#19 Are You Still Watching? The Butterfly Effect's 20th Anniversary 🦋
Alex Mooney unravels the film as a depraved star text, and the movie apparatus as a weapon
The Passion of Ashton: The Butterfly Effect at 20
by Alex Mooney
Content warning for Literally Everything, because this movie’s got it all!
Lately I’ve been catching up, almost six years late, on Mike Flanagan’s 2018 Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House—at the time of writing this I’m only halfway through, but I’ve already considered turning it off multiple times. How might this relate to the infamously ludicrous and ludicrously odious Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect, you ask? When I decided to watch and subsequently write about this harrowing howler, which turned 20 on Tuesday, I was not entirely prepared for how seamlessly it would gel with the other things I’ve been watching lately (shades of Click, The Fan, Birth, and even Tom and Jerry cartoon The Cat Concerto). Hill House, for instance—which forms a fragmented portrait of five siblings’ respective compartmentalizations of the traumas visited upon their family (multiple suicides, drug addictions, and various betrayals intercut with moments of intimacy)—is so enamoured with its subjects’ sufferings, and so committed to reducing them to formal and textual gimmicks (match cuts galore) that it frequently lapses into sadistic parody. “Sadistic parody” might as well be The Butterfly Effect’s mission statement, as it folds space and time in on themselves to punish Kutcher, and everyone he cares about, in the most histrionic ways it can come up with.
The film opens with a quote by “Chaos Theory” concerning the eponymous effect, and races through a cryptic cold open in a mental hospital—“If you're reading this I’m already dead,” etc. etc. We’re then catapulted back to Kutcher’s Evan Treborn at age 7 (played by *checks notes* Logan Lerman??), whose harried mother (PTA alum Melora Walters) is disturbed by a violent classroom drawing that seems to line up with his frequent “blackouts”—the same ones that plagued his now-institutionalized father. Not even six minutes in, and Evan wakes up from one of these episodes in his friend Kayleigh’s basement, both of them naked, both of them on camera, with her drunken father calling the shots (and her brother Tommy watching morosely from the stairs, twisting a doll’s head in its socket). The next blackout happens while Evan is finally meeting his old man, who in the course of a jump cut has tackled the small boy to the floor in an effort to choke him to death. A guard smacks him over the head with a nightstick, and Evan watches as his father bleeds out on the floor in front of him. Next, we see Evan, Kayleigh, Tommy, and new friend Lenny at 13 as their innocent act of vandalism (stick of dynamite in the ugliest mailbox you’ll ever see) goes horribly awry in ways elided by yet another blackout. A couple days later, tensions are high, an adolescent romance takes shape, and Tommy burns Evan’s dog alive in a jealous rage because he kissed his sister. Evan’s mother finally says enough is enough and whisks him away to another life, and he leaves the suffering Kayleigh with the note “I’ll come back for you” (he doesn’t).
These are the formative events of Evan’s youth that he’ll begin to cycle back through once he realizes, in college, complete with hipster beard and goth roommate, that he can jump back into his blacked-out childhood body by reading from the journals he kept throughout the period. What starts as a way to scratch a life-long itch, and fill in some gaps that were better left empty, becomes a desperate attempt to “set things right” after a reunion with Kayleigh goes wrong and she, of course, immediately and inexplicably kills herself. He goes back to the kiddie porn incident and scares her dad straight, finally adding that he needs to discipline his violent son. Evan wakes up in a sorority house (the sudden pink decor made me shout to my empty room “did that make him gay?!”) and finds that he (now a frat boy) and Kayleigh have made a deeply lame life for themselves at the top of their school’s social food chain. Tommy soon reappears, however, more psychotic than ever after a lifetime of “discipline,” and a spectacularly violent confrontation sends the movie on the most whiplash-inducing turn you will ever see a movie take; cut to, or rather away from, Kutcher being gang-raped in prison and later, dropping ethnic slurs in order to charm the literal pants off of the same horny white supremacists who stole the journals he needs to escape (one of them relishes in the stand-out line: “shit on my dick or blood on my knife”... ah, the movies). His next attempt to alter the past, this time to save his dog from Tommy and put him on a better course, goes wrong in a way so hysterical I had to stand up and do a couple laps around my room. By this point (with several increasingly jaw-dropping miseries still yet to come) it’s clear that there is nothing Evan can do that will fix this—the movie simply won’t allow him to succeed.
The idea of the subject being tortured by the artist is not a new one—it goes all the way back to The Cat Concerto and Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck (probably further)—but only recently have artists been trying to keep a straight face while doing so (looking at you Mr. Flanagan). This is perhaps the central question to the complete tonal headfuck that is The Butterfly Effect: does it keep a straight face? The film is in many ways completely earnest drama, translating its cartoonish pasquinade of miseries with the visual and sonic cadence of a “respectable” arthouse movie like Donnie Darko or Mysterious Skin (let it be known that this movie premiered at Sundance six days prior to its theatrical release), but it also has a tendency to edit its ratcheting shocks like punchlines—brought to you by the writers of Final Destination 2, a film much more directly (and crassly) about movie apparatus as a weapon.
The Butterfly Effect has the additional pleasure of being one of the most depraved and incoherent star texts you’ll ever see. When Kayleigh’s dad brings out the video camera and tells Evan “you get to be the star,” Tommy protests: “I thought I was the star!” Tommy, or rather the young actor Cameron Bright who played him, did get to be the star in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth that same year as the possibly-reincarnated version of Nicole Kidman’s dead husband, and his sinister approximations of adult behaviours are eerily reminiscent of his performance in this film, where he is instead upstaged and thwarted by Kutcher. On top of the many references to the narrative trap Evan has found himself in (during hypnosis his doctor tells him “it’s only a movie,” and so on), there is also a strange charge to the way Evan either fails or succeeds in adapting to the contextual details of his rapidly shifting settings. As a frat boy, for example, he leans comically into his social role, possessed by bursts of enthusiasm for humiliating the fraternity’s pledges, and even forcing them to wait upon Kayleigh for an elaborate romantic dinner he’s staged, assuming the role of director and star (crucially, she later tells him that, while romantic, the whole thing felt insincere).
The film as a whole can be seen as an exercise in spontaneous, interactive roleplay, with Kutcher either instinctively code-switching or failing to assimilate to alternate versions of the movie that is his life (in this sense it’s fitting that there are multiple versions of that movie’s ending). This concept is expanded upon to much greater effect in the thorny Adam Sandler movie Click, a similarly punitive high-concept dramedy which derives its morbid sense of humour from actual scripted jokes that only enhance its pathos instead of undercutting it. Click theorizes its protagonist’s life as a film he can navigate via remote control, though the device has some ideas of its own that take the film to some conceptually rich and dark places—think millennial-brained It’s a Wonderful Life.
In the case of Evan/Kutcher, equal parts tormentee and tormentor, The Butterfly Effect can be seen as a twisted rejoinder to Capra’s immortal weepy, building instead toward the realization that Evan’s world would be better off had he never entered it in the first place. His decision in the notorious director’s cut ending to strangle himself in the womb and cancel his existence (declared unnatural by the world’s most insensitive palm reader) effectively frees his loved ones from the misery of subjecthood that his presence necessitated. The final montage set to swelling strings, which solves every one of the film’s countless miseries and ends finally on Kayleigh marrying some rando as the sun sets behind her and the camera tracks slowly toward her, hammers home that these directors, at the end of the day, after all the winking and nudging and disreputable conceptual play, really thought they were making something moving and meaningful. On some level—absolutely from the worst corner of my being—I have some respect for that, but I also can’t in good conscience wish this experience on anyone unable to switch off their empathy receptors at will.
Alex Mooney is a Toronto-based writer with a lot less time on his hands than he thinks he has.
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