“Me-e-e-mories are made of this, da, da, dada, daDA, da, da . . .” Does anyone remember this song? Perhaps you’ve never heard it or of it. Perhaps you’ve heard it on an oldies radio show? Maybe you remember hearing your parents play it on their phonograph? Perhaps you remember what a phonograph is? If I heard the song, “Memories are made of this,” the first time it was ever played and you heard it played on an oldies show in 2007, is your memory less real than mine? If I used a phonograph, or stereo record player, for years and you have only seen one in a movie that is set in the sixties, is my memory more real? Is the phonograph I used more real than the one you saw in the film? My comments are aimed more toward the earlier class discussions that looked at the relative realness of memories. Hmmm, seems the realness thing is my personal theme. Well, like my comments on reality, I don’t think memories exist in a hierarchy of realness. I could see some differentiation based on their relatively to a particular use or point of view, but that would not indicate a memory was “more” or “less” real. The event that one remembers is presumably a real event, but does the accuracy of the memory affect its reality? A more pertinent question might be, and one touching on Memento themes in particular, does the memory affect the reality of the event? (Be warned—I fully intend[ed] to raise many more specific questions than I will attempt to even tentatively answer)
Someone who is invested in the worldview which insists there is one true reality and deviation from it indicates falseness or delusion would say the event that occurs is real and any memory that is “inaccurate’ would be unreal and a subversion of reality. In a way, this would concur with Annie Dillard (in a totally unrelated book, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek) who related a instance of living in the moment, familiar to Zen Buddhists and other Eastern spiritual practitioners, which produced for her a revelation—the immediate experience only exists at the exact moment it is experienced and any subsequent attempt to remember, recreate, or capture the moment is just an attempt to describe something real and is not reality. I say ‘in a way’ because the true reality believer would probably argue that an accurate memory is real—which opens a whole other can of worms. Someone who takes an even slightly more flexible view might look at how an inaccurate memory could affect reality by influencing current events through decisions or attitudes based on faulty memories. So, the faulty memory would not be “real,” and yet, it would surely be part of the reality that would not exist if it hadn’t been there to affect it. So, causal relations would seem to have some impact on the relative status of memory as reality. So there it is and on it goes. There are multiple frames, arguments, and relations that can be applied; like the character in the new Jim Carrey movie, I tend to say “yes” to everything. In my world of multiple, fluid, infinitely unique, and endlessly intersecting realities, everything is true/real, and every memory is real. Oh, I forgot to mention the Idealist philosophy, which state the only reality is in the present, and which I interpret to conjecture that when one remembers something, they create a new reality of that memory as they bring it into their current consciousness. And yes, you can change the past because what you are doing is accessing a different past that shifts you into the present reality that included that past. Yes, I do remember going off; yes, I have turned this into way too much of a personal reflection; yes, I will gladly go down any road: yes, you can watch me fall, or yes, you can see soldier on—that part is up to you.

It’s been fun

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The Shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.

The camera is held by the subject, which according to the philosophical definition is the thinking feeling entity, and pointed at the object, which is external to the subject’s mind. The use of the mechanism necessarily delineates who is the subject and what is the object. And yet when the mechanism produces a medium, like a photo, that distinction is undermined. The viewer automatically identifies with the object. Just as we identify with the hero of a novel, we identify with the object of a photo. The message of the medium is incorporated into the subject’s memory, and becomes accepted. The media vision of the past becomes our past; even though, because we have identified ourselves with the object, it is not really any objective past. We have identified with the object and it therefore exists not in the past but in a separate version of our own time. Of course, the camera is just one such mechanism.

Let us investigate some of the others for a moment. The electric saw is a unique mechanism in the poem because its process in the poem is entirely metaphoric. The saw bites into decades just as father’s photos bring William back decades in time. As he scans the photos of and by his father, William begins to identify with the object. For a moment he becomes his father, and is subject to that man’s sensations, the smell in his nose and the taste in his mouth incidental to standing in a saw-mill.

The electric saw is a powerful image because it implies an absolutely standard subject-object dichotomy. The subject uses the saw necessarily on an unthinking object, which here is wood. You could use a saw on a subject, a conscious entity, but lets suppose right now that when I say ‘saw’ none of you immediately leap into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Wood is a non-thinking object, external to the subjects consciousness. However, through the photo and Gibson’s identification with his father, the saw-mill is cutting into time and memory. Gibson is asserting that the saw mechanism separates subject from object, but that through the photo the saw is actually uniting the viewer and the subject. Gibson can actually taste and feel “the sweet hot reek” of the wood because the saw cuts it.

Finally, the gun is a powerful mechanism. It appears in the poem a few times, and one of Dennis Ashbaugh’s etchings featured the gun as well. Certainly it mirrors the tropes of death and danger in The Book of The Dead (the poem is partly a homily on the dangers of media). It also separates the object and subject, making them the ‘empowered’ and ‘threatened’. Are bullets a medium? The quote that begins Memento Mori, Jonathan Nolan’s short story and the basis for Memento, is by Herman Melville: “What like a bullet can undeceive!” Like a medium, as we use it we forget about it. Just as by being gripped by a book we forget about interpreting the symbols of the alphabet, grammar, or even the concrete book we have in our hands and just fall into its world, Gibson forgets about the gun—until a round ricochets off a rock and nearly kills him.

One would think that the gun uniquely separates object and subject. How can the user of the gun identify with the mind of the object, if the use of the gun ‘ends’ the object? Yet Gibson implies this is not so. The gun reminds him that he is

Absolutely alone
In awareness of the mechanism.

Like the first time you put your mouth
on a woman.

Gibson is separated from everything that he interacts with through the mechanism. Even oral sex, part of an act that promotes spiritual unity and is opposite to loneliness, causes Gibson to separate himself from everything interacted with through the medium. He is claiming that the awareness of the mechanism of a clitoris alienates him from his partner, makes him “absolutely alone”. Gibson’s world is truly lonely.

One thing I think that is so interesting about the movie and connects back with Wordsworth is “remembering” and what the act of remembering really is.

The word re-membering is much like Wordsworth’s word choice of re-collection. Does Leonard have true “memories” from his life pre-accident or is he simply piecing together feelings and moments to construct himself a feeling or memory which he wants to be real? The latter can be seen especially through the scene with Natalie where he “re”members her - you don’t see a full moment; you see bits and pieces of moments that he pieces together well enough to know that he is angry she is gone.

Memories may have a direct connection with our past and an event that occured, but the act of remembering said memories is always in the present. We cannot remember in the past, or how we felt at that time. When we remember something, that memory is shaped by the in-between moments, and so a memory we have can be different if we remember it after a year, or after five or ten years. Though memories are often though to be objective things - something happened, I remember, fact; the act of remembering that memory is and always will be subjective.

For Leonard in “Memento”, the act of remembering is a construct, just like him. Teddy continually tells him “You don’t know who you are” and Leonard replies - “I’m Leonard Shelby, from San Franscico” to which Teddy says “That’s who you were - not who you are.”

Just like memories, Leonard has been shaped by his actions and emotions since the accident, despite his inability to remember them. The audience sees Leonard constructing himself - through polaroids, tattoos, etc. Though these things cannot be taken as fact, Leonard chooses to take them as fact. He is shaping himself by choice, to be something which he believes he needs to be to find his wife’s killer. Much like memories, which can change with whatever occurs inbetween the memory and remembering, we construct them to serve whatever purpose we need them to (at any given time).

I would stop short of saying that Lenard represents the every man because of his lack of a moral code. Although he can not remember that he killed the man who murdered his wife already, there is a clear point in the end where he takes advantage of his disorder to murder someone purposely. This is the point where one could identify him as a serial killer. However, I would argue that he kills him out of frustration of people manipulating him. Lenard realizes that it is very easy to manipulate him, as people constantly do throughout the film. Therefore when he is informed that Jimmy is manipulating him to kill others for his personal gains, he decides to murder him. I believe that Jimmy took the picture that would have reminded Lenard that he avenged his wife’s death so that he could continually manipulate him into killing.

Leonard’s past memory contributes to his drive for revenge, but he has no memory of the sequence of events after the accident the way animals do not have that, so they may repeat the same mistakes because they have no language of consequence. Since Leonard has no language for consequence, he cannot be responsible for all his actions. He reacts the way any animal or human would if they were threatened. When Natalie was insulting his wife, he reacted the way any person or animal would if they were threatened, but his disadvantage is that he does not remember the consequences of that. We do not hold animals responsible for killing. They do it for survival or because they are threatened. He will not remember killing, so he cannot have remorse for it in the same way that animals would. If we do not have memory for the things that we do then we repeat the same mistakes. That is why history repeats itself. By documenting our history or remembering, we learn from our mistakes and we try to make it better. Animals cannot document their history and so in the same way we cannot judge Leonard for repeating the same mistakes.

Before the popularity of the printed word and widespread literacy, tradition was imputed orally. People who have not created memory prosthetics must rely on organic memory. It is believed that pre-literate man in, for example, the time of Homer, would have had an enormous advantage over modern man in the field of memory. Stories could have been recalled with excellent acuity after a single telling. Once the alphabet created the possibility of permanent, detailed memory, sight became much more important. We can say the sense ratio was altered so that the visual rose in importance at the expense of memory.

Organic memory is therefore in someway replaced by text. Memory stores our experiences, but it also stores autobiographical components: what my favorite color is, what my religion is, how tall, heavy, and intelligent I am. In effect, identity is impossible without memory. Since memory is a huge part of identity, and we can create prosthetics of memory, does that mean that part of our identity is indistinguishable from the prosthetic?

McLuhan thinks that is so. When a sense or mental faculty is outered by technology into a new medium, it retains its importance for our identity, but becomes closed off from ourselves. He writes in The Gutenberg Galaxy (pg. 265) that “in beholding this new thing, man is compelled to become it.” For Leonard, from Momento, the tattoo is the memory prosthetic. The tattoos are all death and revenge, paranoia and mystery. He becomes the tattoo. Never mind that in Leonard’s world those forces are appropriate and commonplace, and are all instantiated in drug dealers, murderers, and con-women. He chose that world, just as he chooses not to return to any friends and family that he remembers from before his injury, because his new world is compatible with the identity tattoed on his chest.

The tattoo hypnotizes Lenny in a way. McLuhan writes that “the formula for hypnosis is ‘one sense at a time’.” And Lenny’s tattoos “possess the power to hypnotize because it isolates the senses.” (Gutenberg, 272) In this case, not sight but memory is the most important faculty affected. All new memories are outered into pictures, captions, and tattoos, with the tattoo medium being chosen to represent purpose and identity because of its permanence. New media diminish not just sense interplay (tattoos do not convey sound, smell, or even emotional affect) but also consciousness of the media. The viewer conforms to the new form or structure unconsciously. And as Lenny is unconscious of the medium, he adopts it as part of his identity. The tattoos instruct Lenny to kill; he becomes a killer.

Where is his empathy? Lenny has the detached, coldhearted mien of a Mengele. He has no emotions for others because of the solipsism inherent in his condition. The last paragraph of Memento Mori, by Jonathan Nolan, reads: “you’re different. You’re more perfect . . . A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you’re the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn.“ He is at the center of the entire world, because he cannot remember that there is another world. He is unable to affect his emotions because he can’t remember the steps he took to affect them, giving him the emotional variability of a rock. Because he is freed from the emotional consequences of his actions, emotion itself starts to slip away. How could you explain the value of human life—to a tattoo?

As a fellow presenter of Memento, I would like to add on a respond to what Jo said in her blog. First of all, she points out that because Leonard’s last memory is such a horrible one, he wakes up every day enraged and his constant grief drives him to seek revenge. I wonder, however, if that is the first thing he remembers every morning. He says a few times throughout the movie that he wakes up expecting his wife to be there and has to piece together why she isn’t. While only a brief delay in understanding that his wife is gone, he does have this time sort out in his mind what he wants to do. When he then looks in the mirror and sees his tattoos about his wife being raped and murdered, he then seems enraged and decided to repeatedly seek revenge. Getting that tattoo and leaving himself cues to make sure he looks at it every morning are decisions he makes when he believes he has all the facts of the day. He is not simply a robot that is on a vengeance autopilot, he makes sure before he goes to sleep that his tomorrow will look exactly like his day. I do agree with Jo, however, that because he relearns about her death every day, he never has the appropriate time to mourn over his loss. Perhaps if he could remember for long enough, he would move on and decide not to seek revenge on her killer.

The other thing that caught my attention is her point on morality. She claims he cannot be sorry because he cannot remember and therefore his morality is not in question here. I disagree though because I believe that it is still a part of his nature to kill. If I woke up with no short-term memory and my last memory was tragic, I can guarantee that while I would be horribly distraught and angry, my reaction would not include trying to kill the man responsible. I can guarantee this because it would never be in my nature to actively seek out a person to end their life regardless of their actions. The fact that Leonard jumps to that conclusion in his mind leads me to believe that killing is a part of his nature- something he’s used to. Also, Leonard himself says that even if he cannot remember killing his wife’s murderer, it still happened and his memory of it doesn’t matter. So if he kills other people and doesn’t remember it, it still happened and he is still responsible.