The Mandela Effect (Disappearing Braces in Moonraker)

[Belligerent Savant]

.
2 recent threads now that you have me chuckling audibly, Jack.
Well done.

[dada]

So no one is willing to admit the obvious. The simple answer is: Consumerism has rotted your brains.

The 'dimensional rifts' are inside. The canyons of your mind.

Can't be. It's gotta be 'time travel,' and 'dimensional bleed.' Memory and projections of the future aren't functions of the present, no. There's this field, see, where all events and probabilities are happening at once, that you can travel through like space.

It isn't like a dream, you can even take your body with you, manipulate stuff. Aliens use a 'time body.' They're more advanced.

The aliens and I, we're all laughing at you. Silly humans.

[psynapz]

Har har... I have a skep-dick friend who calls this site Vigorous Masturbation.

But he reads it!

(for the articles)

[Luther Blissett]

I too remember the braces. And I have to be honest, I very recently just watched a special or perhaps even a documentary that used clips from James Bond films (perhaps to promote Spectre, that's how recent this was) with voiceover commentary, and the braces smile scene was definitely in this.

It's not in Pervert's Guide to Ideology is it? I wouldn't put it past him.

[PufPuf93]

Perhaps the occasional metal teeth are Palmer Eldritch?

[82_28]

My vote is that the younger mind conflated the man's metallic teeth with the young girl's. Many girls had braces in those days. Not much there since I never saw the movie anyway. But yeah. Thinking back, all young people were up to the prospect of having braces. You saw them everywhere, including that weird head gear shit.

That's what I think and I'm always down with a good Jack Palance Effect (I actually "started" that but had a friend start it because I was scared to post here).

[dada]

Yeah, but that's getting back to something that came up in the 'simulation' thread. The difference between saying, 'we're made of dust, poor little us,' and 'we're made of dust? that's incredible!'

Just because we're made of dust, doesn't change what we are, what we can do. We're dust that turned into these things that can love and laugh, do all this other neat shit. Of course we waste it on discussing nostalgic minutia.

I think the obsession with consumer culture artifacts is a type of displaced fear of mortality. Pop culture as watered down totemistic fetishization.

It's like we're addicted to a cheap rush of lower insectoid hive 'emotions.' Some of us.

Dust does some funny things.

[elfismiles]

For the record, I think it was someone else describing having a copy in the basement ...

I have/had a copy my dad recorded from TV (I think) and/or an actual store-bought copy ... BOTH on BETA tape, not VHS.

But so far my searches have not panned out. And, I don't currently have a beta player.

ETA: And personally, I chalk all of this up to the malleability of memory and perception.

.
In any event, this could be a 'power of suggestion' scenario. This "meme" (or whatever we want to call it, since the veracity of the Mandela Effect remains in dispute, for now) started with someone placing the suggestion/framing the scene to convey that she had braces in that scene, and so most played along because they recall braces AT SOME POINT in the movie, though not necessarily in that particular scene.

Nah, I now think the likeliest scenario to be that she did not have braces in the smile scene or any other, but we (a lot of people) later remembered that she did, because it makes sense when you recall the smile scene that way. And this would not be very unusual, especially with memories of fictions we consume. For years I was confusing characters from Catch-22 and Catcher in the Rye, because I'd read them in the same year of school, and only untangled it after reading one of these again.

Then again, elfismile's old VHS may yet show otherwise. (Sorry your getting it doesn't count - who says the VHS being sold now isn't doctored too?!)

[Nordic]

I have to add: the girl is a lot hotter than I remember.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Well, ladies and gentlemen. I managed to locate the 'old VHS tape' in question (complete with 80s-era commercials -- apparently it was recorded off a standard TV channel, not "HBO" as previously presumed). I have reviewed the scene/scenes in question.

I have CONFIRMED that the blonde girl in pigtails ........






















is NOT wearing braces at ANY point in the movie.

"malleability of memory and perception", indeed.

I'll look into the best method to upload my copy (I'd have to convert it to digital first), though may send screenshots in the interim for anyone interested.

[Nordic]

It proves nothing! You see, the VHS tape is from this timeline, and the Movie we all remember seeing is from another timeline that somehow merged with this one, erasing the existence of what we saw except in our memories.

I mean I can't believe I have to explain this.

[JackRiddler]

But if that's your time travel model, then we would not be having this conversation in the first place. (Unless we're having it because of memory effects unrelated to time travel.)

Also, I can't believe the death of Arnold Palmer hasn't set off a new wave of this stuff. I mean, seriously? That guy wasn't dead yet?

[Nordic]

But that's how the theory works. Reality changes but our memories don't. If our memories changed as well, we'd be completely in the dark about how CERN is doing this! Goddamnit CERN!

Ok as soon as we start seeing our dead relatives walking around we'll know this shit is true. In fact the whole zombie fad on popular culture was probably deliberately engineered just to get us ready for this.

[brekin]

I think the obsession with consumer culture artifacts is a type of displaced fear of mortality. Pop culture as watered down totemistic fetishization.
It's like we're addicted to a cheap rush of lower insectoid hive 'emotions.' Some of us.
Dust does some funny things.

Exactly. Our culture has increasingly tried to secularize, commodify, and commercialize our sense of existence to where all we really have is "pop culture" as a binding force.
Sadly, when reality intrudes I don't think it can keep out the chill. But since the only frame many people have is the fuzzy pop-sciency-religio-entertainment inculcation they've been raised on when confronted with reality unprepared, they try to master it by jumping back into pop culture that had unprepared them in the first place. That is why the increasingly hermeneutics of pop culture minutiae I think is taking place. Since people have spent their lives immersed in this material, it has to mean something right? And tropes that continually come up, time travel, parallel universes, etc. Have to exist right? I think that is why entertainment forms are being created that purposely seek to create endless speculation, endless commentary, endless variable frames of meaning, endless participation. This is just the latest pop culture shroud of turin. Many people view their life as a movie, and significant for many, their life movie is a series of movies they have watched. Those movies have to be important or their lives will sadly not have been important. Viewing them again we discover most of them have not held up well, but if we can discover fairies in the wallpaper in the background, that reinvests them with importance, and us.

[guruilla]

Pop culture is no different from so-called high culture in being an expression of the human unconscious, consciously shaped and directed for social engineering purposes (using social engineering in the widest sense, not necessarily pejoratively). The difference now seems to be that ancient man didn't analyze his myths, he just lived by them (obeyed the gods rather than tried to dissect them in his lab and find out how they were created). Now we are high on the realization that our gods are projections of our own unconscious and so, by all means, let's co-opt them to our conscious wills (hack into our own unconscious). Ironically, the desire to turn pop culture into reality is itself engendered in us by the same pop culture we are getting possessed by. (Stories of time travel, shape-shifting realities, etc.)

All the theories put forward at this thread, including the wackier more out there ones (tongue in cheek or not) about time travel etc, are based in the assumption that an objective reality exists to be tampered with. Yet objective reality is an oxymoron insofar as what lacks a subject can never be experienced or talked about. Point being, it's not necessary to go all new age to recognize that there IS no demonstrable cut-off between perception and what's being perceived, and that our own lived experience indicates that a reality that is malleable, subject to change via interaction with consciousness, is far more likely than not.