Memory provides a powerful space in the movies for flashbacks, amnesia and unreliable narrators galore. There have been characters remembering things differently from Rashomon to the underwhelming Girl On the Train and many in between. When it comes to science fiction, memory, apart from being a nifty narrative device, also serves as a marker for humanity.
PS I love you
Michel Gondry’s
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While Joel and Clementine decide to give themselves another chance despite Clementine’s warning that they might break up again, technology helps Liam wreck his marriage in
Into the darkness
Jason Bourne woke up in the Mediterranean with bullets in his back with amnesia and no memory of who he is leading to a very profitable franchise. In Alex Proyas’ exquisite
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The Matrix (1999) using a similar colour palate and concept became hysterically popular and buried Dark City under the weight of bending spoons, rabbit holes and a blank faced Neo. Déjà vu, when Neo sees the black cat again, is explained as a glitch in the system and not as Joseph Heller said in Catch 22 , “It was neither déjà vu, presque vu nor jamais vu.” Christopher Nolan is said to have referenced Dark City as well as The Matrix when he wrote Inception .
I remember, therefore I am
Memories are used to distinguish between human beings and robots. While in Terminator 3 , the T850 remembers to look for the car keys in the sunvisor, other movies including the recent Blade Runner 2049 show androids do not have organic memories. Ryan Gosling’s replicant K poignantly says “I have memories, but I can't tell if they are real.” The movie goes behind the scenes to memory maker, Dr. Ana Stelline’s lab, where she says, “Every memory has a piece of its artist…” Harrison Ford’s Deckard in the original Blade Runner (1982) cruelly tells the replicant Rachel her memory of a spider spinning a web is an implant.
Blade Runner is based on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ?, which brings us to the PKD short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” which was the basis of Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 film Total Recall and the 2012 remake. The short story told of a time in the future when you could have memory implants of holidays and other exciting things instead of actually doing them. An office worker tired of his boring life decides to get a memory implant of a dangerous mission on mars. However as he undergoes the procedure, he realises that he actually is a secret agent with his memory wiped. The movie is very loosely based on the short story and since it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, the protagonist was a construction worker rather than an office drone.
If movies are modern myth-makers, it is not surprising that memories are an important ingredient of the process.