Journal 8

The movie Momento caught me completely off guard. At first I thought I was the one that was forgetting some of the scenes and that’s why I could not figure out what was happening but then I realized that as professor Drexler explained, the movie actually started with the end of the “story” and just kept on going back in flashbacks. The movie clearly demonstrated our reliance in our memory in order to function as human beings. Leonard suffers of memory loss and it is not able to create short-term memories yet somehow he can still remember what happened to his wife and why he wants to find and murder the guy who raped her. It must be so hard for people in today’s world that suffer from similar things and must rely in pictures, surroundings, and even in the case of Lenny’s tattoos in order to function as normal people and have a sense in life. I think overall it was hard to follow because of the hapax, but I think the directors did a really good job in trying to differentiate the moments in time using black/white and color scenes indicating the past and the present, as well as going back every once in a while to the same scenes and just adding a little bit more to complete them and produce kind of a sequence to it. I think the directors appealed to our way of making sense of things since they distorted the sequence of the movie so we could figure out what was the movie about. At the end, I couldn’t still 100% agree with whether Lenny was innocent and what happened to his wife was actually true or if he was indeed Sammy Jenkins. I know that we are just starting to talk about the importance memory plays not only in computers and hard-drives but in humans too but it is interesting to note how all these materials we have explored so far really point out the importance memory plays in us although we don’t think about that often.