‘The Mandela Effect Phenomenon’ is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen

A new documentary looks at the phenomenon of people misremembering things from the past- and bathes the concept in embarrassing, conspiratorial nonsense.

Here’s what I’ve never understood about the Mandela Effect: The story goes that some people think they remember Nelson Mandela dying at some point in the 1980s when he was still imprisoned in South Africa. Therefore, they were surprised when Mandela died, for real, in 2013, and something must have happened to explain that. 

But… Mandela was in the news a lot in the intervening years! He won the Nobel Peace Prize, ended South African apartheid, was elected president of South Africa, and served in that office for five years. Two different biopics were made about him.  For the last 30 years of his life, Nelson Mandela was nothing less than one of the most famous people in the world. 

So, what’s the explanation? Is some large group of people, say, confusing Mandela with Steve Biko, another South African anti-apartheid activist who really did die in prison and was the subject of a biopic, Cry Freedom, which came out in 1987? 

If someone says they were surprised in 2013 that Nelson Mandela hadn’t died 20 years earlier, what they’re really saying is, “I don’t follow the news, and I’m generally ignorant about world events.” 

Or is there another explanation- that some amorphous “they” intervened at some point to change history? 

This and similar phenomena are explored in The Mandela Effect Phenomenon, an absolutely laughable documentary that landed on VOD on July 9. The documentary examines historical misrememberings involving Mandela’s death, the spelling of “Berenstain Bears,” and various famous movie lines. 

Is historical memory faulty, with parodies and pop culture references sometimes bleeding in with the historical memory? Or is something more nefarious going on? And what does that nefarious thing have to do with the Large Hadron Collider? 

The film posits a bunch of bonkers, ridiculous conspiracy theories about someone intervening to change history at some point. One theory is that the Large Hadron Collider somehow opened a portal to a different dimension which, among other things, changed the spelling of “JIF” peanut butter and various film one-liners.

The Mandela Effect Phenomenon was directed by Robert Kiviat, who’s spent much of his career making films about aliens and other conspiracies; the Alien Autopsy pseudo-documentary from the ‘90s was him.

The question of why so many people remember things inaccurately is interesting and worthy of study. But this documentary jumps to the wildest, most ridiculous conclusions, without coming anywhere close to making a convincing case. There’s also talk that “we’re living in a simulation,” the favorite theory of all of the dumbest people you know.

Another big flaw: If there’s a plot to change history and do it in an underhanded manner, why aren’t they changing more important things than movie lines or whether or not Sinbad played a wizard in a movie called Shazam?

The film also spends a lot of time on movie quotes, which many people remember as different from how they were actually said in the movie.

The line in The Empire Strikes Back is “No, I am your father,” not “Luke, I am your father.” 

We’re asked why subsequent commercials, pop culture references, and parodies have used the “Luke” version—I think maybe people are remembering the commercials! Why did James Earl Jones, in guest-starring on Two and a Half Men, say, “Luke, I am your father”? Probably because the writer of that episode remembered it the (wrong) way. 

Even weirder is the idea that “If you build it, they will come” in Field of Dreams was changed at some point to “If you build it, HE will come.” But of course, it’s “He.” The “He” part—first interpreted to mean Shoeless Joe Jackson but later revealed as Ray’s father—is super-important to the movie's plot! 

Another example in the movie is that many people remember Sex and the City being Sex IN the City during its early run. I remember, in fact, that on my college newspaper in 1999, I accidentally called the show Sex IN the City, and was corrected. Sex AND the City really was the name of Candace Bushnell’s newspaper column and book. 

The final example of the film is one of the weakest: It’s supposed to an otherworldly phenomenon that Freddie Mercury doesn’t say “Of the world” at the end of “We are the Champions,” when he did do so at the end of the song in the Live Aid performance- but guess what- bands sometimes perform songs differently live. 

It’s just self-evidently stupid and ridiculous, going into Alex Jones territory at various points, with talk of the global elites, Satanists, and secret ceremonies. It even flirts with antisemitism when someone argues that the Monster Energy drink logo… is 666 in Hebrew! (Really, it’s three of the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which is not the number 6.)

 If someone in real life said some of these things, I would get up and leave the room to avoid them.