The Mandela Effect feels like a movie where we are on a journey with the writer of the film as he works his way through the very idea of the “Mandela Effect”. And I think that is a very good thing.
For those who may not know, The Mandela Effect is a term coined for people who have memories of something happening that is counter to reality. The most popular (and where the name comes from) is the idea that many people thought Nelson Mandela had died in the 1980s. Had you put them to a lie detector test, they would have passed it because they remembered it. The only problem is that Mandela didn’t pass away until 2013.
False memories? Parallel universes bleeding into each other? The simulation which we all currently live in (and is possibly the darkest timeline) glitching?
Whatever your flavor of rabbit hole you wish to take, this movie is more than willing to spiral down with you.
The core plot is a simple enough one: A husband and wife have a daughter who passes away. While trying to make some kind of sense of the world he now lives in, Brendan notices that some small things are different than what he remembers. Book titles, the Looney Toons name, the look of the Monopoly guy… all of this pointing him, in his grief, into trying to find an explanation for it all. And he then begins to take a personal journey to figure out whether his reality is true or not.
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Definitely less Horror and more Science Fiction (obviously), I thought that some of the questions being raised by Brendan were ones we all have asked. He is simply trying to find Order in a world full of Chaos. The same thing we all would like in our lives. It is somehow more comforting to think that our lives are perhaps not our own, but a simulation being run around us. Order is comforting. Chaos is terrifying. If there is no specific reason for an event in our lives (especially a tragic one), that is so much worse than anything else might be.
Brendan wallows in these theories, emotionally seperating from his wife who is also trying to work her way through the grief process. And through all of that it introduces a couple of interesting thoughts about the lengths someone might go to “get their life back”. Would they abandon the ones who survived in order to cling to a life which doesn’t exist anymore?
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How much does a person’s memories affect the world around them? If you remember an event one way and everyone else remembers it differently… how do you rectify those differences? How much do other people’s stories shape our memories as well? I know there have been many times where I remembered a portion of an event, but then a family member mentioned something which I’d completely forgotten (or buried too deep to even conjure back up). But is that memory mine or simply a construct of someone else?
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A couple of years ago, I hit upon a similar thought process. I’d come home and my toiletries were on a different side of the bathroom. I’d been going to the right sink for years and suddenly I’m using the left sink. It’s a very minor change, but one which got my mind turning over and over again. If I knew about the Mandela Effect, it wasn’t at the forethought of my brain. And I started crafting a story about a man who was starting to see some inconsistencies with his memory and everyone else’s memory.
Many, many words later, and I had writen The Echo Effect.
While my trip down the rabbit hole was far different than this particular movie, I enjoyed viewing another (a parallel) version of these ideas could be presented… and what their ultimate outcomes might be.
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John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.
He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!
Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.
His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.
He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com
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