Popcorn Paradoxes: Blackouts and Nosebleeds

Welcome back to another Popcorn Paradoxes, the series where we watch time travel movies as if they were documentaries and try to make sense of what they tell us about time travel.

This time we are going to look at a dark, and disturbing, psychological thriller that was hated by critics on its release, who often felt the violence was too shocking and were uncomfortable with the childhood abuses that many of the characters suffered, but it went on to be a box office success and later a cult movie.

It is, perhaps, the story of a young man called Evan Treborn, who has a severe psychological illness. He suffers from hallucinations and memory blackouts, that may be a result of a hereditary condition, or according to his doctor may have been brought on by early abuse and stress.

Then again, it could be the story of a man with a genetic mutation, or actual multi-generational curse, that unsticks the protagonist in his personal timeline, allowing him to break his own history and the history of the lives he has touched.

As usual, if you haven’t seen the movie I suggest you go watch it now. It is available online, such as here on Amazon. Be warned the movie is very intense in content and these days should carry trigger warnings for child abuse, as well as some sexual and violent content.

I’m going to assume you have watched the movie and are now immediately puzzled by some of the ‘inconsistencies’ and paradoxes that the story contains. This is going to require some careful unpicking, the movie is dense and winding, so I apologize, but this is a big one. Here we go with the examination.

What is The Butterfly Effect?

Actually, I almost feel like I’m being patronizing by explaining the title of the movie, as it is covered quite well during the movie, but I think it is worth placing the pop science version most people are aware of slightly aside.

The Butterfly Effect was coined by Edward Norton Lorenz, an American Mathematician and Meteorologist. He was working on weather pattern computer models and discovered that depending on how many decimal places he entered into a computer model he got radically different results. He called this, Deterministic Chaos, where large systems were incredibly sensitive to initial conditions, and while these non-linear equations were known to mathematicians, this Chaotic behaviour had not been observed, due to a lack of computational power.

He simplified this concept into the metaphor that the single flutter of a butterfly wing could create tiny vortices that could alter other events around them, until in an amplifying cascade, could ultimately lead to a typhoon halfway around the world. It should be noted that this is a probability thing, not every flap goes on to create a storm.

Physicists, biologists and chemists have since discovered Chaotic systems everywhere, all interacting, sequencences of events that are often impossible to directly connect in a cause and effect chain. The interactions are perhaps simple, but due to their number (and the Butterfly Effect) the end results are impossible to predict. It is because of this that no matter how powerful the computer systems used (although the more powerful, the better; as you can run more variants and get a better idea of what is possible) or the number and sensitivity of readings that are fed in (although the more the better, and the more sensitive the better, due to the nature of the beast), no scientific weather prediction can ever be truly accurate over longer than about a week.

These nonlinear equations combined with increasing computer power lead to the creation in Mathematics of terms like Fractals and Strange Attractors, which have their own pop science associations. Some of which may be important to our understanding of the movie’s temporal physics later.

The Beginning

The movie opens with Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) breaking into an office and barricading himself in. There are people outside calling his name. He grabs a box and hides under the desk while he roots through the box and grabs a pad and paper from above his head.

He starts writing and begins to tell us his story, this moment is a framing event that the story returns to near the end.

“If anyone finds this, then I guess my plan didn’t work and I’m already dead. But if I can just go back to the beginning of all this, I still might be able to save her,” he narrates as he writes.

From there, the movie jumps back in time and we begin to get a handle on who this man is and what he is on about.

The Blackouts

Evan suffers from blackouts, just like his father did before him. We join the story with his mother fixing the family car, and reminding seven-year-old Evan that his father can’t attend his school Parents’ evening, as it would be “too dangerous for him.”

She drops Evan off at school and is about to leave for work when the teacher, Mrs Boswell, asks her to come in for a chat about Evan.

We see the classroom, with one child (Tommy) hitting another (Lenny) with a wiffle bat. The teacher tells Tommy to stop and leads Mrs Treborn to her desk. She retrieves a picture from the drawer, explaining that she as going to show the principal, but that Mrs Treborn should see this first.

She explains that she asked the children to draw what they wanted to be when they grew up, most of the class drew themselves doing their parents’ profession. Evan though drew a rather sophisticated and anatomically accurate picture of himself disemboweling two men.

Mrs Treborn is clearly shaken, but promises that she’ll take care of it. She asks if she can take the drawing, which Mrs Boswell agrees to, but adds that when she asked Evan about the drawing, he claimed he couldn’t remember drawing it at all. Mrs Treborn looks horrified and says she has to leave.

The next scene has Mrs Treborn talking to Doctor Redfield, explaining that she is worried that this blackout condition has been inherited from Evan’s father. Dr. Redfield tells her not to jump to conclusions and that he will run some tests to see if there is anything wrong.

It is explained to the young Evan that Dr. Redfield also treats his father, and that James Treborn also suffered from memory blackouts when he was younger, although it is implied that there is significant other damage to James’ brain that Evan shows no sign of (yet…). Dr Redfield suggests that perhaps keeping a journal of his blackouts might help Evan to recover those memories.

The next scene shows Evan writing in his journal, today he is going to play at his friends Kayleigh and Tommy’s and will get to meet their dad. Maybe he’ll one day get to meet his dad. Mrs Treborn is on the phone talking to Kayleigh and Tommy’s father, George, thanking him for taking Evan for the day.

She returns to the kitchen and is shocked to discover Evan standing expressionless holding a large knife at his side. Then Evan blinks and drops the knife, his expression returning to normal and asking, “What happened?”

I know some people have problems with this movie for all sorts of reasons, ranging from how the mechanism of time travel works, to some of the apparent paradoxes, the dodgy freudian psychology, the violence and implied child abuse, but for me this scene and what follows is the most unbelievable part of the whole movie.

I simply can’t imagine any parent would ignore this event and pack their child off to another child’s house after this. Not when the last time it happened he drew himself holding a knife atop a pile of bodies.

I understand she was probably late for work, but since she is a nurse, I would expect there to be understanding about a sudden fugue-state blackout in a seven-year old and the need to seek professional help immediately. I suspect this is a mistake on the part of the male writers, and we just have to put it aside, and move on.

Kayleigh, Tommy, George and the Basement

Ignoring her son’s mental instability and fugue states, Mrs. Treborn drops Evan off at the house of George Miller (Eric Stoltz – who famously was nearly Marty McFly, and may still be in a nearby alternate history), the father of Tommy and Kayleigh who are two of the children from Evan’s school class. Mrs. Treborn gives George her work number in case anything happens, but doesn’t bother warning him that Evan had an episode earlier in the day. Perhaps we can chalk this up to her embarrassment, or a desire to protect Evan from the stigma of mental health issues, or perhaps she is operating from a state of denial (although that seems unlikely since she is having Evan tested), but again I find it unlikely that she wouldn’t warn the babysitter…

The film shows that George has a brand new video camera and he and the kids are going to make a movie, with Evan playing Robin Hood, Tommy playing the Sheriff of Nottingham and Kayleigh playing Maid Marion. George moves from loving father to creepy pedophile with a swig of whisky and asking Evan that film stays “Their little secret.”

No sooner has Evan agreed to these terms (and George tells him to get his costume on, pulling his shirt over his head) than he blacks out again. They are all now in the basement of the house and we all get the impression that something bad has just happened that Evan is repressing.

Evan is confused and asks what has happened and where they are. An angry George tells him not to behave like a retard, or he’ll call his mother and tell her that he has been misbehaving (which is a fairly classic depiction of abusive behaviour).

We don’t get to see much more, the scene ends focused on Tommy sat on the stairs watching and twisting the head of one of his sister’s dolls around in a disturbing way. However, we return to this scene multiple times in the movie, which we will get to later.

James Treborn

Following the Robin Hood blackout we return to the hospital, where Dr. Redfield reveals to Mrs. Treborn that Evan does not have any brain lesions, which his father suffers from.

Dr. Redfield concludes then, that Evan’s blackouts are not connected directly to his father’s condition, but that they may stem from stress. Specifically, the stress he suffers from being fatherless. Dr. Redfield notes that the latest blackouts revolve around the meeting with George, and indeed the one in school, where he drew the picture, was also parent related, albeit indirectly. This is not a terrible conclusion, necessarily, but he is a bit quick to dismiss James’ illness, rather than noting that they had little data on James’ early illness, and so it could remain a possibility. The blackout fugues alone are unusual enough that any sensible medical professional would suspect a connection.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Dr. Redfield himself is operating from a state of denial, perhaps due to his inability to treat or understand James Treborn’s condition (which we find out in the Director’s cut was also present in James’ father before him). It is possible that he simply refuses to believe that this condition could be hereditary, due to the nature of the brain damage.

Anyway, Dr. Redfield suggests that Evan meet his father, as that may be enough to stop the stress and the blackouts. I’m seriously starting to wonder exactly where this man got his Doctorate or Medical degree. He does qualify that James will be heavily sedated, restrained, security will be present and both he and Mrs. Treborn will be present to supervise. Although considering the nurses bring in a slightly sedated James, to the room when Evan is in it already on his own, and don’t secure him, I’m not sure how Dr Redfield gets to keep practicing.

Evan, almost predictably has another blackout during the meeting, he comes around again and his father is trying to kill him. There’s a struggle and James gets hit in the head, and goes down in a spreading pool of blood, on the floor right next to Evan.

The next scene is James Treborn’s funeral, before we fast forward six years.

The Blockbuster

The next scene after the funeral shows the now teenage Evan smoking in the Miller basement with Kayleigh, Lenny and Tommy. Tommy is searching for something and he finds it, a quarter stick of dynamite that he calls a blockbuster. Tommy decides they should go blow something up.

His preferred target is a mailbox on a house that is a small scale model of the actual house.

Lenny is peer-pressured into placing the dynamite in the mailbox and the kids stand there staring in anticipation.

Evan has another blackout, of course. He comes around running in the woods, dragging a dazed, unresponsive Lenny, who is soon seen being loaded into an ambulance, still non-verbal. It is clear that each of the kids, apart from Evan, who cannot remember, have seen something traumatic.

We cut to Dr. Redfield’s office, where Evan is being hypnotised to try and recover the missing memories of the Mailbox event.

The attempt at recovery does not work. The only additional details that Evan remembers is a car arriving. Then his memory jumps to the woods. Dr. Redfield assures him that he has fixed the problem and he can remember. Evan suddenly fits, blood pouring from his nose. This is the first of many nosebleeds that Evan suffers from.

Nosebleeds are loosely associated with seizures, but usually occur after the fits have begun, it is very unusual for a fit to begin with an nosebleed, and should have set alarm bells ringing for Dr. Redfield.

However, the very next scene shows the kids going to a movie theatre. Evan tries to find out what happened and Tommy shuts him down. Later Kayleigh leaves the theatre and Evan follows. She shows him the bruises her father has given her. He tries to comfort her, and they kiss, which is seen by Tommy and sends him into a rage that he takes out on another kid, before being dragged away.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Treborn catches a news story about the explosion. She presumably gets the full details of the explosion, which we don’t yet know and draws a conclusion.

She gives Kayleigh a lift home with Evan in the car, she then tells Evan that they are moving.

The Junkyard

Lenny gets out of hospital and Kayleigh and Evan go to meet him. They talk him into going for a walk and the three wander into the woods. They notice smoke ahead and run towards the junkyard.

Tommy is there, he has built a fire and is stuffing Evan’s dog into a sack that he covers with lighter fuel.

Evan runs forward with Kayleigh, yelling for him to stop. Tommy grabs a plank and swings. Evan leaps back out of the way and the plank connects with Kayleigh’s head, knocking her out. Tommy feints a swing and then connects with Evans knee, knocking him to the ground. Tommy drags the sack closer to the fire while Evan rolls on the floor in agony. Evan struggles and he rushes forwards, into another blackout.

He comes around to a scene of devastation. Kayleigh struggles awake too. Lenny is nonverbal again, and Tommy is gone, missing. A shocked Evan realises the sack is burnt, and his dog obviously dead.

Lenny is taken away once more and his mother confronts Evan, calling him a monster.

Then Evan and his mother move away, although he writes a note, saying “I’ll come back for you.” that he shows Kayleigh before they drive away.

Another seven years slip by in a title screen.

Psychology of Memory

Evan is now a Psychology Major, looks like Ashton Kutcher, and is apparently doing very well. He jokes with his Professor about his test, and is asked about his project to change the way they think about memory assimilation, before he heads back to his shared dorm room.

He is friends with Thumper, a heavy-set goth (played by Ethan Suplee in eyeliner), who has just finished having sex with Cricket, a skinny goth-chick. Thumper introduces Evan and Cricket. She complains that Evan blew the bell-curve on her anthropology final and leaves.

Evan tells Thumper to get dressed, they are celebrating, it has been seven years since he had a blackout.

They go to a bar and play pool in pairs with a couple of girls. Thumper is hassled by a bunch of Frat boys, until he jumps the cue ball into their beer pitcher and smashes the pool cure on the table and threatens them with it. Evan leaves with the girl he was playing against, and they go back to his room.

She asks him about the journals that he keeps under his bed, and he explains he’s kept them since he was seven. She asks him to read something from one of them and he reluctantly agrees.

Then as he’s reading something happens.

He flashes back to the passage he was reading, back to the Junkyard. He is lunging forwards for Tommy and pauses, uncertain what is happening, and is struck down by Tommy, who then kicks him. Evan passes out.

He awakens back on his bed, with the girl trying to wake him.

He leaves her, and drives back to his childhood home to find Lenny.

Lenny is obviously in a bad way, his room is unchanged from when he was thirteen, except that there are more model airplanes now. Lenny responds to Evan’s questions about the day in the junkyard only by quoting Tommy, but it confirms that Evan has remembered what happened accurately. Lenny also seems to threaten Evan not to say a peep or it will be his last.

He returns to his dorm room and his journals.

Thumper and Evan briefly discuss him being able to recover the other repressed memories (which is what he believes he did – he doesn’t consider that his confusion at arriving in that memory had a physical effect on what happened that day, yet), and he tries again reading the journal entry about the mailbox blockbuster.

Appearing Scars

Evan goes back to the mailbox event, now he sees more of what happened. The car he vaguely recalled was the house-owner returning, carrying a baby.

Evan drops his cigarette and burns himself on the stomach as Tommy threatens Lenny, telling him not to make a peep or it will be his last. Before the mother and baby head to check the mailbox.

The kids drag Lenny who is still staring at the results of the explosion away from the scene. Then abruptly Evan awakens in his dorm room, rolls over and vomits. Then Evan lifts his shirt noticing the scar on his stomach as though for the first time.

There is a possibility, however slim, that the scar on Evan’s stomach had always been there, but it seems unlikely that someone could miss something like that on themselves, although it is perhaps possible that he had sustained a negative hallucination over the last seven years as an act of repression.

The implication is, of course, that he has travelled back in time and altered his personal history by burning himself — and that this is what he clearly believes, but is that reasonable? Evan studies Psychology and particularly memory and perception, he would know that the more likely conclusion in this case is that he has repressed the memory and the perception of the scar, probably even keeping the scar covered so that no one saw it from a sense of unconscious self-preservation not to relive or confront the trauma. Evan as top of his class could probably cite cases of exactly this sort of PTSD, although the shock of what he has just seen probably made him irrational in this regard.

Certainly at this point while Evan believes he has changed the past he recalled, the changes could be solely in his perception.

He talks to his mother about his father’s illness. He also got straight A’s and eventually thought that he had worked out a way to recover his memories. Although she never knew if it was true, and seems to believe in retrospect that he probably hallucinated the recall. Exactly as Evan may have done. She holds back something else, but implies that James believed he could even change the past, but that was the belief that got him committed to the asylum.

Evan next thinks about trying to recover the memory from the basement, when George Miller had the video camera. Thumper talks him out of it, telling him there might be a really good reason he is repressing what happened and he should not mess himself up further.

Instead, he drives to find Kayleigh, somehow finding her work and then meeting her outside.

He chats with her and she seems pleased to see him at first, talking about how she emancipated herself and how Tommy is doing okay, working at the auto-shop since he got out of juvy, until Evan asks about that Robin Hood movie. Then she freaks out and storms off, telling him to leave it alone, nothing will make it better, and he left her behind and never even called.

He finds out from a phone message that not only has he failed to turn in his psychology paper, but that Kayleigh killed herself after telling Tommy that he had upset her. Tommy threatens to kill Evan then.

Evan attends the funeral, but doesn’t approach. He watches Tommy and George obviously upset and angry. He says his own personal farewell at the graveside and throws in the “I’ll come back for you” message from earlier.

Back to the Basement

Evan reads the journal of that day and travels back to revisit the events of the day. He remembers George saying the basement would be better for the scene, and the action cuts to the basement once more.

We see more of what happened, George is verbally abusive to Tommy, and threatens him with physical abuse if he doesn’t do what he is told, and then he tells the other two to undress so that they can kiss and stuff for the movies, like grown-ups do.

Evan then confronts George, with very adult speech he threatens George, telling him not to touch his daughter ever again. He also tells him to discipline Tommy, which Tommy reacts to by twisting the head off the doll.

Evan then wakes clutching at his head.

We see flashes of a different history, one where Kayleigh is happier, but we also still see flashes of the junkyard and cinema scenes unchanged, but then Kayleigh steps off a bus into Evans arms, and they spend time together after he left.

Then Kayleigh from next to him in the bed asks him if he is alright.

History has been changed it seems, and Evan remembers both versions somehow.

This sequence is the first real proof we have that Evan can alter history, things have dramatically changed from how they were. It turns out as we find out more that Evan’s life is different, he is a member of the Fraternity that were hassling Thumper and he is no longer friends with Thumper, neither it seems is Evan any longer the top of the class. His psychology professor no longer even recognises him.

He doesn’t much care though, he has Kayleigh alive and in his life, and is even about to propose, when his car gets trashed. It turns out Tommy is out of Juvy and has come to find his sister. Tommy blames Evan for the years of abuse he suffered from George and won’t let Evan take away his sister, the only person who ever loved him, he tells Evan as much before he attacks him with a metal bat.

Evan protects himself with a can of mace, but then takes up the bat and clubs Tommy down, shaking off Kayleigh as she tries to stop him. It is only after a loud crunch that he realises what he’s done, as campus security appear, called by Kayleigh on a campus ‘blue-light’ alert post.

Prison

Next we see Evan entering prison, he meets his religious cellmate, Carlos, who tells him he can’t protect him when the prison’s Aryan Brotherhood come for him. Evan gets his journals back from his mum and we find out that his lawyer thinks he can get him out for self-defence.

The Brotherhood steal some of his journals and he bets Carlos a packet of smokes that he can prove to him that God speaks to him in his dreams.

Then Evan uses a page of his journal to go back in time while Carlos watches for proof.

Evan jumps back to his seven-year old self, when he is asked to draw what he will be when he grows up. He draws the two Nazis that have been threatening him with himself stood atop their bodies. This is the picture that we saw his mother see earlier in the movie. Then Evan goes to the teacher’s desk where she has two metal spikes to hold paper on the desk. He calls the teacher with his hands over the spikes…

And we jump back to the prison where Carlos is freaking out because Evan has two scars in the palms of his hands that he is convinced were not there a moment ago. He believes the scars to be stigmata, and pays up the packet of cigarettes and agrees to help Evan with his plan to deal with the Brotherhood.

Now let’s unpack this event a little, as it tells us so much about how time-travel works in the movie.

Evan, who has no stigmata, goes back in time, draws the picture we saw earlier and stabs himself in the hands. Carlos, who does not travel in time, sees the stigmata appear, even though the stabbing took place back when Evan was seven.

The drawing already existed in Evan’s timeline, Evan, his teacher and mother had seen it already. This seems very strange at first glance, how can the drawing exist before Evan has time-travelled, but the stigmata not? There are a couple of possibilities, with differing probabilities.

Firstly, we could postulate that originally one of the future Evan’s (who no longer exists and was not in prison) came back and drew the picture, but since he wasn’t in prison had no need to stab himself in the hands. The problem with this possibility is that the drawing’s subject matter doesn’t change. The Evan that drew the picture must have encountered the Aryan Brotherhood and since he couldn’t have been in prison that couldn’t happen. If the original picture had not been shown this could have been an option, but alas we have to reject it as a true possibility.

The other possibility is a little odd. It is a fact that Evan’s ability to time travel relies on him writing the journals, and the journals only exist as a result of his mother (and Evan) seeing the disturbing drawing and the accompanying blackout, so the drawing has to exist, regardless of how anything else unfolds, in order for the drawing to have a possibility of existing. This is a closed temporal loop, formed around this drawing, a Predestination Paradox. However, why didn’t the stigmata exist? The events that lead to the drawing also result in the stigmata, so surely the seven-year-old Evan we met at the beginning should have had his hands bandaged? Well, perhaps, but perhaps not.

Everything that we see happen in the movie from beginning to end we perceive through Evan’s narration, we can’t dismiss Evan as an unreliable narrator though. We can’t dismiss the wounds and memories as Evan negatively hallucinating them here either, as Carlos is witness to the change in time. So how can we reconcile that?

Evan’s perception is key. Throughout the movie Evan’s personal timeline is always the governing factor. He perceives gaps in his memory, however each gap has some ending that he has already perceived, and usually reality is preserved well around these events when he travels back. That is, he doesn’t always alter his own memories immediately around these blackouts, even when he changes history. This time he does radically alter his own memory of that blackout. Rather than ending with him staring at a picture he didn’t remember drawing (or however it originally ended), it will now end with his hands impaled on the metal spikes.

That should be a huge change to Evan’s past. It should have had his mother and Doctor’s worried at least a week earlier, and Evan’s own history should have been radically altered, but instead the physical scars appear as Evan returns (almost as though he brought them back with him), but none of the memories we’d expect to punch Evan in face. In fact, this change, it could be argued, should have moved him out of prison, anyway. In fact, it would probably have put him in Sunnyvale institute a lot earlier. So why didn’t it? And why did Carlos get to see the change happen?

I think the two are connected.

They could be down to proximity and perception. Carlos is close by when Evan jumps, and is watching closely, his mind is primed to see a change. Evan changes his own timeline, but the changes do not affect Carlos in anyway, until after he has already seen Evan’s hands.

The cause precedes the effect, as far as both Carlos and Evan are concerned. Evan has already altered his past before this, and created the timeline that placed him in prison with his last jump. He has not yet gone back and changed any of those previous blackouts. Each trip still exists as he recalls it, unchanged, so these time travel events must have a correcting factor on the titular Butterfly effect, effectively stopping him altering his history to avoid prison. If he had instead attacked Kayleigh, Tommy or Lenny at that time, it may have altered everything else, but because he only affected his own history, it wasn’t enough of a change to leverage him out of prison alone. As it turns out, there may be a reason in the vagaries of Chaos Theory that may explain this, but we’ll circle back to that later.

It is enough to persuade Carlos to help him get his Journals back off the Aryan Brotherhood, and murder the leader and a henchman. Before Evan abandons him to his fate and leaps back in time once again.

The Retconned Junkyard Blues

The very next time that Evan jumps back, to escape the Prison permanently, he returns to the Junkyard scene for a second time, actually arriving earlier than the blackout began the first time, and other things are already different to the last time he visited. Kayleigh is dressed differently, and wears her hair differently to the last visit, more similar to how she was in the Sorority, than how she was when we first passed this way.

Presumably, although we don’t see it, this thirteen-year-old Evan now has stigmata scars on his hands as well. But perhaps not, Evan’s history is in flux here, nothing quite matching what we saw earlier, and that means things unfurl a little differently, but it could mean that stabbing himself isn’t part of this Evan’s history anymore. The scars do seem to vanish from the movie immediately after they serve their purpose. Again, we might have to revisit that later.

Firstly, Evan grabs a sharp shard of metal and handing it to Lenny tells him to cut the rope with the shard.

Evan overwrites his previous interaction with Lenny, Tommy and Kayleigh completely here. He doesn’t pause the same way, and that puts Kayleigh in a different position, and with her hair tied up, it is not dangling across her face. Both of these mean when Tommy connects the plank with her face it splits her cheek deeply. Then, although Evan talks Tommy into releasing his dog, Lenny leaps in a plunges the metal shard into Tommy’s back.

Quite why Lenny did that is anyone’s guess, it was probably anger from the Mailbox incident mixed with years of tormenting, combined with just watching Kayleigh get hit, but even so, it is an extreme reaction. Then Evan returns to the future.

He’s back in his room, shared with Thumper.

During the flashes of memories being rewritten, which is very intense this time (as he has pretty much wrecked everything that put him there now, there was no way he could arrive in the Prison), Evan sees Lenny being taken to Sunnyvale. Thumper finds him, shaking and bleeding from the face.

Evan is scanned, and then meets with Dr. Redfield and his mother again. Evan is able to describe the damage to his brain as looking as though 40 years of memories have been jammed into it in the last year. He also guesses that the damage would be similar to his father’s brain. Evan takes the opportunity to go and visit Lenny, who is securely strapped down even after all these years.

Evan is upset by the encounter. Lenny, of course, blames Evan for the events of that day.

So Evan goes back to talk to his dad. He jumps into one of the few remaining blackouts that he hasn’t already visited, and again things seem to be exactly as they were the first time we saw it.

Evan doesn’t appear to have bandages or scars on his hands during this exchange either, but then he didn’t the first time we came this way.

It seems as though that stigmata effect was purely and only for Carlos’s benefit. It never existed in any of Evan’s histories, except the one where he came back in time from Prison, the first time.

Ironically, this seems to suggest some sort of Chronology Protection Agency exists, even in the scene where Evans father is explaining the exact opposite stance, and that if he plays God with people’s lives, he will destroy who they were. He also warns Evan that coming back here, could even now be killing his mother, for all he knows.

Evan feels he knows better, smugly telling his father, that he’ll send him a postcard when he’s made the perfect world. His father leaps across the table and …

This trip to the past is once again exactly as Evan originally recorded it in his journal. Nothing changed about how it began or ended. Evan didn’t have injuries from his previous trip and time seems to remain consistent, but why? This ability to time travel seems to be highly erratic in how it presents Evan’s ability to alter time. Anytime he visits a blackout the first time, the sequence usually makes sense, Evan returns with memories that could have happened in that blackout, however anytime he goes back and revisits a blackout again, things seem to get very weird. Changes caused by previous jumps can affect a revisit, but not a first visit, no matter how that original visit may have been affected by other jumps.

The only way this makes any sense is if Evan’s ability to jump isn’t just an ability to time-travel, but an ability to navigate multiversal time.

He can always return to his Prime time-line by going back to a period when he had a blackout and filling in the gap, however having fixed the temporal anomaly in his Prime time-line he is never able to return to that Prime history in that blackout again. Instead, these Secondary histories are always drifting from their original history, caused by and causing radical changes to history.

This is only broken in any way by his jumping back in Prison and stabbing himself. It is the only time we see an end result of a blackout that does not seem to match Evan’s original memory at all, and this is because of a deliberate action by Evan because he wants to demonstrate his ability to someone else. He deliberately changes his personal history in a physical way, but that seems to have no other repercussions, and goes against the Butterfly Effect as it stands.

It increasingly looks as though in this instance Evan not only creates a new history, but also transfers Carlos to that new history in a way that makes him aware of the change. Yet, that history is immediately abandoned by Evan once it has served its purpose, the proof jump is undone, and the hand stabbing is never needed, so it never happened. Although that still leaves the picture Evan made in school, that was part of the Prime time-line. That picture exists without any rational causation, as a temporal anomaly of a future that couldn’t have existed at the time it was made (before Evan time-travelled) and can now never happen (as Evan was not ever in Prison for killing Tommy as Tommy died at Lenny’s hand in the Junkyard).

It’s all starting to look a bit timey-wimey.

Save The Baby, Save The World

Evan tries to track down Kayleigh, first intimidating George Miller, reminding him of the things that happened in the basement, and then tracking her down to a run down hourly-rate hotel.

He explains to her everything that has happened to him, and hints at a few things from the Director’s cut in these conversations.

After finding out that things went very badly for Kayleigh in a world without her brother around (even in juvy).  Evan decides to take her advice and go back to save the woman and baby.

He leaps back to the Mailbox scene, and calls out to the woman to stay back. Lenny and Tommy also run forwards, with Tommy tackling the woman and baby to the ground with far too rough a tackle. Then the mailbox explodes throwing Evan back.

Evan comes around and thinks Thumper and Cricket are in the other bed. Only it’s not Thumper. Instead, he is greeted by this un-eyelinered face.

That causes Evan to collapse back with a smile, and then he stretches… and we get  the best time-travel messed up history reveal in the entire movie.

Evan is now a paraplegic, his arms gone, and he is confined to a wheelchair. Kaleigh is happy, dating Lenny, and Tommy is okay with them together. Tommy has become a Christian who spends a lot of his time helping Evan.

Evan has a hard time getting used to his new position and the new history, this is a radical departure from any previous history he has encountered.

Evan blows off his Psychology course and talks with Kayleigh, trying to piece together more of what happened than his flashes of memories have told him already.

He finds out that the reason Kayleigh stayed with her father after Mrs. Miller left George, was Evan. She liked him from the very first time they met. Even in this world where she ended up with Lenny, she cared for Evan first, she said.

Evan can’t take this world, where everyone has it great, except him. He even considers suicide, but can’t manage even that.

Then just as he resigns himself to this world, he find his mum is dying from cancer. The accident that destroyed his arms caused her to smoke more, his attempt to fix things is killing his mum, exactly as James Treborn predicted.

This steels Evan to try and change things once again. This problem being that he no longer has a Journal entry for the Mailbox (or anything following that) as he had no arms to write the entry. So he decides that he will go back before that and destroy the dynamite somehow.

He first tries to jump back to the morning before he goes to the Miller’s. He pulls a knife from a drawer thinking that he’ll use it to cut the blockbuster so that it won’t be able to blow him up (he seems to think he would get away with hiding it in his pocket- which seems a bit ridiculous given the size of the knife he selects). Again, this is a return to a previous Prime time-line blackout and Mrs Treborn comes back to the kitchen to find Evan holding the knife, exactly as she did the first time. Evan has managed to change nothing.

He returns to an unchanged future.

So he goes back to the next blackout, in the basement of the Miller’s. He immediately runs off to grab the blockbuster and threatens George Miller.

There’s a struggle and the lit dynamite is knocked from Evan’s hand. Kayleigh picks up the blockbuster as it rolls towards her, and Evan wakes up after the explosion.

The Final Jump

Evan is in Sunnyvale, he has been there since that day. He doesn’t have his journals. In fact, Dr. Redfield claims that the journals never existed, and that this is just like his father who claimed to have a photo album that allowed him to time-travel that also never existed.

Now, I don’t quite understand the doctor’s thinking here, the original journal should exist, Dr. Redfield told Mrs Treborn to make him start it before the Miller events. So why does he deny the journal’s existence? Well, I think that Dr. Redfield is convinced that the Treborns are highly delusional, and that admitting the journal exists would feed into Evan’s delusion. By denying the existence of any journals he is trying to protect Evan’s mind from itself. Although it is possible that he is actually just being a pedant. No “Journals” exist, but a journal does, and he may be refusing Evan access to it until he can recognise that there are not multiple journals. Interestingly, in the extended Director’s cut of the movie we find proof that Evan’s grandfather died in Bellevue mental asylum, and that his father kept numerous photographs loose in a box. There was no “photo album”, but the photos existed.

I’m not sure why Dr. Redfield would take such a pedantic approach to his patients care. In fact, nothing about the way Dr. Redfield treats Evan during this scene is entirely accurate to a mental health professional dealing with a delusional person, as far as I can tell. How can he expect a patient to accept reality when he denies the existence of a part of that reality. It is not going to build trust between the delusional patient and himself. Unless of course the existence of the journal is a delusion, as Dr. Redfield insists, although that is not at all consistent with the time-line we have been presented.

Evan collapses during this confrontation, after Dr. Redfield mentions his father’s photographs. The damage to his brain is so great now that Dr. Redfield even comments that he’s not sure how Evan even has use of his motor functions. He also reveals that Evan is going to be shipped to Bellevue as they will be better able to deal with him there.

Evan, however, has asked his mother to bring the old family movies that his father shot long ago, and knowing that he is being shipped off leads him to break out of his room and head for Dr. Redfield’s office. We now see the opening of the movie, again, although shot from different angles.

Evan places himself under the desk, scrawls the note and then turns on the movie projector.

The movie shows a birthday party (probably Lenny’s) where Kayleigh is introduced to him for the first time and she leans in and kisses him.

Evan manages to use the movie to go back (again presumably there is no blackout that we are aware of for him to exploit here). He tells the young Kayleigh that he hates her, and that if he ever sees her again he will kill her and her whole family (which is a harsh, but possibly true statement considering), and flashes back to his college room.

He is staying with Lenny again, who is clearly happy and well-adjusted, and asks him where Kayleigh is. Lenny responds, “Who’s Kayleigh?” and asks him if he needs to see the doctor.

That’s pretty much all there is, apart from the variability of the endings following this scene (and in fact before this scene) — the Director’s cut has Evan undo his whole existence, erasing his own birth with the help of his birth movie.

Strange Attractors and Zero-Worlds

So what can we actually deduce from the movie?

Well, first and most likely, Evan really is just delusional, both he and his father (and grandfather) share a genetic aberration that makes their brains function differently to other people when they form memories, blackout, and later recover them, that leads to them believing that they are travelling in time. This delusion then grows to make them think they are able to alter history, but in fact, they free-form hallucinate the results of these “altered” histories, while probably actually living in a mental home.

However, this interpretation does have to ignore the endings of the movie, which imply that Evan can undo the damage (and does indeed manage to create a perfect world by either sacrificing — or at least postponing — his true love or his life, depending on which version you watch).

So instead, what if the Treborns really can travel in their personal time. How does that work?

The Blackouts are caused by visitations from the future, these blackouts are critical, and recorded events in Evan’s life. They happen in random moments, as well as moments of high stress (moments that Evan later would want to interfere with). The first time Evan goes back to an event he rarely changes anything significant, instead he creates minor variations on his history, but the titular Butterfly Effect doesn’t seem to apply. Evan’s personal history has a habit of trying to merge back upon itself, trying to set itself on a certain track. A track that creates the journals and hence a record of the blackouts allowing Evan to travel.

This seems a lot like a self-fulfilling prophecy, that Evan can time-travel because he has time-travelled, but the essence of the Butterfly Effect is that even a tiny variation in the past should result in a massive change to the present, which isn’t what we observe. Instead, the journal entries seem to create relatively stable periods in Evan’s history, even across altered histories. There is no record Evan stabbing himself in the hands in any universe, except the one where he did it solely to prove he was special to Carlos, and Carlos was able to perceive that change, when no one else can remember any of the other alternate histories is impossible unless Evan’s intention was part of his ability to do that.

It looks like Evan is creating new histories, in accordance to multiverse theory, and is also part of several predestination paradoxes, which seems impossible. So what is going on here?

The Zero-Worlds theory could hold true. This implies Evan exists only in his own timeline. He can only jump back to events from his personal timeline, and even when he changes history, if he tries to return to an event for the first time he only arrives back in his original memories of that event (not the ones you might expect from either a single mutable timeline or from multiversal travel). His personal timeline can interact and interfere with other people’s pasts (and their presents in Carlos’ case) and with his own, but for him causality is linearly preserved. This interpretation allows Evan to visit and alter his past, but also allows for the predestination paradoxes that are part of his personal timeline, however it is not a complete match for everything we see. The Zero-Worlds interpretation finds it very hard to reconcile Carlos experiences with those of Thumper and Lenny. If Carlos by proximity can sense a change then both Thumper and Lenny could have seen something (although nothing ever changes that they might observe — possibly).

However, the Zero-Worlds theory cannot explain the Novikov Self-Consistency that sometimes attempts to insert itself into Evan’s life. He always ends up at the same college, but his room mate changes between two people, or he does or doesn’t join the fraternity. These changes are not consistent with the Butterfly Effect as commonly understood, but do fit within Chaos Theory if we consider Strange Attractors.

Strange Attractors are the names given to the periods of apparent stability that form within chaotic systems. In meteorology, these Strange Attractors cause events like heat-waves and cold snaps, when prevalent winds settle into a particular cycle for a while. This same effect occurs in the movie, with Evan’s history either having Thumper or Lenny as a college roommate, although he once branches out into the fraternity house as a less stable possibility (he never returns to the fraternity after that change). Strange Attractors in Chaos theory are a result of complex mathematics resolving to create these plateaus or orbits in the data, which is probably not the case with Evan’s life. Instead, I think the Strange Attractors may be a byproduct of Evan’s subconscious navigation of the multiverse. It seems reasonable that he is not in complete, conscious control of this ability. His initial attempts are haphazard, and later he becomes more adept at getting the changes to work out as he wants, but still events conspire against him.

He creates a world where his friends lives are perfect, but his own is devastated, but would have been willing to live with that reality for their sakes, had not his mother got sick. This event alone makes me suspect that as far as Evan is concerned, there are no accidents. He chose the world where he sacrificed himself, running towards the mailbox, and lost his arms and the use of his legs. However, he did not choose, consciously, for his mother to contract cancer. The fact this followed immediately after his father suggested it, implies to me that Evan’s unconscious accepted that suggestion, and navigated to that divergent history with his next jump. It is too much of a coincidence otherwise.

In this context, the journals, home movies and photographs behave has anchors, or more properly fulcrums; they are set points in Evan’s history that allow him to leverage alternate histories about himself. With these anchors he can return, and revisit his own timeline, the first time he uses them they always seem to return to that point in Evan’s personal history, regardless of the history he is currently within. However, when Evan returns the next time the journal is anchoring two moments in Evan’s timeline, the original Prime history and the history he was in when he first went back. This means that Evan can see differences when he revisits that were not there the first time, and can alter his past with a single action, and single trip, that then does not knock on to other trips.

TL;DR

The Butterfly Effect seems a bit of mess at first, but once you realise that Evan’s ability is to navigate through alternate histories, while living in a Zero-Worlds universe himself, his abilities become understandable and even somewhat logical.

The journals are his anchor back to his own past, and the prime universe that he was born in, they act as fulcrum allowing him to lever himself out of time, but each entry only works that way once. As the anchors become contaminated by previous trips. Thereafter, he is relying on pure instinct to get him where he is going.