Where did Pam's jacket come from in Totally Killer?

Time travel stories are not about time travel, usually. Just as zombie films tend to be about consumerism or corporate overreach, and fairy tales are about teaching children about the dangers of the world, time travel is an allegorical device. Going back to the future, locating 12 monkeys, or edging tomorrow is often just a vehicle to tell a story about family, or the hopeless inevitability of humanity's destructive tendencies. As such, it's kind of a waste of energy to pick apart the logical inconsistencies in a time travel story; you could argue that's missing the point of the allegory.

That said, let's talk about the magical teleporting jacket from Totally Killer.

The film Totally Killer is a 2023 slasher comedy directed by Nahnatchka Khan. It follows the story of Jamie Hughes, who is transported back in time to 1987, the year that three of her mother's friends were brutally murdered by the Sweet 16 Killer. Jamie has the chance to stop the murders from happening and save her mother's life, said mother having been killed by the same masked murderer in the present day. The film switches back and forth between the 2020s and the 1980s, chronicling Jamie's flaccid attempts to alter the timeline.

At the start of the film, Jamie is shown to be in possession of a white fringed leather jacket that actually belongs to her mother, Pam. When Pam finds it in Jamie's bedroom, she scolds Jamie for leaving it on the floor, calling it "vintage" so you know it will be important in the 80s timeline.

Jamie puts on the jacket, a bundle of plot occurs, and both she and the jacket time travel to the past. The character wears this unique and insistent jacket prop for most of the film. Comedic shenanigans happen for approximately 70 minutes, and then Jamie gives the jacket to someone in the past, almost flippantly saying "Give my mom this." Back in the present, her mother is wearing the jacket during the epilogue.

This suggests that the jacket itself is a Loop Object (a term I just made up). Pam doesn't have this jacket when Jamie meets her mother as a teenager, which means Jamie was always the one who gave her the jacket, allowing her to then give it back to Jamie as an adult, so Jamie could give it back to her in the past again. So far, so loopy.

But that's not how time travel works in Totally Killer.

One of the smart characters in the film explains to Jamie that time is like a river—she says it's a 'theory', but everything the characters in this movie describe as a theory is simply proven to be 100% true in all cases. Making changes in the past will change the flow of time, but not the river itself, and a close approximation of the original timeline will just reassert itself in your wake. If you change something, it will only ever change it a little bit.

A convenient excuse for wacky hijinks without big consequences, sure, but it's a comedy. However, it means Totally Killer's time travel is not a loop; Jamie goes back in time exactly once, changes the past, and never has to go back in time again. The river flows on.

Except for that goddamn jacket, which can't exist unless Jamie continues to go back in time over and over again from that same point. Uh oh.

"I sort of wish you guys would just get over it."

Does this silly plot detail in a silly movie matter? No. But yes, actually. Because Totally Killer is a lazy film, with a flimsy grasp on its own themes; and the jacket is accidentally a metaphor for that, just like the time travelling photo booth is a metaphor for...

Well, nothing.

It's a little strange how nicely the rest of the time travel works in the film, but this is maybe thanks to how divorced it is from anything the film is trying to say. Time travel is invented by the main character's best friend based on notes written by her mother. Nobody finds this particularly amazing, it just happens, and is signposted with the shockingly blasé line "When are you going to tell people you're building a time machine?"

The legitimate discovery of actual time travel by a teenager is treated with all the gravitas of an episode of Jimmy Neutron. You might think this would tie back into the plot in some way, like the mother researched time travel to stop the murders herself, or Jamie's actions precipitated the discovery. Incorrect. The time travel booth and the horrific murders are simply two things that happened at around the same time in history. It's like if The Terminator was about a car crash, and also on an unrelated note a robot from the future is there.

Pam's Jacket (or is it Jamie's jacket?) is given a prominent role in the design of the main character, in the marketing for the movie, in the first act of the film. The movie wants so badly for us to care about the jacket. And then it vanishes.

Nothing is said about the jacket again until the climax, where Jamie seems to suddenly feel she needs to give it to her teenage mother. No character ever asked where it came from, nobody checked whether Teen Pam already had a jacket exactly like that, and simply decided not to wear it today. The writers just forgot to write in more about the jacket, and had to rush to give it some significance at the almost-literal last minute.

It's infuriating because of how useful the jacket would have been to strengthen the themes Totally Killer was toying with. Different generations in the same family failing to connect because of past trauma, a mother and daughter who don't have anything in common. If only there were some sort of symbolic connection between them that would signify that they weren't as different as they believed. Some sort of, I don't know, white fringe leather jacket that represents the time that passed between their upbringing while also linking their experiences.

I'm not trying to say that it isn't extremely stupid and nerdy to harp on about a plot hole in a movie. It is very stupid. But in good stories, things happen for a reason. And in bad stories, people hand leather jackets to their best friend's mother in 1987 so the filmmakers can point and say "Hey look! That's a time travel thing! This happened because of time travel! Pretty cool, right?"

Back to the Future 2 also contains a jacket. Totally Killer loves to mention Back to the Future, in case someone in the audience doesn't know what time machine is, but is very familiar with Robert Zemeckis films.

Marty McFly's shirt and vest have little significance in the first film of the trilogy. In the second film, he has to dress up as his own son to impersonate him at a diner, donning a futuristic version of the classic fashion piece. It's self-drying and auto-sizing, because it comes from the future of 2015. While it gets no lines, the McFly jacket manages to be: a representation of future technology, a reminder of this character being a physical copy of Marty, a way to link the previous film visually to this one, and a thematic representation of Back to the Future's ideas about repeating patterns through history. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Pretty good for a prop, it's almost like they thought through how individual elements of the visual and narrative storytelling would support the film.

Totally Killer's jacket is a representation of a jacket. It mostly just reminds you that the film doesn't know what it wants to say about time travel, families, murder, or anything else.