Journal 4/7

After watching Memento this week, it really made me think of how dependent we are on our memories. The director of this movie did a phenomenal job on putting the audience in Leonard’s shoes. The way the plot ran backwards made it so that I was left feeling very lost, just like Leonard felt about finding out who the murderer was. It also shows how manipulative people are capable of being. I shouldn’t have been shocked that people would take of someone like Leonard with his condition, but the scene where Natalie berates him and calls his wife horrible names and steals the pens so he can’t remember what she did, shows how low some people can go. Memory has always been a confounding concept to me because it is hard for me to understand how images and moments are captured. I would love to think that we are capable of remembering things exactly as they happened, but I think we interpret moments and twist them into what we want them to be. For example, after Teddy told Leonard that he had been manipulating him so he could get his revenge and “play detective”, Leonard chose to make up his own story. It often makes me question whether my memories are true, or if I overthink situations and make it more than it is. It is quite delusional, only proving that humans are definitely flawed. Another interesting part of the movie was that Leonard’s system for remembering things was to take pictures and write notes. This was his only way of preserving moments and it reminded me of how a computer works. This systematic programming runs along the same course as how the brain remembers things. But yet at the same time, there seemed to be a lot of emotion clouding his judgements, which made him alter some things because he wanted them to be different. The biggest lesson I learned from this movie was that humans are very flawed and trust their memory too much, even though it is often smudged with bias of our own selfishness.