The Butterfly Effect
This (and the post following) are ones I wrote about a year ago and never posted because that was about the time I quit blogging for awhile.
SPOILERS ABOUND
And, if you want to read an actual good article about morality and choices and fictional characters, you should read Creating the Innocent Killer by John Kessel, instead of this one, which is just stuff I made up off the top of my head.
So, I just watched (most of) The Butterfly Effect. This is the story of a kid who blacks out in his youth when certain terrible things happen. It turns out that he has the ability to go back to these points in time and change what happened. It's grim and occasionally mean-spirited though it has a happy ending, which, coupled with its grimness makes the feeling of the movie very uneven. The blackouts are never explained--you think it's because that's when his adult self is possessing his child body, but the event really happens unchanged in at least one reality and so the first time it must have been just him, the child, standing there seeing it.
The central story is that Evan can return to these moments in time by reading his journal. He takes over the body of his younger self and ‘fixes' the situation. Of course, the way the situation is handled turns out to affect way more than Evan expects because although Evan is book-smart and majoring in psychology he's not really that bright about how the world works. It's not really the Butterfly Effect (which says that the flutter of a butterfly's wings can cause a typhoon in China--or something to that effect--and is a simplistic explanation of chaos theory). Because for one thing the effects are always clear right there in front of us in the event. They happen at the moment Evan makes the change. A child murders another child; a boy hears something so horrible he is compelled to become that thing; a girl dies; a boy loses his arms and the use of his legs. Those things don't happen because of a ripple effect; they happen right then and there. How life turns out from there is, of course, mighty different.
There are two issues with the movie--quite different issues that affect different factors. It takes Evan an enormously long time to figure out that what he does matters. He wants to just make one person's life ‘right' and he always winds up screwing everyone's life up (and, of course, making one person's life really, really bad) but it takes him probably four trips into the past before it even seems to occur to him that this is happening. He wants to do heroic things without paying any prices. And it's clear (though we are never given the details) that his father, who had the same talent never got beyond this stage. Evan eventually does but it's repetitious and doesn't speak well of Evan's character. It's possibly a weakness of the limits of movie-making, but I think it's more likely a flaw in the story. Evan needs someone in the world to talk to and plan with and process. Of course, that wouldn't have allowed him to get into all those grim, life-threatening, sexually perverted situations.
The other issue that the movie walks away from and never addresses at all is that at least three of the main characters whose lives Evan is playing with (including Evan himself) are completely capable of murder. Evan (and of course no one else since they don't know what's going on) never face up to this. He never questions what kind of person he is--a boy his father tries to kill, who continues to play god for the sake of one woman's life, who would kill a childhood friend because he (Evan) was holding a bat in his hand.