Time travel, changing history as the subject of film and television works, in the present is not uncommon, but grandmother paradox or parallel time or space, there seems to be no good theoretical explanation and proof, but this does not affect the good looks of many related film and television works, the key is to see how the creator’s level of self-justification. Such as “the night the comet came”, set people to meet with themselves in another time and space without annihilation, and the first “Terminator”, set the origin of the male and female protagonists is a circular timeline without a head or tail.
As for “Mirage”, it seems to me more like a segmented function with breakpoints, the formation process of which is not mysterious and is what the movie is telling in the right order – the story of two sets of breakpoints jumping to change the local function.
Note a few details:
1. although the knife was in Clara’s hand, it was Angel who pushed his wife to her death in the pushing and shoving, and he later covered up his mistress Clara;
2. the film deliberately mentions that after his capture, Angel confessed that he was going to bury the body in a slaughterhouse, and repeatedly emphasizes, through David’s mouth, that this is strange;
3. the film recreates the murder scene, combined with the timing of the opening credits Nick Jr. crashed through the murderer, Angel should not have time to think about how to dispose of the body;
Combined with the above three points, the film is likely to imply and emphasize that this is not a story about their own separate parallel time and space.
If Vera had not saved Nick Jr. on that night, all life would have gone on as usual, like a continuous function curve drawn based on the timeline, as shown in the blue curve (for the convenience of drawing it as a straight line, only the color is used to make the distinction), without any break point to continue, only the solid line without the dotted line. She may find David cheating sometime in the future, perhaps never notice, in any case, the days will be like the original, ordinary and ordinary day by day, until the end of life.
(1) to the original life function named f0, in this blue line, in 1989 Nick Jr. died in a car accident, Angel was arrested, Clara took the watch, Angel harbored Clara to escape sanctions, Hilda’s body was found in time, more than a decade later Vera met Captain Otto, cut off David from Ursula, gave birth to a daughter and gave up being a doctor, and in 2014 David cheated on his nurse.
However, Vera could not sit idly by on a 9-year-old boy who saw his death, she pleaded vociferously, changing the fate of Nick Jr.’s life and the course of his own life, the blue f0 function terminated at point D, which is the night of 2014.11.9.
(2) two symmetrical sustained thunderstorms exactly 25 years apart, together with the TV camera formed a spatio-temporal connection conditions, Vera’s move to change history, the formation of a function breakpoint at point D, AD between the blue f0 function is replaced by a green f1 function.
On this green line, Nick Jr. is saved in 1989, the dead body is buried in the slaughterhouse, the main culprit marries his mistress, Nick becomes a police officer, finds Vera and falls in love and marries, supports Vera to become a doctor, David marries Ursula and suffers from a meningioma, and cheats on his nurse in 2014. Since Nick Jr. did not know about Vera’s original life, he fell in love with Vera by accident and did not realize what it cost Vera.
The f1 green line is generated by the f0 blue line after the breakpoint rewrites point B at point D. This determines that the breakpoint D maker, Vera, although in the green line, is also bound to mutate at point D and have both f0 and f1 dual memories, that is, the blue dashed line erased between BD, and the newly generated green solid line between BE. So the green line in Vera does not live in Nick’s old house, and did not succeed in using the TV to contact Nick Jr. It does not affect the green line to continue to develop, because the change comes from the blue line.
For the blue line of Vera, after the D point as if waking up to a strange world, the brain is all the memories of the blue line. For the green line, Vera was suddenly written into the blue line memory at point D. She seemed to be a different person in the eyes of outsiders and behaved strangely.
After the D-point mutation, Vera needs to make physical contact with others to retrieve the memories of the new timeline.
As the D point began Willa has active blue line memory and passive green line memory, DE between is Willa has been begging to be erased blue line and looking for a way to go back, only remember the green line of Nick had to go with Willa to find the reason, in the process to know in the blue imaginary line they have not experienced, the story of what happened to Willa.
If Vera give up her daughter, she can take the memory of the blue dotted line, and Nick continue to live, so that the f1 green line continues, that is, the part of the green dotted line. But Willa does not want to lose her daughter, preferring to gamble with her life, so the butterfly effect has to continue.
3) Willa threatened with death, Nick had to create a second breakpoint through the TV connection at the E point before the end of the symmetrical thunderstorm, that is, the night of 2014.11.12, erasing the f1 green line between the BE and rewriting it as the f2 orange line.
One can try to reason that Nick’s thinking was to restore Vera’s blue line as much as possible, including:
failure to inform the location of the hidden body to prevent Nick Jr. from reporting Angel, the watch as evidence to bring Clara to jail, changing the blue line captain’s life, and thus changing the life of Vera;
discouraging Nick Jr. from meeting Willa at the station when he grows up so that Willa can successfully meet the captain and marry David and have a daughter;
Given that Nick on the orange line still became a police officer and returned home, he should not have advised Nick Jr. to give up the search for the truth, if the time is right, perhaps he can also teach Nick Jr. to learn to go dark earlier, to suffer less unnecessarily, and to return at the right time in the future to uncover the killer;;
Reasoning from Nick’s point of view, the orange line Willa will return to David’s embrace, she is likely to also forget the green line with Nick’s memories, while they will have the green line memories, then there is a possibility that Nick is living and working in the neighborhood, in addition to uncovering the murderer, but also hold the expectation that may see Willa again, watching Willa from a distance;;
The last and most important point, after doing all the above confessions, Nick made what seemed to him the most reliable change to bail out, is to let Nick Jr. take away the TV and camera, to try to avoid from the root of the most Vera save himself to open a new timeline, for the sake of Vera, he wanted to get everything back to square one, even if he might disappear.
Due to the urgency of time and the importance of the task, I personally believe that in order to save Vera, Nick could not afford to think more about himself, coupled with little knowledge of the principles of changing history, the above may be all the efforts he can do within his cognitive ability.
I’m afraid that Nick could not have imagined that in the orange line, he not only survived and retained the old memories, even Vera retained all the old memories.
In the new timeline, the two can renew their relationship, is Nick’s heart to pay the sacrifice of the unexpected, which is the writer’s reward for the smitten, and Vera’s two best, is the writer’s reward for the good people.
As Nick created the breakpoint E, referring to Vera’s experience, the green line of Nick will suddenly find himself coming to the f2 orange line after the E point, while having dual memories of f1 and f2, that is, the green dotted line erased between BE, and the newly generated orange solid line between BE. Similarly, in the eyes of those outside the orange line, Nick will suddenly become another person at point E, from a man who does not know Vera, to Nick who loves Vera.
So Nick saw Vera, after pretending a few sentences, then revealed a meaningful smile, that means he actually remembered everything.
As for Vera, because the priority of the breakpoint D is higher than the breakpoint E, the former is the prerequisite for the latter, so f2 orange line of Vera in the D point will still be affected by the breakpoint, gradually get terrible and confusing memories, that is, David said “and” nightmares, until after the E point, Vera completely get AE blue, green, orange Triple memory, that is, the movie Vera experienced and recovered memories (for Vera orange line and blue line experience is the same), but it is still too unreal, like a nightmare, so Vera verified David’s betrayal, Angel and Clara’s affair, the slaughterhouse corpse, to prove that the dream is not a dream, but also to prove the green line Nick sacrificed for her love.
So the future, in the orange line, Vera and Nick have both love, Vera also do not have to lose their daughter, that is, the film is Vera against the odds, the final fish and bear’s paw both happy story.
This movie is also an expression of the choice to decide life, planting good causes to get good results, as well as the story of the man who lost his horse is not a blessing.
Vera gave up the good man Otto, from Ursula side intercepted David, but also to their own seeds of misfortune, she saved Nick Jr.’s life, although let Angel get away with more fast 25 years, but also so that Nick Jr. survived to get Clara’s watch, as to send her to jail with the evidence of ambush, Vera and use their own sacrifice to return to the existence of their daughter, and give up David away from the possibility of misfortune .
Not to mention that David’s ambush buried clues to his possible murder, single on the habitual cleavage of human character problems and emotional problems of potential violence factor, Willa’s rescue of little Nick, but also precisely to save themselves, whether life or love.
After sorting out the entire process of segmentation function formation, you can conclude the creative thinking of the screenwriter, “Mirage” in this story, if the butterfly effect to explain, then it is the same time and space after the local was changed superimposed results, if the use of multiple time and space to explain, then they are not independent of each other in parallel, but three time and space superimposed collapse into one time and space.
Regardless of which explanation, there are similar breakpoints in D and E. These two points are like the curvature discontinuity in a continuous curve, or the singularity in a unified formula function, or the breakpoint in a segmented function.
The film also deliberately emphasizes the discontinuity of the virgin’s behavior and memory at the breakpoint, so there is no need to dwell too much on how the change occurs when the camera is taken away from the orange line, because the change originally starts from the blue line, and the three color lines are finally combined in a discontinuous way.
For others, life is still continuous, while for Vera and Nick, every time they come to a breakpoint, some strange changes in themselves, and then naturally skip and change the conditions, which is what Nick said “we live in a chaotic system. In the orange line after the E point, the two of them will carry the memory of living more than others for decades, and long loved each other for a long time, so go on.
[Add] To summarize the orange line:
A point when Nick Jr. was dissuaded by Vera, did not go to the neighbor’s house to avoid a robbery, after sneaking into the neighbor’s house to see the split, picked up Clara’s gold watch, reported forced to apologize to Angel, Nick Jr. was not willing to be misunderstood so guard the TV, at point B was persuaded by Officer Nick, take away the TV and camera, hide the wish to quietly try to grow up to become a police officer, and do not bother Vera, so that Vera can meet Tony married to David at point C to have The next daughter.
Willa lived in Nick’s old house, at point D began to be written blue + green line of memory, like a nightmare, three days later, that is, after point E, Willa’s memory written complete, the end of the film Willa woke up directly after all the memories before the suicide, at this time she still felt as if she had a long nightmare, see David beside her very happy, then went to hug his daughter.
Then she found that there was no TV at home, and she found the matchbox thrown out three days ago downstairs, but this did not prove whether the dream was real or not, and whether it was true that David had cheated on her in the dream, because throwing the matchbox was something that had happened before she went to bed, and then she saw Angel with Clara, which meant that the news of Angel’s arrest had changed, but she was still not sure whether the news she had supposedly seen was a dream or a real So she went to the slaughterhouse to dig up Hilda’s bones, only this [no outsiders know and mentioned in the news and the body has not been buried] ironclad fact, like the spinning gyroscope in the space of the stolen dream, can really become all dreams are true corroboration.
For Vera, the life between AD, the orange line and the blue line is the same, as back to the original life. For Nick, the orange line still changed the blue line he died at the age of 9 tragedy, but also changed the green line he waited for Vera suffered and met Vera happy, to the point E Nick will suddenly change and remember everything experienced with Vera, but it will also feel like a dream, he needs to contact with the people around him without disturbing Vera, to verify what kind of history of the life he is in, and in just a few hours Vera has found Hilda’s bones, so they reunite again, and when they meet Nick will still pretend not to know Vera like he did on the Green Line, only last time it was heartbreaking, this time it’s a joke.
Back again to the news of Angel’s arrest in the blue line, why did the writers emphasize that he confessed to wanting to bury the body in the slaughterhouse, because that was his memory in the green line, and it was a memory very close to the point A of the arrest. With this reasoning, Angel in the green line may also dream about the arrest, Nick Jr. may also dream about the car accident, and so on and so forth.
In the erasure and rewriting of the blue, green and orange lines, the “Schrödinger’s superposition” occurs, the erased imaginary line is hidden under the solid line, all the overlapping part of the experience, may occasionally cross in the consciousness of the different lines, like a dream, it is difficult to distinguish the real from the fake, which is quite like Zhuang Zhou dreaming of butterflies.
The only certainty is that, no matter in which life, Angel did his best to protect Clara, Otto will miss Vera was cut off, David always habitual cheating also suspected of murder, Vera will always marry to accompany her to steal the station sign.
The so-called character determines fate, perhaps this is their “destiny” it.