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Most people play the what-if game at some point or other. Many of us look back on a specific moment when we made a decision that had ramifications far beyond our own lives, and we wonder if we did the right thing. For example, what if I had not skipped grades when I was 12 years old? I came to regret that decision frequently during my high school years, and if I could revisit any moment in my past, that would probably be it.
But I was not the only person affected by my choice. Had I not skipped grades, I would probably not have gone to Bible school, and I would not have become friends with a couple of fellows who ended up moving to Vancouver and becoming my first roommates. Two of my roommates went on to marry women who lived in the suite below our own, and one of these couples already has children. There are times when I wonder if those kids will ever know that they owe their existence, in part, to the fact that I said "yes" and not "no" when I was offered a chance to accelerate my education.
If my actions affect the lives of others in ways that cannot be foreseen, then the decisions of others have affected my life, too. And all of our decisions are made in the context of seemingly random events, which provide yet another opportunity to play the what-if game.
Several films have been playing that game lately. Last year, in Sliding Doors, Gwyneth Paltrow played a woman named Helen whose life goes in two separate directions following a fateful run through a train station. In one timeline, Helen catches the train and arrives home in time to discover that her boyfriend has been cheating on her. In the other, Helen misses the train, and in the extra time it takes her to get home, her boyfriend's lover leaves the apartment undetected. Through a combination of chance and choice, the Helen who discovers her boyfriend's infidelity meets a fate very different from that of the Helen who doesn't.
Run Lola Run, an energetic German film released in North America several months later, ups the stakes by diverting our attention away from the protagonists every now and then. Lola (Franka Potente) gets a phone call from her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who has just lost a bag containing 100,000 deutsche marks that he is supposed to deliver to a gangster he's meeting in 20 minutes. In desperation, Manni decides to rob a store. Lola, hoping to stop him, runs out the door, down the stairs, and out into the streets, in search of money. She does this not once, but three times, in three different timelines, each the result of an encounter with a bully and a dog in the stairwell. And as Lola passes people on the street, director Tom Tykwer gives us flash-forward glimpses of the lives they will go on to live. The person who meets a spouse or experiences a religious conversion in one timeline might die a horrible death in another.
More recently, the Australian comedy Me Myself I stars Rachel Griffiths as Pamela, a lonely single woman who wonders if she made a mistake by turning down a marriage proposal from an old flame named Robert (David Roberts) 13 years before. One day Pamela, while fleeing a street evangelist, is hit by a car, and the driver turns out to be an alternate version of herself who accepted Robert's proposal and went on to have three children with him. Married Pamela takes Single Pamela home, then mysteriously disappears, leaving Single Pamela to figure out the exhausting intricacies of motherhood. Still, marriage has its benefits, and Single Pamela comes to enjoy her sex life with Robert. But as time goes on, she discovers that Married Pamela's life wasn't all that perfect either; in fact, the marriage had been on the verge of collapse. In the end, we learn that, just as Single Pamela has been living Married Pamela's life, Married Pamela has been living in Single Pamela's world; both women needed to see how things would have been if they had made a different choice. And, now that they know, both return to their original lives.
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