External Memory

In the epic final class for Cinematic Modernism, Melissa brought up the issue of people's memories failing thanks to our modern age. It all seems a bit "science fictiony" (and yes, this is not a real adjective ... but a man can dream; I'm the Howard Roark of wordtology), but it also seems kind of counter to what movies are telling us: memory is important. Yes, certainly, I've spoken about memory before, but this is about its representation and manifestation.

Narratively speaking, memory is a giant commodity. To lose it is a gigantic tragedy. Away From Her, on the screens at this very moment, is the story of a woman who suffering from an illness that is robbing her of her memory. She gets sent away to live in a care facility, and has to live without her husband for a month to acclimatise. When her husband comes to visit her one month later, she has not only forgotten who he is but has attached herself to another man. Cue streams of tears; my friend was crying just at the summary alone.

We have all witnessed (or heard about second hand, if you're being less honest with yourself) amnesia on soap operas. In fact, Alexis on Ugly Betty is even now struggling with retrograde amnesia and, for a nice change, has forgotten only the last two years of her life: you know, the years where she faked her own death and plotted revenge on her father for his rejecting her desire to have a sex change (she used to be Alex). It's the only case I can think of where memory loss has been presented as fortuitous.

It's perhaps not a surprise that a natural, existing phenomenon, in this case memory loss, has been harnessed by fiction as something that can be controlled. In the manga Fruits Basket, there is a doctor who can erase memories. He is forced by the patriarch of his clan to erase the memory of his own fiancée in one chapter; in another, he has to erase the memory of the mother of a curséd son. Of course, the doctor and the son retain their own memories; these are hugely traumatic and tear jerking stories because the loss is paradoxically shared.
Ghost in the Shell, the Japanophile's home for confusing pop psychology, suggests that if one can retain their memory then they have retained their humanity, even if they have become more man than machine. It works the other way, too: implanted memories in Blade Runner make people question their own reality.

If we want to get all contemporary on the issue, and maybe even to something you serious folks have actually seen, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looks at the propriety of memories: if you have your memories of someone erased, are you not technically stealing from that other person? In the process of losing these memories, Jim Carrey realises their importance and significance, and desperately wants to hold onto at least some of them. Certainly, there was pain in there, but the point of a memory is that you own it. To shed a memory is to shed some of our humanity.

Melissa was talking about how we're not learning things anymore; we're not bothering to do so, because of this age of instant gratification. It's not so much that we're not learning anything, as much as we're externalising our memories - which means more that we're sharing them than actually owning them. External memory isn't a propertarian regime. This is a concept that I learned about from the movie Innocence, but it's an actual concept that I can apply to our real lives.

External memory manifests itself in many ways: Youtube, Wikipedia, and even in the form of cities. The concept is that rather than bothering to commit something to memory, you can simply look it up. Rather than describe the idea of Away From Her to you, I could have simply linked you to the trailer to communicate it.
Rather than choosing to retain something in our minds, we think "hey, I can just look that up at any time, why should I bother to keep it on board?". Of course, this is not always practical, as xkcd will tell us:



Yeah. Not a great idea. It's not like we should discourage watching, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit to jog our memories, and to renovate our existing memories. It's also part of why we respond so poorly to extreme changes: if our memory is one thing and what we're witnessing is another, the lack of an overlap can be extremely distressing. It's just like going to the site of the Valhalla and seeing an office building. While the changes happening at Greater Union George Street are probably for the best, they are still a sort of murder: the places where I have seen things can exist now only in memory.

As to a city being a memory: we don't have to remember a city, surely, because it's there. If we wanted to remember it, we could go there. Yet Berlin and the Moscow seen in Man With A Movie Camera patently no longer exist. An author like Terry Pratchett might tell you that lands and cities and buildings have memories, but a city can't tell you what it used to be; it can only tell you what it is now. If a city is a living organism, it's one that passively accepts whatever befalls it. We can lock a moment in time with a camera, but it's not going to be as personal as the one that exists in our mind.

So maybe the reason we choose to forget things, not to retain them, is because we fear their change. Memory is a tough thing to fight, and it looks like society is waging a war on it. Perhaps we should pay attention to what the literature tells us: memories shape us, they are what we are ... and, as Muriel would tell you, there's no stopping progress.