The Screen Addict | The Butterfly Effect
I recently ended a bad relationship in which I was played like a slot machine. After going through the often referenced five stages of grief, I realized that of all the things you lose in a toxic bond, there’s only one element you can never get back – wasted time.
As a film buff with a vivid imagination, I often fantasize about going back in time and how I would correct bad decisions. That same dreamer inside me also knows that if there’s one thing we can take away from time-travel films, it’s that changing something in your past inadvertently sets off a sequence of events that will have consequences beyond your wildest imagination.
This concept is of course known as the Chaos Theory or Butterfly Effect, referring to the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo, could lead to a tornado as far away as Tenessee.
The theory is perfectly visualized in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), when Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm pours several droplets of water on Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler’s hand, and explains that as a result of microscopic changes in her skin, the water flows differently every time.
Many writers and filmmakers have alluded to Chaos Theory, most notably science-fiction novelist Ray Bradburry and Robert Zemeckis, the co-creator and director of the Back to the Future franchise.
I am probably one of the biggest BttF fans in the world, but when it comes to The Chaos Theory, there is another film I hold in extremely high regard – the aptly titled The Butterfly Effect (2004).
This Ashton Kutcher starrer was a modest success back in the early Aughts, and I have to admit it didn’t make a huge impact on me personally either. It did stick with me though. And in the years that followed, I found myself thinking about it from time to time. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to re-watch it. Time is the only critic that matters after all, so I should practice what I preach.
Revisiting TBE, it is pretty obvious that first-time writers and directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber were in way over their heads, but still delivered a spectacular and genre-significant debut.
Kutcher’s Evan Treborn suffers from a hereditary condition that allows him to repeatedly time-travel back to a traumatic event in his youth that will have profound repercussions. In an attempt to save his own life and that of his loved ones, Evan relives the moment over and over again until he gets it right.
The complicating matter in this situation is a theory known as the Grandfather Paradox, which specifically applies Chaos Theory to time-travel. In short – if you were to travel back in time and kill your own grandfather, you would prevent yourself from being born at all and travelling back in time would have been impossible in the first place. How’s that for a mindfuck?
It's the Chicken-or-Egg conundrum, a Catch-22 that will fry your brain if you don’t accept the sobering truth – it is a concept beyond human comprehension.
The Grandfather Paradox obviously does not apply exclusively to killing one’s grandfather. The concept broadly states that changing one element of your past – however small – will effectively delete the future as you knew it.
This is exactly what happens to Evan of course – whatever he changes in the past, there will always be consequences in the future.
So, what’s my point? I sometimes wish I hadn’t met the girl that screwed me over. However, the reality is that if I hadn’t gone through that experience, I wouldn’t have met my current girlfriend who I am going to marry this summer.
Everything happens for a reason… Or does it?
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Twitter (X): Robin Logjes | The Screen Addict