Our Time Machine
As we get older, and begin to have lives apart from our parents, it’s always important to try and maintain that connection with them, especially when it appears as though they do not have much time left. Usually, that comes with the onset of an illness that takes a part of them from us. Over the past couple of years, my mother has been dealing with memory loss, and some signs of dementia, so for me, that urgency has led to trying to get her involved with what I’ve been doing as far as the podcast. For Maleonn, it is something even more ambitious, and “Our Time Machine” chronicles his efforts in a lovely and emotional way.
Maleonn is a conceptual artist from China, and his father, Ma Ke, was once the artistic director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theater. When the Cultural Revolution happened, however, Ma Ke was forbidden to work, and humiliated, but after a decade, he re-immerses himself in the theatre, which inspires Maleonn. In his old age, Ma Ke is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and so, Maleonn does the only thing he can think to do- created a conceptual production, inspired by his life with his father, using it as a time machine to preserve those memories, and his father would be involved with the production. As the production wears on, you see a lot of moments where the production, involving puppets and elaborate sets, risks engulfing Maleonn, and we wonder how the end product will turn out.
We should all be so lucky to be able to try and give something like this to our loved ones as they reach the end of their lives. One of the things that is so affecting about “Our Time Machine” is not only seeing how Ma Ke comes to appreciate, as much as he can, what his son is doing for him, but how Maleonn comes to figure out the best way to communicate with his father, and reconcile that with what he’s doing. At a certain point, what we are trying to do for our loved ones during such situations becomes more about doing it for us, and we come to the realization that their needs are different. Maleonn’s journey to this understanding is profound, and well worth following; his creations along the way are singular, and the work of an artist finding his way through a difficult time in his life, and it’s inspiring to watch how open he is about that process.
