Now you may have seen The Butterfly Effect and are thinking "Huh? Why would you give that movie even a second thought?" The reason you're thinking that is probably because you saw it in the theater. Or you saw the theatrical version on DVD. That version has a studio-mandated happy ending.
The non-theatrical "unrated" version of this film has the most devastating ending that I have ever seen.
And I have seen a lot of devastating endings.
Context
To set it up for you, here's the story: a guy has childhood blackouts where he awakens and finds his life has been irreparably and inexplicably damaged each time. As an adult, he discovers the ability to send himself back in time into his own body at specific points. These points happen to match his blackouts. Every time he goes back he tries to fix the damage he's done, but every time he makes his life and the lives of his friends and loved ones worse. (Basically- his time-travel attempts to fix his life are the very things that ruin his life.)
To time-jump, he has to look at a video or memento of a moment in time, focus on it, and then his consciousness transmits there. He gets ominous hints throughout his life that he was never meant to exist; that his life is outside of time. Also: after every time-jump, he emerges back in the present with less sanity.
So by the end of the movie, he's completely lost his mind and is a gibbering mess in an institution. But he still recognizes that his involvement with the woman he loves will destroy her no matter how he tries to fix it. So he comes up with a final solution for how to protect her from him.
This is the solution: (Spoiler, obviously. Nothing R-rated in here, just the most emotionally devastating thing ever) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wSH1SpQh9c
* * *
I'll pause here. It's worth five minutes of your life.
Unless you're emotionally fragile or depression-prone, go ahead.
* * *
You make it through? Good. You okay? I presume not. I'd give you a hug right now if I could.
Obviously, that scene hits you harder in the context of the film, but HOLY CRAP, right?
No one warned me about this. I had no idea they were going there.
I was shaken for days after seeing that. And it still gets to me whenever I think about it. Much more so now that I have kids.
How To Wreck a Psyche
Let's break down the sheer brutality of this scene:
2) The mother loses her fourth child in a row. After three stillborn children, she experiences a fourth. In the delivery room.
3) Implication of the "fourth child" death. Her other children may have done the same thing. The ability to time-jump may be genetic, so it's highly probable that those three people also found a way to get back to their womb and destroy themselves there rather than live and damage the lives of their loved ones.
4) The most drastic heroic suicide ever. A lot of stories have ended with the main character sacrificing himself to save people. This is the first one I've seen where a character goes back before his birth and erases his own existence to save people.
5) Anti-It's a Wonderful Life ending. This movie presents the incredibly dangerous notion that maybe everyone in your life is better off without you. What if you were never born and never had a chance to hurt anyone? Would people be happier? Would loved ones suffer less? When you break down the good and the bad, are you better off never existing?
No Middle Ground
The weak-sauce original ending is here, if you feel like watching something that will make you shrug.
According to Wikipedia, they shot two other endings, too. Read about them and you'll agree: both pathetic.
There is no middle ground here.
The "director's cut" ending is the most emotionally intense ending ever. And the "theatrical" ending is the biggest cop-out in the history of cinema.
Everything in the film up to that point made it clear that any meddling in the past will have incredibly bad unintended consequences. But the cop-out ending tells us that all he had to do to fix everything was go back in time and say something mean to his beloved. This scares her off and makes her never see him again.
HUH?
Nothing worked up to that point- and he tried a LOT of things- but one little mean comment somehow makes everything okay and fixes the lives of everyone involved?
NOPE.
It's a nice thought, but I don't buy it. And it undercuts everything else the film just told us.
But Just To Be Clear
I'm not saying the "director's cut" version is a good ending. And I'm not saying it's a helpful ending. Just that's it's effective, and the right ending for this story based on the rules this story establishes.
I sincerely hope that no psychologically frail people see the brutal ending and take it to heart, thinking that suicide is a legitimate solution for the problems in your life and in the lives of loved ones.
That's a very very dangerous concept.
I've been through dark periods where I've been paralyzed by depression and the thought that not existing would be terrific. When you feel like nothing works, nothing matters, and everything you do seems to just make things worse, it's easy to think that giving up on everything is a good idea.
This couldn't be more wrong.
The old cliche is 100% true: suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. You're not just destroying everything you are, you're destroying everything you'll ever do or be. You're robbing yourself of growth and learning opportunities and inflicting unimaginable pain on the people that care about you most. Suicide is a bad idea, is what I'm getting at here.
(Euthanasia for patients in extreme and constant pain is a totally separate issue, one that I'm not gonna touch here. I'm just addressing suicide driven by emotional pain.)
When you can't think more than a few days ahead, or if you see a black void where your future is supposed to be, TALK TO SOMEONE. ANYONE. IMMEDIATELY. People care, whether you realize it or not.
Also: don't watch the unrated version of The Butterfly Effect.
-Phony McFakename
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