This week, there was an interesting contrast in course material to Ishiguro’s Buried Giant. We watched an episode of Black Mirror that followed a couple and how they were affected by having a device that granted them perfect memory. Having a total-recall type memory is something that we dream about, however this episode highlighted the dark side of having infallible memory. Although the protagonist of the episode ended up finding out the truth about his wife’s affair, he ultimately had changed into an entirely different, violent person and ended up severely unhappy, thus leading him to gouge out his perfect memory device. Black Mirror is a show that often highlights what can go wrong with the exponential pace technology races at and its effects on human nature, and this episode definitely displayed all of that and more. Compared to Ishiguro’s Buried Giant where the characters have a very poor memory, both the episode and the story make me content to have a perfectly imperfect memory; not too perfect, not to forgettable. After reading through most of Buried Giant and watching the episode of Black Mirror, our imperfect memory is really what attributes a lot to human nature. Perhaps the main character of the Black Mirror episode could have lived a happier life had he not dug relentlessly into his memory archive, although he would have lived under the phrase “ignorance is bliss”.
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