Repeatedly the film Butterfly Effect appears to rely on Niven's Law to avoid anomalies. Yet that law itself would seem to have created a major problem for the entire film.
The essence of the Law is that once someone travels from the future to the past to change the past, the impact that person has on the past is permanent, even if the change prevents him from making that same trip. Thus when Evan cripples himself at the mailbox he does not undo the impact of the trip he made to protect Kayleigh in the basement, even though he now has no reason to make that trip and could not do so if he wished. Yet it appears that when he ends his relationship with her at their first kiss, he somehow undoes every other trip he has ever made, but not this one. He never appears in the basement that first time, nor later when he exploded the dynamite; he never sees what happens at the mailbox nor returns to change it. He neither learns what happened to the dog nor tries to save it. Presumably, too, he has no cigarette burn and no scars in his hands. Niven's Law simply fails to apply; the trips he made have all been unmade.
The argument is that these trips have become impossible, not because the departures are undone but because the destination points have been erased. Since Evan travels to moments in his own past, he cannot go where his doppelganger never was. If seven-year-old Evan is not in the basement, twenty-year-old Evan cannot get there. Since this final trip has completely altered every significant event in Evan's life, he cannot make any of the trips he once made, save perhaps the one to his classroom, the one to the kitchen, and the one to visit his father. He now has no reason to pierce his hands or to grab the knife, but Niven's Law suggests he does not need a reason as long as there was one in a previous version of history.
More problematic is the question of whether he will ever travel in time at all. Nothing in this last time trip will prevent him from having the blackouts, or from seeing the psychiatrist, so he will have the journals, and one day will read from them. They will take him to different memories, and he will have different complaints about his past which he will want to fix. We cannot begin to know what these were, but it is certain that if the worst event in his life was a hangnail, he wlll consider whether he can eliminate the hangnail. Niven's Law breaks down precisely because life is never perfect, no matter how many times we fix it, and even when it is perfect we are likely to believe that something different would be better. It is not beyond possibility that this Evan Treborn deeply regrets having driven away Kayleigh Miller, and will use those home movies to fix that moment.
This leads us to a version of divergent dimension theory in which all those alternate universes are real, all those Evan Treborns are living all those different lives, and many more worlds are being created by his divergent selves as they seek to perfect their lives--and if there is one lesson we can draw from the movie, most of those worlds are bleak.
So perhaps it works, but only if you're willing to accept that for each Evan Treborn eventually the trick does not work, and he is stuck in the world he created. The worst we see is the one who stabbed two fellow inmates expecting to escape to another version of history, only to find himself still there. There might be worse than that.
Comments
You dont seem to grasp time travel very well. Evan goes back to an earlier time. He will grow up with this as a blackout. This makes Kay Leigh move away with her Mom. So now her father doesn't rape her and she doesn't become a crack whore. Simple. The reason Evan did not have any journals is that he was committed and had nothing to write about. So no journals. Simple.This last trip cancels that out. There must still be a stick of dynamite in the guys basement. Simple, simple, simple.
Thank you for your comments, E.
I am not persuaded that it is quite so simple, though.
First, if you've read the previous entry "The Blackouts Problem", it should be evident that if the blackouts are dependent on the time travel, they cannot have happened in the original history; therefore time travel does not cause blackouts. We do not know what causes them, but they must exist before he can discover his ability to travel to them.
Second, I see nothing in the film that suggests that Evan's rejection of Kayleigh will cause her to live with her mother instead of her father; I would love to know how you reach this conclusion.
I understand why he does not have journals, but as I wrote in "Out with a bang" it does not make sense that he had asked his doctor about them before the first day he experiences this universe.
I think if you read the full series you'll see that there are problems; it is not simple.
Thanks again.
--M. J. Young
Mark, you said: "Second, I see nothing in the film that suggests that Evan's rejection of Kayleigh will cause her to live with her mother instead of her father; I would love to know how you reach this conclusion."
In the film, when Evan is a quadriplegic, he is in the park with Kayleigh. The conversation, quoted from the film, goes like this:
Evan: "Kayleigh? Do you ever think about us? I mean, wonder if it could ever have been different between the two of us?"
Kayleigh: "Sure, Evan, why not? You were the first person I really ever cared about."
Evan: "I was?"
Kayleigh: "That's why when I was little I never went to live with my mother."
Evan: "I don't get it."
Kayleigh: "When my folks split, they gave me and Tommy a choice who we wanted to live with. I couldn't stand my dad, but I knew if I moved to my mom's I'd never see you again."
Greetings, Ducky, and welcome to the conversation, such as it is. I've often said that temporal analysis is frequently in the little details, and it appears that I indeed missed this one.
That doesn't resolve the fundamental problem, though: if Evan travels from the future to prevent his relationship with Kayleigh, then fifteen years later he will have no reason to prevent his relationship with Kayleigh and so won't know to make the trip to do that. It''s a fundamental infinity loop problem (see http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-15701-Time-Travel-Movies-Examiner~y20... for infinity loop), that if you've undone the reason for the trip you undo the trip and restore the reason.
But you're right that in that particular history, there is good reason to think that Kayleigh would have gone with her mother.
Thanks for the comment. I hope you're enjoying my other articles here at The Examiner, http://www.examiner.com/x-15701-Time-Travel-Films-Examiner for links, or http://www.mjyoung.net/time/examiner.html for a more convenient index.
--M. J. Young
Oh no, I understand the problem and why it occurs, it was just that you had missed that detail. I've been following your work for a while now, and often deconstruct timelines for fun (although nowhere near to the extent and accuracy you do, and I lack the writing skills to do anything meaningful with them). I try to watch the film in question before reading your analysis, however, and I've only recently gotten around to watching The Butterfly Effect.
Ah. Well, thanks for the catch, and for reading. Are there films you've seen that you'd like me to tackle? I'm in the middle of Timeline, and have a draft of A Sound of Thunder waiting, and am working on Next, with a couple others waiting in the wings, but I'm always open to suggestions, and it helps me to know what to grab when I see it.
--M. J. Young
Well, I kinda liked FAQ About Time Travel, although it seems I'm one of five people who did. But to be honest, you've done pretty much all of the films I can think of that involve time travel. The only others I know that you haven't mentioned yet are Fetching Cody and The Jacket.
That actually is one of which someone sent me a copy, although there's some question as to whether it will run on my DVD player (something about "Region" coding). I'll have to give it a try and see if it works. You and the guy who sent it make two readers who have seen it, and they say that you should count a hundred silent audience members for every one vocal member (or they did back when I was in radio, I don't know what the ratio is now), so if we've got two hundred interested readers that's worth tackling.
Thanks for the input.
--M. J. Young
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