This week we had watched the movie Memento, which in my personal opinion was an absolutely fantastic movie. The cinematography was beautiful and the acting was very well-done. Perhaps my favorite part of the movie was how the director made the audience feel just as lost as the main character Leonard through telling the story in reverse. The first few scenes of the movie portray Teddy as a suspicious character and Natalie as a helpful one, but as the movie goes on their motives and true selves are revealed to be opposite. You can’t help but feel sorry for Leonard as the movie ends, as he is forced to chase his John G. endlessly, even after he got his true revenge. No matter what emotion or realization Leonard has, nothing will ever stick and the audience can really empathize with the frustration of his condition. I was surprised to hear many of the terms used throughout the movie such as conditioning as I am currently taking a psychology course. Much of the movie was spot on in their terminology as Leonard described his condition and ways in which Sammy Jankis tried to alleviate his symptoms. The movie also could potentially have been based on a real life case of a man unable to form new memories, which I have also studied in my psychology class. Very similarly, the man could remember his own name and things from decades ago, but not what he ate for breakfast. Ultimately we learn the truth very early in the movie when Leonard states “how can someone heal when they don’t have a sense of time?”. Overall, the movie was extremely good and chock full of motifs and themes throughout.
Going back to our discussion of sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory, an interesting fact I learned in my psychology class is that although it is true that memory is located in the hippocampus and has a lot of activity in the prefrontal cortex, memory is not actually located in a specific part of the brain. Rather, it works more like a congenial system with interconnecting areas. The movie sort of portrays this accurately by having Leonard’s injury be near the temple/front part of his head. The movie also shows how memory does work like a computer. An input is encoded (sensory memory) and stored for later use (short-term and long-term memory) in something like a hard drive. In Leonard’s case, Leonard’s injury could be no different than if a computer’s hardware was damaged, drawing a similarity between our human brains and a computer.