BUTTTERFLY FICTION

Pone, J. (2006) Intimate strangers Time 11/13, 142

At the time this is written, chaos theory has reached fiction as a subset of novels and movies about cause and interconnectedness. Perhaps the first most commercial form of 'Butterfly Fiction" was The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher. Unfortunately this 2004 thriller was one of Kutcher's first non-comedic performances and the critics didn't take him seriously. However, the actual butterfly effect originated with an economist that suggested that chaos theory begins when a butterfly flaps its wings it can cause a storm hundreds of miles a way.(It also borrows from quantum mechanics.) At any rate, the small little creature has the possibility to create major damage to life and limb of those very far away.

Chaos theory is still at the descriptive level in terms of causation, but experiments do strongly suggest that chaos theory has exceptional value. The butterfly is a metaphor for a micro variable that can create macro changes in society. When one says in both literature and common parlance

that "little things mean a lot" or "what you send out comes back to you" or " someday that will catch up with you" or finally "the best laid plans of mice and men can go astray" you have arrived

at chaos theory.

Such movies as Lost, Heroes, Babel, Six Degrees of Separation and even Bobby have all the same cause and interconnectedness. You go by someone who some other day will have a big impact in your life. Three years later, that other person will climb into a car, and crash into you in a city where you live. Or, you are having something to eat at a restaurant and another person will be sitting next to you. Later another will be calling you long distance and you will answer but that call was really the wrong number. However, once you were at the phone, you decided to make another call. Your cell phone needed recharging so you got out of your chair and went to your land line. The call you made started a marriage that would last the rest of your life and for years another person managed a number of computers that processed your family checks. He wrongly routed yours one day accidentally and your check was sent to the wrong person who called you and you went to their workplace. You needed the check that day and once you got to their office on the fifteenth floor an airplane crashed into your building and blew the two of you away. In that airplane was the person that set next you at the restaurant that special night described above. Little things mean a lot.

We make contacts all the time. Most are temporary and shallow, but the choices that we make have a trickle effect and they can impact us years from now. In Kutcher's Butterfly Effect, tiny changes early in his character's life have tremendous impacts later. As we watch, we get to see how the little events explode in 4 or 5 variations later in life.

Ironically, Kutcher was also in Bobby. However, regardless of all the films that you will see, expect Butterfly Fiction to become part of literature. We can also revisit old novels and discover that there were other novels, essays, and related that tell the same story of  distant actions that later impact on our lives.That is butterfly fiction. In those days long ago, it didn't have a name. Now it does.