Butterfly Effect part 5:  sophomoric antics

We have covered the major events in the life of Butterfly Effect central character Evan Treborn, focusing on when he was seven and then thirteen.  Now he is twenty, a very successful psychology major in his second year of college, free of any blackouts since then, and celebrating.  He brings a girl back to the room, and she wants him to read from his journals.  The selection is presumably random, but happens to be the junkyard scene where the dog was killed.  As he is reading he suddenly loses touch with the room and is living the part he could never remember.  This disrupts his date, but it also begins the new part of his life.  He visits Lenny, upsetting his already unstable friend, but confirms that this is what happened.

Technically, whether we use replacement theory or some kind of divergent or parallel dimension theory, this puts us in a new timeline (creating it or moving us to it, depending on the form of the theory).  The boy who sees the events surrounding the death of his dog now knows the future in great detail.  Practically it changes nothing.  He tells no one what will happen, and believes that he is remembering, reliving as a sort of hallucinatory memory, not as a reality.  He is swept along with events, and makes no effort to choose otherwise.  It is shocking enough simply to remember, and the more to discover that the memory is correct.

Not at all surprisingly, he next determines to use the journals to "remember" that one event that so damaged Lenny and destroyed their foursome, the mailbox.  He sees what we previously described; but he also drops his cigarette on his shirt and burns himself.  This is significant, because even though at this point he is being swept along in events, he has made a very small change in the past.  It is at this point that he, and we, know that he is not remembering, but literally reliving, going back into the person he once was but taking what he knows now.  He finds that burn on himself in the future, seven years later; it was never there before.

This is the first difficulty created by the time travel, and it is a difficulty that will repeat in all future trips made by Evan.  It is the fact that he remembers the history that he has erased, not the history that he has created.  Like the Marty McFly who at the end of Back to the Future is surprised by the world in which he must have been raised, Evan remembers the world that he has unmade despite living in the world he has made.  Just as it is inconsistent in Frequency for the burnt letters to appear on the table as John Sullivan watches, as his father burns them thirty years in the past, it is not merely that Evan now knows how he got that cigarette burn; he now has a cigarette burn he did not have before.  He has changed history, and he knows it.

It is of course necessary to the story that the burn appear now, and that he not have had it previously.  He must realize that he has changed history, and that can only happen if his memories are out of synch with his situation to some degree.  Yet it does not make a lot of sense temporally.  If he has changed everything that happened, why does he remember what never happened instead of what happened instead?  We could guess that he has leapt into a divergent or parallel self, that his consciousness went from the unburned twenty year old in the dorm to the mailbox explosion and then to the mind of the twenty year old with the cigarette burn.  It then forces us to ask what happened to the other Evan Treborn, whose mind left his body in that other version of the dormitory.  Perhaps he was not burned, and decided that that memory was not real after all.  For this particular version of him, it's not that big a deal; but for some of those yet to come, not actually undoing the world in which he finds himself, not actually jumping to the newly formed universe, would be a disaster.  The next timeline is exactly that sort, as Evan Treborn tries to fix the life of the girl he loves.  That will be the subject of the next article.