movies, music, games, and fashions of the 1980s were all the rage once again. By 2041, spiked hair and acid-washed jeans were back in style, and covers of hit ‘80s pop songs by contemporary bands dominated the music charts. People who had actually been teenagers in the 1980s, all now approaching old age, had the strange experience of seeing the fads and fashions of their youth embraced and studied by their grandchildren” (7-8). Thus, when Wade is growing up, it is the 1980s almost all over again. This is a perfect example of the way that time exists in a nonlinear, continuous stream. The experiences that Halliday had in the actual 1980s led to his obsession with the pop culture of the 80s, and that obsession informed his behavior in his future, which then informs the behavior of all of this followers, who do everything they can to turn back the clock. It ends up that Wade is living in a version of the 1980s, complete with songs on the radio and the same popular fashions and games, to the point where the elderly who actually experienced the true 1980s feel as though they are experiencing it again. In this way, Cline blurs the timeline that Halliday, Wade, and everyone on Earth are living in, and paints Halliday as a time-being. Even after death, he is able to project the whole world back in time, so that people are living with 80s music, but played by contemporary bands. It’s the 1980s but also it is not. It’s retrospective time that people are projecting themselves into but also living in the present.