The movie Memento deals with memory and time. I will discuss this film and compare it to some of the readings we had for class.
Memento is about a guy, Lenny, who loses his memory after the death of his wife and then hunts down the murderer so he can kill this person to avenge her death. The entire movie is based on the condition Lenny has of him only remembering things for a few minutes and then totally forgetting everything that happened unless he takes a Polaroid of the memory and writes some information down on the back of the photo. Lenny lives in the present and can"t trust anyone. He can"t even trust his own memory, which he finds out later on, after realizing that he created false memories to hide the fact that he actually killed his wife from an overdose of insulin and that she wasn"t killed by a rapist after all. Lenny lives in a false world of manufactured memories.
Altogether, memory is deceiving and it can play tricks on you. Dennett talks about this in one of the articles. He said that if he were able to tamper with your brain on Monday and put a false memory of a woman wearing a hat that you met at a party on Sunday, you"d think that you really met this woman. You"d think this even though on Sunday you knew you never met this woman. This false memory changed reality and made you think you met her on Sunday when in actuality you met her on Monday, the day the memory was created. This forces you to ask yourself what is truly real and how much can you really trust your memory. There are two ways to look back at an event: "this is what I remember" and "this is what really happened". Memory makes it hard to distinguish between the two. In Lenny's case, he chooses "this is what I remember" and blocks out "this is what really happened".
Another article that has to do with memory and how it's portrayed in the movie is the Bergson article. In the film, Lenny only lives in the present and uses memories from the past to help him shape the future (finding his wife's killer).
