Movies on My Mind
Week Ending 3 September 2016
The Mandela Effect
So did C-3P0 always have a silver leg? Did Dolly from Moonraker once wear braces? Did Forrest’s mother always say life was like a box of chocolates? In the case of the latter, and without really wanting to trawl back through the movie to check, I’d be minded to suggest the confusion arises from Gump’s momma telling him it is like a box of chocolates at one point and his recounting it at another.
But the silver leg thing… I don’t remember that. And it does make much more sense for Dolly to have braces because… well, Jaws has braces. I mean, she’s adorable either way, but it was an instant signal they were simpatico.
And if they’re genuine anomalies, symptoms of the Mandela Effect, does this mean the Hadron Collider is messing with out reality(ies)? With trifling trivialities such as these, ones that inevitably leave some of us askance and others putting it all down to age, faulty memories, or not paying enough damn attention in the first place? Anthony Daniels has said C-3PO definitely had a silver leg from the get-go, but as someone at the heart of any reality warping, he’d presumably have to be able to directly affirm it. Can we ask Oliver Stone if JFK’s car had four seats or six? I know he wasn’t there (well, I don’t know, maybe he was, now), but if anyone has an opinion on it, he should. I don’t pay enough attention to cars to have a strong opinion on that one; I was just going back and to the left as instructed. And Does the lion lie down with the lamb in Isaiah 11:6 or does a wolf do the job instead?
Answer: Like Darth’s “Luke, I am your father”, it appears to have forever been a popular misquote. Much as I love a conspiracy, and doubt very much the Hadron Collider is doing anything commendable (at very least, a bunch of “whacky” science nerds are play-human sacrificing in carparks, a double-double bluff if ever there was one), the biblical quote suggests one of those repeated memes that has become the established form, rather than a CERN-complicit charge satanic conspiracy to change sacred scripture.* Alternatively, if you want to keep a conspiratorial theme running, it could be latest distracting psyop.
Which doesn’t mean CERN isn’t heaving with Satan-worshipping scientists enacting their latest version of a Babalon Working, just that these glitches in the matrix do seem to tend to elicit the sceptical/not really that crucial response. The problem is, which isn’t to doubt others wholly invested in this, that you read enough cumulative references to reported pop culture anomalies in songs, movies and TV (and deaths) and it leads the initially intriguing to become less than transfixing.
But the Hadron Collider. Still a bad thing. Quit with the human sacrifices, guys. Even the fake ones.
*Addendum 24/08/22: The problem with this is that any rationalisation is still a rationalisation. I’m currently going with the Mandela Effect being a thing (and a natural thing), but its specific instances likely being a mix and match of genuine and less-than-total recall.
