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Remember the scene of pride and prejudice in BBC adaptation? Otherwise, they must either be too young or not a popular culture consumer. It is regularly voted for one of the most memorable moments in British television history.
Iconic, a giant floating statue was honoured in the middle of London’s serpentine lake in 2013, with Darcy showing his hips deep inside the water, his undulating muscles visible under his slimy shirt. The Guardian is one of many newspapers covering the announcement, describing the sculpture as a celebration of the “notorious scene.” The statue’s video news segment described the moment “seeing Firth flapping from the lake.”
But here’s something interesting. This scene doesn’t actually exist. I discovered this while trying to find the original footage of a recent feature. You will not see Mr. Darcy coming out of the lake. We see him jumping into the water in his clothes and in the next shot he walks along the solid ground – slightly wet, but yes, but certainly not drip. In other words, this “memorable” scene is nothing more than a figure of our collective, passionate imagination (as Firth himself once had to point out).
And this is not the only thing we have dreamed of. Remember when pedestrians changed the colour of a refreshing packet of salt and vinegar from blue to green, and vinegar, and vice versa? Remember when the “Kitkat” logo was hyphenated? Remember the treasure trove behind fruit logo fruit on loom? If so, you succumbed to what is known as the “Mandela effect.”
The term is credited to “paranoral researcher” Fiona Bloom. She produced it in 2010 when a large number of people on the internet claimed that anti-apartheid activists recalled the death of South African President Nelson Mandela in prison in the 1980s. He was actually still alive.
Psychologically, it might be that we call collective confusion: (MIS) Memory is the confidence of unintentionally distorted or forged memories, even when evidence of conflicting it is presented. Research shows that memory is not static or fixed, but instead is formed by “rehearsals” of stories over and over again with themselves and others. Once we have sufficiently exaggerated or approximated the story, it becomes our “truth.”
This also works at the collective level. Psychologists explain that the effects of Mandela occur through a combination of emotional bias, the consumption of misinformation on the Internet and media, psychological priming, and the need to understand things.
Most of the examples I cite have many reasonable explanations. Mandela’s death may have been confused with the death of another anti-apartheid activist named Steve Biko, from which the popular film was made. With Darcy, our false memories are probably the result of both filling in the story gaps and repeating the media-making scenes. Darcy’s first mention of “dripping” of Darcy wet from the lake was independent in 1995 shortly after the release of the series. It was then repeated in hundreds of articles.
But some things are not so easy to explain by simple psychology. Last year, the fact-checking website Snopes published a thorough investigation into whether it had been featured on the loom’s logo fruit and discovered something new before. Where did that idea come from? Is there any evidence of glitches in this matrix? Those who spend time on online forums will not be surprised to hear that many inhabitants of the internet think it constitutes evidence of parallel universes.
As artificial intelligence becomes more and more refined, what will affect our memories? Will it be difficult to prove the “real” version of an event when the incorrect version looks very real? Do facts and fiction become blurry unless the truth is evaluated anymore?
Or, on the contrary, would AI help to eliminate fakes and historical revisionism through some kind of close fact-checking system, and reestablish them in the memory of the collective consciousness of truth? As an eternal optimist, I’m going with the latter. But I keep holding Darcy’s memory in his dripping wet shirt, thank you.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
