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The Butterfly Effect Presentation

The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 psychological thriller film about a man named Evan Treborn who frequently suffers from blackouts. During these blackouts, he discovers he can travel back in time to his childhood through his journals. His attempts to go back and change traumatic past events have unintended consequences that alter his present life in various ways, such as finding himself imprisoned for murder. He comes to realize that trying to change the past only ends up harming those he cares about. The film explores themes of chaos theory, the butterfly effect, and how small changes in the past can have large, unforeseen impacts on the future.

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Maria Veronica Bustos
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2K views14 pages

The Butterfly Effect Presentation

The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 psychological thriller film about a man named Evan Treborn who frequently suffers from blackouts. During these blackouts, he discovers he can travel back in time to his childhood through his journals. His attempts to go back and change traumatic past events have unintended consequences that alter his present life in various ways, such as finding himself imprisoned for murder. He comes to realize that trying to change the past only ends up harming those he cares about. The film explores themes of chaos theory, the butterfly effect, and how small changes in the past can have large, unforeseen impacts on the future.

Uploaded by

Maria Veronica Bustos
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American science fiction psychological thriller film that was written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart. The title refers to the butterfly effect, a popular hypothetical example of chaos theory which illustrates how small initial differences may lead to large unforeseen consequences over time.

Butterfly effect

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks earlier.

CHAOS THEORY

Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including meteorology, physics, engineering, economics and biology. Chaos theory studies the behaviour of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect.

CHAOS THEORY

Small differences in initial conditions yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.

Butterfly effect in popular culture


The butterfly effect is the phenomenon whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome.

Butterfly effect in popular culture


The term is sometimes used in popular media dealing with the idea of time travel, usually inaccurately. Most time travel depictions simply fail to address butterfly effects. According to the actual theory, if history could be "changed" at all (so that one is not invoking something like the Novikov self-consistency principle which would ensure a fixed selfconsistent timeline), the mere presence of the time travelers in the past would be enough to change short-term events (such as the weather) and would also have an unpredictable impact on the distant future.

Butterfly effect in popular culture


Therefore, no one who travels into the past could ever return to the same version of reality he or she had come from and could have therefore not been able to travel back in time in the first place, which would create a phenomenon known as time paradox.

MOVIE: THE PLOT


Evan Treborn frequently suffers from blackouts, often at moments of high stress. As a young child and adolescent, Evan suffered many severe sexual and psychological traumas. These traumas include being coerced to take part in child pornography by neighbour George Miller, Kayleigh and Tommys father; being nearly strangled to death by his institutionalized, mentally ill father, Jason Treborn who is then killed in front of him by guards. Various accidents (including the killing of an infant) while playing with dynamite with his friends; and seeing his dog being burned alive by Tommy, also marked his life.

MOVIE: THE PLOT


Seven years later, while entertaining a girl in his dorm room, he realizes that when he reads from his adolescent journals, he can travel back in time and is able to redo parts of his past. His time travelling episodes account for the frequent blackouts he experienced as a child. However, there are consequences to his revised choices of early actions that propagate forward in time to his present life. For example, editing his personal time-line leads to alternate futures in which he finds himself, variously, a college student in a fraternity, an inmate imprisoned for murdering Tommy, and an amputee.

MOVIE: THE PLOT


His efforts are driven by the desire to undo the most unpleasant events of his childhood which coincide with his mysterious blackouts, including saving Kayleigh from being molested by her father and from being tormented by her brother Tommy. The actions he takes, and enables others to take during his blackouts, change the timeline in each new future where he awakes. As he continues to do this, he realizes that, even though his intentions are good, his actions have unforeseen consequences. Moreover, the assimilation of dozens of years' worth of new memories from the alternate timelines causes him brain damage and severe nosebleeds. Ultimately, he decides that his attempts to alter the past end up only harming those he cares about, and realizes that the main cause of everyone's suffering in all the different timelines is himself.

Postmodern Characteristics
Temporal distortion Anachronic narration is when the time within a story is told out of order. This is discontinuous time and lacks temporal continuity; it is non-linear narration. Paranoia Many postmodern authors write under the assumption that modern society cannot be explained or understood. From that point of view, any apparent connections or controlling influences on the chaos of society would be very frightening.

Postmodern Characteristics
Magical realism The introduction of fantastic or impossible elements into a narrative that is otherwise normal. Magical realist novels may include dreams taking place during normal life, extremely complicated plots, wild shifts in time, etc. Intertextuality An important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgment of previous literary works.

Postmodern Characteristics

Fragmentation Fragmentation in modernist literature is thematic, as well as formal. Plot, characters, theme, images, and narrative form itself are broken. Intertextuality An important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgment of previous literary works. The intertextuality of certain works of postmodern fiction, the dependence on literature that has been created earlier. The name of the film The Butterfly Effect The Butterfly Effect's premise is borrowed from Ray Bradbury's famous short story "A Sound of Thunder.

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