I Clone Bearing Memories

It probably shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone that I have a fondness for identifying tropes from TV shows and movies, and I enjoy reading about tropes that others have identified.  But although I also indulge in the inevitable smart-ass tone which attends the descriptions of such things, I usually have some appreciation for the dramatic, esthetic, and even sometimes financial, considerations behind the use of these devices.  Even as I smirk at the contrivance, I still understand why everyone who goes on a soul-searching road trip in a movie drives a classic convertible, (Unless it's a family trip.  Then they'll usually drive an old, lime green, station wagon or a comically impractical behemoth of an RV.)

There is however, one trope in particular which I'm completely mystified by.  I've noticed it in several movies in recent years, the idea of a clone having traces of memories from the original subject.  Now, bear in mind, I'm not talking about the old school, Gee Whiz Bang!, type of cloning here, the kind where the subject steps into a big silver contraption covered with dials and switches, and after a few seconds of banging hammers, popping springs, and slide whistles, they step out in a cloud of steam with their very own doppelganger.  As preposterous as such scenarios are, there's still a certain internal logic to the idea that the memories carry over.  Such cloning works on the principle of a copy machine, and if the machine makes a perfect replica of the body, then it figures that the mind would probably be copied as well.

No, I'm talking about the more modern variation, where the clone is grown in a lab from strands of hair or tissue samples.  Frequently...too frequently...in such stories there will be a "startling revelation" at some point that the clone somehow possesses fragments of memories from the original.  "Residual memories" they'll often call them, as though your memories could leave a residue in your fingernail clippings.  I'm not sure how even one screen writer could reach such an ignorant conclusion, and yet the idea pops up again and again as if it's transcribed from some underground Bible of Hollywood mythology.  I'm not sure if it's just a holdover from the old method, or the product of some kind of New Age mysticism about the endurance of the human spirit, but it makes about as much sense as thinking people have to be shrunk down before they can fit in my TV set.  Considering that we are all, in a sense, "cloned" from a combination of our parents' DNA, you'd have to wonder why all our dreams aren't troubled with memories of our own conception.

And yet the trope persists.  It has become nearly the fastest way of ruining a movie for me.  Well, it might not ruin the movie, but it does remove me from its reality.  Just as the film thinks it's laying this Earth-shattering twist on me, I'm just shaking my head in weary disbelief, sighing because it happened again.  And it pops up in quite a number of different ways, and it serves the story in different capacities.  I'm going to break these capacities down into the categories of character, plot, and theme, and provide an example of each. (Be warned: All these examples contain major spoilers of the movies in question!!)

CHARACTER

The creators of the film Alien Resurrection were faced with a bit of a problem.  How do you continue a franchise when your main heroine committed suicide by doing a back flip into a pool of molten metal in the previous movie?  They did what any self respecting film-makers would do when they had a cash cow that desperately needed milking.  They had her cloned by some shady government operatives in a plot to harvest the alien embryo that had been gestating inside of her before she died.  Now, we can try to just accept the notion that the alien's DNA was bound up with her own, just from having the embryo implanted in her chest.  Whatever, we'll roll with it.  But then there's a scene early on where the scientists are informing the top military guy in charge that the clone appears to have traces of Ripley's memories.  Dum-dum-dummmm. "Why does it have memories?", the military guy asks.

Why, indeed?  I would speculate that they did it for the sake of character continuity, and for the sake of the audience.  If Sigourney Weaver was going to reprise her role as Ripley, then they wanted to establish some connection to the character she had played in the past three films.  I'm not sure why they bothered though.  Ripley spends half the movie in a creepy daze; she barely has any dialogue, and she even has a strange affection for the aliens as part of her genetic bond with them...or something.  That couldn't be farther from the original character, who's defining attribute was pretty much her seething hatred of the aliens.  I cringe to think that they may have just included the cloning clause so that they could turn Ripley into a walking collection of clever sound bites for the movie trailer.

"So I hear you ran into these things before.  What'd you do?"

"I died."

Uggghhh.  Moving on.

PLOT

As a fan of the animated series, I found the live-action version of Aeon Flux to be a bit disappointing.  Like many film adaptations of TV shows which aren't helmed by the original creators and don't grow naturally out of the series' original run, Aeon Flux failed to capture the tone of the source material and only superficially built on the original concept.  The animated series featured a dark and grotesque dystopian future, a mechanized nightmare that felt inescapable.  The movie, on the other hand, featured a botanical paradise where the organic blended smoothly with the technology.  It had a somewhat appealing look, and some inventive ideas that would have been right at home in a video game, but it just wasn't the same.

But I digress.  The plot involves Aeon uncovering some tired conspiracy where they've been abducting people and cloning them and circulating the babies back into population.  It's kind of a human recycling program.  I'm not sure why this would come as a surprise to anyone as the human race had been sterile for centuries, but maybe I missed something.  At any rate, Aeon eventually discovers that those Random Flashes of Images (now there's a phrase that should be trademarked) are memories from a woman named Katherine who lived hundreds of years ago, memories which have piggy-backed on the DNA samples down through the ages to arrive in a bad movie.  Turns out this Katherine and the original of the main bad guy were married in some past pre-clone life, and...oh hell, let's just move on. 

THEME

Of the three movies discussed here, The Island is the only one to make a definite statement against cloning.  It tells the story of a society driven underground after a devastating plague.  They all eagerly wait for their name to be called in a lottery where they'll win a chance to go to "The Island", the last disease free place on Earth.  Or at least, that's what they want you to think.  Turns out the inhabitants of this underground complex are clones of people out in the real world, and the only place they go when they win the lottery is an operating room where they get their organs harvested.

The movie uses a couple of conceits to convey its anti-cloning message.  The head of the company tells his investors that the clones are kept in a persistent vegetative state, but he later confides in someone that they found the organs to be useless unless they came from living, conscious, active bodies.  This is what necessitates the society in the underground facility and the whole fiction of the Island and so on.  This comes off like a desperate contrivance to justify the plot, but it's probably the most realistic thing in the movie.  For the past few years, scientists have been trying to clone a meat substitute from cow DNA, which they call "smeat."  The problem is that this smeat has the consistency of gelatinous goo.  It doesn't have any muscle tone because it doesn't come off of a living, active cow.

Less realistic are the dreams of one of the clones, Lincoln Six Echo.  It turns out these Random Flashes of Images are memories from his counterpart in the real world.  I file this under theme, because I think they're trying to make some sort of statement about cloning and the soul and...I don't know.  But I'm afraid they also threw it in to explain why Lincoln is such a quick study in the fast-paced action scenes.  Turns out the real Tom Lincoln is a bit of a "petrohead."  This is a Michael Bay film after all, and we all know he's a bit of a "dickhead."  So yeah, things get a little muddled.  He even throws in one of those "I'm not a number; I'm a name; Kunta Kinte" sequences, but it's so mishandled that it lands like an incomprehensible dud.  It comes off as tacked on, and when you come right down to it, the "Lincoln" part of his name is just as much a matter of bureaucratic filing as the "Six Echo" part.  I guess you'd have to see the movie to know what I'm talking about.  But then, if you haven't seen the movie, then you shouldn't be reading this anyway.  Don't say I didn't warn you!!                         

Collateral: The Things That Matter to Us

"Get with it. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?"

That line comes from Vincent, the coldly efficient hit man in the movie Collateral.  It's arrives at a pivotal point in the story, and it expresses Vincent's extremely nihilistic outlook in a simple and straightforward manner.  It's a clear-cut moral rationalization, and yet it has a sort of enticing logic to it.  It would seem that from a far enough perspective, and on a broad enough scale, that the problems of three little people really don't amount to a hill of beans.  Vincent's night of systematic elimination might seem brutal and tragic in close, human terms, but to him it's all "a speck on a blink."

This statement, however, leads to an unintended epiphany for Max, the cab driver which Vincent has coerced at gun-point into driving him around all night as he runs his "errands."  Max's epiphany and his subsequent actions reveal the fatal flaw in Vincent's philosophy.  Here he is declaring that nothing really matters on the grand cosmic scale, and yet all night long he has been using the things that matter to Max as leverage against him: his life, his mother, his job, his hopes and his dreams.  This blatant contradiction throws Max into a rage, and yet it also gives him the clarity to see through the things that have been holding him back in his life.  What Vincent takes as a nihilistic blank check that justifies murder, Max takes as a liberating affirmation that allows him to see the concerns that have been restraining him for the petty trivialities that they really are.  He takes Vincent's philosophy to its logical conclusion, jams on the gas, and flips the cab at full speed, nearly killing them both.  Perhaps Vincent would have been better off keeping his rationalizations to himself.

But Collateral, after all, really is Max's story.  Through-out the night we're given enough information to piece his life together.  He has been driving a cab for years, but he harbors a secret dream of someday owning his own limousine service.  "Island Limos", he calls it, and he grows somewhat wistful when he speaks of it, "You never want to the ride to end."  He says that he's just waiting to get enough money together, the right client list, ect., but there's a sense that underneath it all that the dream will stay a dream, and deep down Max fears that he'll spend the rest of his life driving the cab.  Vincent cuts immediately to the core of this fear and he needles Max relentlessly with it.  He taunts Max with it, rubs it in his face, because...well, maybe just because that's where Vincent's predatory mentality drives him.

Vincent arrives in Max's life like a walking personification of the kind of near-death experience that kicks someone out of the comfortable complacent place they've settled into.  He starts off as just another fare, but even then he's waving a wad of money in Max's face, asking him to bend the rules and chauffeur him around for the rest of the night.  Max reluctantly agrees, already a little out of his comfort zone.  When the first of Vincent's victims falls out of the night and lands on the windshield of Max's cab, he suddenly discovers exactly what kind of insanity he's gotten himself into here, and now there's far more than his cab license at stake.  His life itself is at risk, minute by minute, as Vincent turns his gun on him and tells him to get in the cab and drive.  It's the kind of thing that puts your life in perspective.

But Collateral is more than a movie about a man taking stock of his life in a dangerous situation.  It pivots on Vincent's philosophy.  For Vincent it is a bleak declaration of despair and meaninglessness.  For Max it is an awakening to the fact that his life is his to take control of, and make the most of.  In a pointless "speck on a blink" what does he have to lose?  Isn't "Island Limos" a small risk to take in the great scheme of things?  That's what Vincent is missing.  The things on this little speck matter, because they matter to the creatures living on this little speck.  Max sees liberation, because he cares about something, because he has a dream, and because he sees that the dream only matters because it matters to him, and it's up to him to do something about it.

By confronting us with a man who lives beyond the concerns of morality, who murders his victims with the cold efficiency of checking off a laundry list, Collateral propels us out there to that place beyond the galaxies and stars where it all becomes meaningless.  And then through Max, it draws us back to Earth with a renewed appreciation for the things we truly care about, and the fact that we alone give them meaning.  "Island Limos" might mean next to nothing on a speck of dust in limitless space, but it's Max's piece of that speck and it means something to him.  A powerful argument against Vincent's nihilism, and an elegant display of philosophy in action.  It's a deceptively simple movie that raises some complex issues.            

The Lasting Appeal of the Star Wars Saga

It's been some thirty odd years since the first Star Wars movie premiered, but Star Wars' place in our culture is as vibrant and thriving as ever.  So much so, that it even gets to be kind of irritating at times, especially its proliferation among faux nerds.  In this internet age, everyone feels that they need at least a modicum of nerd credibility, just enough to come off as smart, quirky and interesting, but not so much that you come off as a socially inept, spastic dweeb, popping their zits in a lonely, subterranean room that smells of dirty socks and old cheese.  Star Wars provides the proper pinch without the danger of overdose.  A few well placed references to Boba Fett, an opinion concerning Han & Gredo, and a liberal amount of tongue-in-cheek philosophical debate about the saga's plot dynamics, and you're accepted as one of the "cool" nerds.  It all gets a little old at times.

Courtesy of Andres Rueda

Fortunately, it isn't all about hip references and ironic analysis.  There is a far more genuine reason that Star Wars has a fan base that spans multiple generations.  It answers a question so basic, that we might not have even realized we were asking it: Can spirituality survive the advance of technology?  And the wonderful thing about it is that it answers this question, not as a matter of abstract proposition, not as speculation or theme, but by providing a genuine demonstration of the possibility.  It gives us a futuristic vision which resonates with a mystical sense of our own past, a galactic civilization from "a long, long time ago."

But the real achievement of Star Wars is in more than just the concept.  It's in the details.  It combined these contrasting elements, past and future, myth and technology, at such a fundamental level that these things grow up together out of the story's universe blended and practically indistinguishable.  This is absolutely crucial to the effect.  If the mythology had been superficially overlaid, or if it hadn't worked in such a creative and esthetic manner, it would have completely undermined the thesis, rather than supporting it.  One fatal misstep, and it all could have easily ended up as "swords & sorcerers in space."  That Lucas was able to avoid this, is something of a small miracle.  He created something... believable, if such a word can apply here.  Not believable in terms of realism, but believable as a fantasy that the audience could invest with depth and meaning and emotion.  We don't believe in the plausibility of the story or the universe of Star Wars.  Instead, we are convinced and compelled by what its vision represents: a mythology for the space age.

Perhaps more than any other element in the Star Wars universe, the light saber perfectly embodies this paradigm.  If the story had featured sword-play involving traditional swords of silver and steel, the mystique of the entire saga would have collapsed, unraveled, and ultimately fallen flat on its face.  It would have turned the whole thing into a completely incompatible farce that no one could take seriously.  The light saber neatly resolved this problem.  It carries the mythical weight of the story, while at the same time being an intriguing piece of technical hardware.  We wonder: How does it work?  Where can I get my hands on one?

Much of the Star Wars universe is composed of these sorts of plunderings from human history, everything from classic cars to Nazi paraphernalia.  These things are treated with that same flawlessly intuitive touch as the light saber.  Every element is tied into the fundamental foundation of Star Wars' unique vision, so that it seems unmistakably of that world and yet it also resonates as something recognizable on an almost sub-conscious level.  It exploits these emotional cues to provide texture and depth, while bringing us out onto a broader stage of advanced technology and wonder among the stars.  It engenders a confused state of mind, rebounding between the distant past and the distant future until the line between them blurs.  This is the special magic that it generates.  It makes you forget the impracticality of the Imperial Walkers or gunner turrets to fight space battles.  It all exists outside of time, somewhere where it all makes sense.

And finally, this brings us to The Force, which is at the core of the story as well as the overall concept of the films.  The Force is the abstract companion to the light saber.  It draws on our religious and spiritual foundations in a general way, and yet it feels completely at home on a grand galactic stage.  It is simple, and yet expansive and enchanting.  It carries an air of the deep and the profound, even though it is provided very little of substance.  But that's how we prefer it.  Giving more detail about The Force just demystifies it, as anyone who's heard the word "midichlorian" will quite readily testify.  We aren't looking for further elaboration.  The Force is a stand-in for that feeling of awe and reverence, magic and mysticism.  It's that thing that we fear to lose when we worry that we might dehumanize ourselves inch by inch with our own technology.  In the end Star Wars appeals to us because it shows us a galaxy where it does endure, beyond hyperspace, beyond Death Stars and droids.

I could go into the reasons George Lucas' return to this material years later proved to be such a disaster, but I think I've said enough for one day.  There's plenty more that could be said about Star Wars, and one of these days I'll get around to saying it.  For now, if you don't find that my treatment of the saga's appeal really captures the essence of your feeling towards it, if you find it all a little too ponderous and complicated...well, then allow me to offer this alternate explanation: 

           

Inception: The Calculus of Dreams

Inception seems to be one of those movies that people either love or hate.  When it came out last summer there were several complaints that I heard lodged against it.  One of the most prevalent ones was that the dreams were not strange and surreal enough, and that the endless complexity of rules laid out in the movie bore no relation to what dreams are really like.  Realism is a strange complaint to make concerning a movie about dreams, since dreams by their very nature are practically the antithesis of realism.  Still, I knew what these people were driving at.  The dreams in Inception do bear little resemblance to those visited upon our nightly slumbers.  However, these people were missing the whole point.  The surrealism lay in the concept of the story, not in its details.  The peculiar charm of Inception is that it takes a systematic and cerebral approach to an emotionally chaotic phenomenon.

The movie borrows from several basic phenomena of dreams to construct its elaborate rules.  It treats these phenomena as if they were precise variables in a complex equation, as things which can be measured and quantified with pinpoint accuracy, which is not actually the way these things work at all.  But the movie precedes as if this is the case.  The idea is absurd in and of itself, and I believe that this is done deliberately.  I'm sure Christopher Nolan has had the same lifetime of dreaming experience that we've all had.  Inception isn't meant to be a realistic portrayal of dreams.  It takes the subject of dreams and builds an abstract framework of intricate systemic design.  Dreams are merely a means to this end.  The following is a consideration of the pieces out of which this framework is constructed.

TIME EXPANSION & COGNITIVE COMPRESSION

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud tells the story of a dream dreamt by a man name Maury.  In the dream Maury was on trial.  The dream was set at some time during the French Revolution, and this Maury was brought before the revolutionary tribunal.  After a lengthy trial, he was found guilty and thrown into prison to await execution.  The date of his execution arrived and he was led out to before the screaming crowd.  He was brought to the execution block, and locked into the guillotine.  When the hissing blade dropped, he awoke just as it hit his neck.  Upon waking he discovered that the headboard had fallen and struck him on the neck, which was what had woken him up.  Apparently, the entire long ordeal of the dream had merely occurred in the few fractions of a second when the headboard struck his neck.

Of course, we've all had similar, if somewhat less extreme experiences.  We've fallen asleep for a few hours and had dreams which seem to cover months or even years.  Mostly this is because events in dreams often occur in a more narrative than real-time fashion.  Just as a movie can cover the distance between March and June simply by taking a few moments to show us a tree flowering into full bloom, so too can our dreams give us the illusion of an epic passage of time.

Inception treats this phenomenon quite literally, however.  The dream infiltrators measure the time expansion with perfect precision.  They time things down to the second on the basis of this expansion.  They account for this expansion by crediting an acceleration of mental functioning.  The deeper the infiltrators descend into the dream-world, level by level, the quicker their minds are able to process information.  Since the dream is being sustained and created by the mind, the accelerated experience of it causes the actual real-world time that it covers to become more and more compressed.  Conceivably this compression could go on, descending down to an infinitesimal level.  At this level, which the characters refer to as "limbo", the mental functioning has been accelerated to the point that an infinite amount of experience can be compressed down to a single moment.

THE INCORPORATION OF EXTERNAL STIMULI

Have you ever fallen asleep with the TV on, and had the audio from the TV weave its way into your dreams?  Have you ever had the alarm clock go off, only to have the noise reinterpreted by your dream?  I know I have.  Maybe you've even heard the joke where the guy says he was dreaming that he ate a giant marshmallow, and then woke up to find that his pillow was gone.  Scientists have even done studies where they've tickled people with feathers or dripped hot wax on them, and then they've recorded how the stimulus showed up in their dreams.  Some have even argued that the entire content of dreams is constructed entirely out of stimulus external to the dream, whether it be a noise outside the window or the gurgling of our own stomach.

Inception takes a rather interesting approach to this phenomenon.  The film makes much use of the idea of "levels", dreams within dreams.  It uses this concept of external stimuli to demonstrate the way the dreams are packaged inside of one another.  When a van flips over on one level, the entire reality of the level below tumbles end over end.  When the van free falls through the air, the level below loses gravity altogether.  In addition to providing some  neat visuals, this also accentuates one of the spacial peculiarities of dreams.  In a dream, your physical body appears to occupy a space which resides inside your mind, which, of course, is  already inside your body to begin with.  As the infiltrators descend level upon level, their bodies are continually being tucked inside dream worlds that exist inside their minds.  It becomes a sort of existential Droste Effect, which again descends down to an infinitesimal level.  So limbo occupies not only an infinite point in time, but in space as well.

THE NESTED PERMUTATIONS OF FALSE AWAKENING

False awakenings are like the evil cousins of lucid dreams.  A lucid dream is where the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming and are then able to take control over the dream.  The lucidity of the lucid dreams lies in the fact that the dreamer seems to be in full possession of their mental faculties, which are normally blunted and limited in dreams.  In a sense, they seem wide awake and yet still dreaming.  If you've had the experience you know how odd it can feel.  Well, a false awakening is sort of the opposite experience.  This is where the dreamer believes they've woken up, often with the same surroundings where they fell asleep reproduced with amazing accuracy, but actually they're still dreaming.  This is usually accompanied by an eerie sense that something is wrong or "off".  Then something disturbing usually happens, and the dream flies out of control again.

Inception uses this phenomenon to construct the concept of dreams within dreams.  It employs it in a backwards manner, as the characters are usually seen descending down into the next level.  However, it should be noted that when this idea is first introduced to us, it is in the form that we're more familiar with.  The characters awake from a dream, which we the audience think is the waking world, only to find that it is just another dream, one level above.   Having the "level" concept demonstrated to us in this fashion, allows us to accept it when it's used backwards later on.  In reality, the phenomenon of false awakening doesn't imply any kind of nesting of dream levels.  The false awakening is just another of a multitude of common dream experiences.  It falls in a sequence of events, rather than demonstrating a layering of levels.  I don't believe it has even been shown that events in the false awakening dream affect the reality of the dream that proceeded it.  But then, how would you know?  Nevertheless, this nesting concept provides an ingenious means to demonstrate the  peculiar spatial architecture of dreams mentioned above.

PERPETUAL EXPERIENCE OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

At one point in Inception, the main character, Cobb, explains that in dreams we create and experience our world at the same time.  This is absolutely true, and its really quite amazing when you think about it.  Dreams seem able to tap into a deep reservoir of creativity and invention that we can only access the merest fraction of while we're awake.  While we might struggle in our waking life to squeeze out the simplest shred of an idea, dreams create with a disposable abandon as though drawing from an endless well of inspiration.  This well, of course, is simply our imagination.  Awake, we keep it in check to various degrees by our intellect, but in dreaming it has free reign.  Like our inner monologue, it flows continuously, but we only seem to tune into it completely in our dreams.  It is as if we climb inside our imagination and then experience it as though it were reality.

Robert Louis Stevenson was said to have gotten his idea for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde from a dream.  Coleridge was said to have gotten the idea for Kubla Khan from a dream as well.  There have been countless other cases of people getting ideas for everything from songs to paintings from dreams.  I myself, have gotten the idea for several stories from dreams.  Sometimes a dream seems to provide an inspiration that never would have occurred to you in a million years, but the ideas are there waiting.  They just required a loosening of the intellect and a lowering of inhibitions to bloom into their full form.

In a sense, the story of Inception can be seen as a metaphor for this process.  The title refers to the planting of an idea in someone's mind, a seed in the soil that takes deep root in the subconscious.  Again the level concept is employed to ingenious effect.  The deeper the level of the dream the deeper into the core of the subject's psyche.  Like space and time, the subject's identity becomes more compressed and concentrated as you descend.  A small detail, planted deep enough, expands up through the levels until it reaches the level of waking reality where it can become a fundamental part of the subject's personality.  This implies a model of the mind spatially equivalent to the psychological concept of formative development.  The further you regress in time to a person's earliest experiences, the more fundamental those impressions are to the foundations of the person's personality.  Like the seed planted in Inception, as the core of the person's life experiences grows, the more this foundational impression expands.  While these seeds often grow into weeds in the garden of our life, occasionally they can flower into something beautiful and creative.

WAKING TO THE REAL WORLD

The ending of Inception spawned endless debate.  Was he really awake or still dreaming?  Did the spinning top fall or not?  Unfortunately people were picking up this metaphysical ball and running in the wrong direction with it.  Too often people focus on the issue of "what really happened" in the story's plot, rather than appreciating the meaning behind it.  Inception leaves the story open-ended, not to encourage speculation about the narrative, but rather to encourage the viewer to speculate about the nature of reality itself.  The top is meant to demonstrate the old philosophical notion of whether we can truly determine the difference between reality and an illusion.  The idea is not a new one, but the truly clever thing that the movie accomplishes is to present the conundrum not in words, but in a single image.  This is the final result of the elaborate equation.  Everything in the movie is set up to converge on that single image.  The movie is like a complicated chess problem with all the pieces put perfectly in place for this final checkmate.

The levels concept introduces the possibility that there might be another level above what the characters consider reality.  Cobb's wife Mal introduces the enigma of what we require to accept something as reality.  The concept of inception itself introduces the idea of the mind's capacity for self-deception.  The concept of sub-conscious projections introduces the dilemma of being together with the ones we love or alone with only our idea of them.  The limbo concept introduces a dream reality that  in its infinitesimal compression can transcend space and time and the consequences of the waking world.  And finally we have the totem, the spinning top, representing an anchor to solid, physical reality, ambiguously caught between spinning and falling, caught between the world we live in and the world we dream of.  It begs the question of what really matters, what really makes the difference between the two? 

12 Monkeys: Mental Divergence

The Path of the Virus

I love a good time travel story.  I have seen all three of the Back to the Future movies more times than I can remember.  I could tell you precisely how the time travel rules change from one Terminator movie to the next.  I even sat through The Time Traveler's Wife, God help me.  But, my all time favorite has to be 12 Monkeys.  It faithfully follows the principle that the past can not be changed and then takes that principle to the point of absurdity as causality circles back on itself like the monkeys chasing each other's tails round and round, representing the twelve hours on the face of a clock.  The funny thing is, though, in a certain sense 12 Monkeys isn't about time travel at all.  It's about mental illness.  It's about the fine line between insanity and what we're willing to believe.

In the late 19th century a man named Daniel Schreber was treated from what was then known as dementia preacox, a illness which we now call schizophrenia.  He believed that God and his psychiatrist were trying to turn him into a woman.  He believed that God was trying to penetrate his skull with "rays of sperm".  At one point, he became convinced that the outside world had ended and that the people and doctors that visited him were only mere facsimiles of the people they represented.  In 12 Monkeys, James Cole is locked in a mental institution in 1990 following a violent outburst.  He believes he is from the future.  He believes that billions will die in 1996 from a deadly virus.  He believes that he has been sent to the past to collect information, and that the people around him are already dead from his perspective, ghosts of the past living in a world that has long since been abandoned and reclaimed by the animals.  He believes that there is a transmitter in his tooth that transmits his location to the people in the future.  He often hears a disembodied voice when calls him "Bob."  Much like Schreber's doctors, Cole's doctors consider him to be insane.  The difference in 12 Monkeys is that it's all treated as if it's completely true.

There's a statement at the beginning of the film that suggests that Cole's story is based on a real patient's delusion.  The issue the film raises is how do we know what's true and what isn't?  How do we know if a man who claims to be from the future is insane or telling the truth?  We hear all the time from people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, people who claim to be channeling the dead souls of Egyptian pharaohs, and yes, even people who claim to be from the future.  It's easy to be dismissive and declare that these people are either "crazy" or lying to get attention.  But how can we really be sure?  Maybe aliens really are secretly communicating with certain chosen people via their television sets.  When it comes to committing someone to an institution where do you draw the line between someone who needs help and someone who claims something that you "know" is impossible?

Having seen a few cases of schizophrenia for myself, I believe that the defining feature of the illness is the lack of internal logic.  It's one thing to have someone tell you that they've seen a UFO.  It's another thing to have someone show you a jar of chunky peanut butter as proof that Jesus controlled an army of robot spiders.  If you've ever been there, you know the difference.  I'm not saying that you necessarily believe every person that tells you they've seen a UFO.  I'm just saying that don't just dismiss them as insane because you don't believe in UFO's.  If it sounds like it makes sense if you granted the premise that it was true, then you can at least give them the benefit of the doubt, and agree to disagree and remain skeptical until you see some proof for yourself.  

Following the recent shooting in Tuscon, one of my cousins in Arizona posted links to some Youtube videos that this Jared Loughner kid had made a few months earlier.  Most of them feature little blocks of text talking about "conscience dreaming" and "a new currency".  I've watched these videos, and I really don't see the slightest possibility of making any kind of sense out of anything he's saying.  Obviously, I don't need to tell you that I'm not a doctor, and I don't know the kid.  It's hard to make a determination based on a few words taken out of context in an online video.  Is it possible that he has some valid theories about the true nature of reality?  I suppose.  But strictly on the basis of what I've seen, and with my extremely limited qualifications, I think there are definite signs of metal illness.  In any case, I can't quite imagine any insight into the nature of reality that he might have had that would justify the actions he took.

12 Monkeys presents a very extreme case.  True though it is, Cole's story sounds every bit as much like dementia as any story could.  Is the movie simply trying to present a concrete dramatization of a schizoid delusion, or is it just doing everything it can to push the boundary between the possible and the insane?  It's hard to say.  At one point he vanishes from a tiny locked room where he was sedated and restrained to the floor.  One of the doctors speculates that Cole must have slipped the restraints, climbed the high, smooth walls, and escaped through an extremely small vent in the ceiling.  Given what he believes, this is the only logical explanation that he can come up with...and it's just as crazy as anything else in the movie.

(This post is also available in extra cheesy version.)

Saving Private Ryan: Images of War

Saving Private Ryan begins and ends with two long, extended battle sequences.  These scenes are shot hand-held with little dialogue and they have the feel of on-location documentary footage.  Because Private Ryan is a Spielberg film, and because it has that Spielberg style that feels good-hearted and hopeful even in the midst of war, I think people tend to forget how real and raw these scenes are.  One of the most brutal and violent depictions I've ever seen.  Kubrick may have had the more dark and calculating reputation, but shot for shot, there's really nothing in Full Metal Jacket that comes close to what you see here.

But it's not just violence for the sake of violence.  The two separate scenes and the feeling their images invoke serve as milestones that gauge the evolution worked in the audience's mind through-out the film.  The first scene depicts the D-Day landing at Normandy.  The shots are fast and low, and they give you an uncanny, unnerving feeling or being right there with the soldiers.  You feel you're experiencing the battle with them, and the one thought that goes through you mind, the same thought that must have gone through so many of their minds, is  simply that you don't want to die.  Beneath the withering fire of the German guns the whole point and purpose of the battle and all other considerations are pushed aside.  Life is torn to pieces all around you, and you just don't want to die.  Nothing else matters.  Then, the movie closes with another epic battle scene, as the characters fight to defend a bridge where the German army plans to cross.  Again, it's a harsh and violent scene, and again you feel like you're down in the middle of it with the characters, but yet somehow the fear of the opening scene is gone.  Death is still there at every turn, and a character is even show paralyzed into inaction by his own fear, but that feeling of stark and intense mortality that drives every other thought from the mind is gone, replaced by a feeling of nobler purpose.  It is the deceptively simple story that takes place between these two scenes that causes the change.

So what is this nobler purpose?  The movie barely touches on the political agendas and moral issues behind the war itself.  The subject of the holocaust is raised through a Jewish member of the squad that goes searching for Private Ryan, but this is more a matter of characterization than theme.  The German soldiers aren't cast as villains, and in fact, there is one scene where we can't help but feel sympathy for one of them.  So this "nobler purpose" isn't just a matter of good fighting in a righteous cause against evil.  The feeling is more like men put into an unfortunate situation where they're forced to kill one another.  In the heat of battle they're driven to a murderous rage because the enemy is trying to kill them even though they're also trying to kill the enemy in turn.  The absurdity of this is demonstrated clearly in one scene in particular.  The saying, "If God be for us, who could be against us?", is even raised in a conversation between the men, but it's clearly not where the movie's heart lies.  This is just the soldiers trying to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. 

No, the nobler purpose is to be found in their mission to find Ryan.  "This time, the mission is a man.", one of the soldiers observes.  It's the fact that even in the middle of a war, with men dying all around, one individual human life still has value.  It ultimately doesn't matter whether Ryan goes home and "invents a longer lasting light bulb."  What matters is that a human life was saved.  The importance of this comes to be something that goes beyond the "math" of the mission and even the senselessness of war itself.  One single man's life still has value.   

In the end, they stay to defend the bridge.  Not because the Germans are evil and have to be stopped.  They stay because Ryan doesn't want to abandon "the only brothers he has left."  They stay, because they stay together.  So when that final battle comes, it's no longer just a case of men thrown senselessly into the face of mortality.  It's men who have chosen to fight and even die to try to keep each other alive.  They've learned that isn't a question of nine men sacrificed to save one, or one sacrificed to save nine.  It's life that matters, regardless of the numbers.        

The Talking Dog Defense

I hear this particular logical misnomer so often these days that it's practically become a cliche'.  I've heard it from stand-up comedians, radio hosts, and dozens of times in personal conversations.  You've probably heard it yourself.  You might have even been guilty of proliferating it.  Here's what happens:  You're talking to someone about a movie that contains science fiction or other fantastical elements in its concept.  You point out an inconsistency in the plot, or some unrealistic detail of the story that bears no connection to the fantastic element involved in the story's basic concept, and what is the retort of the person you're debating this point with?  It's usually some variant of "There's talking dogs in this movie, and you're complaining about...", etc.  This is usually said with a tone so heavily  laced with snarkiness that it even comes across in the tone-deaf world of internet communication, where we have to qualify even the mildly rudest jokes with smiley faces.   

And yet, the person is completely wrong.  Making a movie about talking dogs isn't a free pass to throw logic and sense out the window.  Such a movie simply postulates the existence of another world, one in which dogs talk.  Aside from this conceit, as ridiculous and scientifically untenable though it may be, the movie is still under an obligation to follow certain rules.  1.) It must establish the difference between its world and our own and follow this difference with consistency.  If the dogs talk but behave otherwise like normal dogs in every other respect in the first act, they can't be performing brain surgery in the third.  2.) It can not break consistency with other details of its world that it shares in common with our own, without accounting for these differences.  You can't move Christmas to April 15th without explaining why or how the change is a consequence of dogs talking.  Suppose your story has a subplot about a secret society of mailmen.  Without further explanation, this subplot would simply leave the audience perplexed.  But if this development is explained by the fact that mailmen are the only ones who can hear the dogs talk, then everyone's on board.  Of course, rule 1 comes into play here again.  If you establish that only mailmen can hear the dogs talk, you can't have little Billy hear them talk later without accounting for it.  3.) The fantastical conceit of your story isn't a giant rug to sweep plot holes under.  Just because your movie has talking dogs, that doesn't mean that Mr. Smith can break his leg in one scene and then be playing basketball in the next.

Of course, I'm using the talking dog example precisely because of the absurdity of it.  A movie like that, you could cut it a certain amount of slack because it's clearly a comedy, but the leeway isn't unlimited.  Besides, the "Talking Dog Defense" is used for all kinds of stories.  It rears it's ugly head when discussing stories with elements that range from everything from aliens to zoos for dinosaurs.  Pointing out the logical fallacy involved seems almost too obvious to be worthy of mentioning, but since so many people routinely resort to this argument, apparently it needs to be said.  Most people are aware of the literary concept of suspension of disbelief, but they don't know how to discriminately apply it.  They treat it like a magic screwdriver in their toolbox of artistic appreciation, and they think it can fix anything.  You show them a loose tile that needs re-grouting, and up they pop with the screwdriver.    

If you get what I'm saying, feel free to use the phrase.  I'm hoping it catches on.  The next time you're debating a plot hole in a sci-fi movie with your friend, and you point out that the corporate espionage sub-plot didn't make sense and they say, "You expect a movie about robot armies from the future to make sense?", tell them that they're using the "Talking Dog Defense."  When they ask what that is, send them here.  Tell them to click on the ads and order a few recommended Amazon products while they're here.  I'd feel a lot better making money off of your belligerent friends.                             

The Matrix: A Study of Internet Identities

For about 11 years now, I have gone by the name "nuclearheadache" on the internet.  I have used the name for websites, forums, email, and of course, as the title of this blog.  I came up with the name on the spot, without giving it much thought.  I was creating an account, I was prompted to choose a username, and I had a really, really bad headache at the time.  There wasn't much more to it than that.  Since then, though, the name has become a persona, a projection of my personality, or at least a projection of those aspects of my personality that I chose to share on the internet.  The name suggests something that a name like, say, hellokittysuperfan116 would not.  

In real life I am Bryan White.  I'm a 35 year old factory worker.  I'm married.  I have a daughter.  I'm left handed, and I have grey eyes.  My identity in the real world is at the mercy of countless things which are beyond my control, not the least of which is my name, picked for me at birth and not a matter I had the slightest input in.  My hair has decided to abandon me for the most part, also without consulting me at all.  This undeniably affects my image in the world, again, in ways that are beyond my control.  Although nuclearheadache  is not my real name, and although the persona it encapsulates is an artificial construction by virtue of the fact that I can select and choose what constitutes that persona, in some ways these things are more real precisely because my choice was involved.   A username is a creative expression.  A given name is an outfit someone else dressed you in.   A virtual avatar is an artistic choice.  Your face in a random accident of genetics.  

Yet, there is honesty in a face.  A lifetime of choices, good and bad are written there.  A face displays your virtues and your faults.  There is a paradox here.  On the one hand, our internet identities are more genuine expressions of ourselves because they are more deliberately chosen and they are less subject to factors  beyond our control.  On the other hand, our real life identities are more genuine because we can not hide our faults behind an artificial construction.  You might say that a  person who knows us in real life is much more likely to see us at our worst because they are more  liable to see us under pressure as we deal with real problems and we struggle in the real world.  But yet, there are times when a person uses the anonymity of the internet to reveal hidden sides of themselves that they usually keep hidden in normal society.

If you're reading this, that means you're on the internet just like I am.  We all have a foot in either of these two worlds, and we all possess these dual identities, and so the question becomes:  Which one of these worlds is more real?  Which one has more of our true selves invested in it?  Who really know us better; the people we interact with online, or the people we interact with in life?  And in turn, which of these people are more real to us?  The consideration of these questions is one of the major themes of the movie The Matrix. 

Years ago, I used to have this friend that was very suspicious of the internet, and of computers in general.  I'm sure you've all known someone like this at some point.  I was sitting around with him one night and we were talking and he said that some day aliens might land here and they would find the streets deserted, the buildings empty, and everything rotting and rusting away.  There would just be silent desolation everywhere.  Eventually, these aliens would find their way to our homes, where they would find each and everyone of us in some back room plugged into a virtual world of easy and infinite possibilities which we had long since chosen over the limiting confines of the real world.  I wasn't sure that I agreed with his pessimistic outlook, but as an aspiring writer, I appreciated that there were some intriguing possibilities for fiction there, if someone could figure out how to make a story out of the idea.  So when I heard about The Matrix, my first reaction was a smile that someone else had had the same idea.  

On its surface, The Matrix seems to be a simple story of people being freed from an artificial, virtual world so that they can live in the real world.  This would appear to be the primary struggle of the characters in the film.  The virtual world appears to represent a form of bondage, and the fight is for the freedom of reality.  A straightforward reading of the narrative suggests this unmistakably.  But if you look a little closer and dig a little deeper, you find it's a little more complicated.  Beneath the obvious surface, you find that the real world and the online world have been switched.  Each one represents the other in the reality of the film.  This is a mirror image of our world, through the looking glass and flipped around backwards.   

The first and biggest clue to this switch is in the names.  In the film's virtual world Keanu Reeves' character is named "Thomas A. Anderson", while in the film's real world he is known as "Neo."  However, the name Neo is clearly recognizable as a type of internet username, as are the names of the other characters, "Morpheus", "Trinity", "Tank", and so on.  A big point is even made, during the climax of the story, of Reeves embracing the username over the Anderson name, which is clearly recognizable as a type of real name in our world.  The point being that "Anderson" is a kind of slave name that belongs to his former life of captivity. 

On the surface of the story, this captivity involves being held prisoner by the artificiality of the Matrix.  But the juxtaposition of the name-types reveals a deeper level.  The captivity that the Anderson name represents is the captivity of the circumstances of the material world.  It's the captivity of his job, the suit and tie he has to wear, the neighbor's garbage that Smith mentions.  It is the captivity to the mundane realities of life.  The Neo identity, as Smith again points out, is another life, lived in computers.  It is Anderson's online persona.  As Neo, he has a much grander purpose and a far less restricted existence.  It is  breaking these chains of reality's restrictions that defines Neo and ultimately leads him to the realization of his true self. 

Since this scenario suggests that the Matrix represents our physical reality, this might seem as though it is contradicted by the superhuman feats of agility and bullet-time virtuosity displayed by the characters within the Matrix.  However, the dividing line in the symbolism between the real and online worlds is not simply between the Matrix and outside the Matrix.   The actual point of demarcation between real and online is the moment when Neo wakes up from the Matrix.  By following Neo's path to becoming the "one", as opposed to the zero he apparently was in his former life, The Matrix explores the duality between the limiting realities of real life and the possibilities of the online life.  From the soul-crushing dullness of corporate America Neo is initiated into a realm of instant downloads, customizable options, and fantasy role-playing.

That is the real trick of The Matrix.  Although it plays like a dire warning and an indictment of the virtual world, it is actually an endorsement of it and exploration of its place in modern life.  In the question of where our true selves lie, it falls firmly on the side of the persona that we create by choice.  The society of the real world, it argues, is a system that keeps us under control with its agents checking our every step.  The internet provides our minds with an opportunity to break free and become the person we were actually meant to be.  You may agree or disagree with this, but the hidden secret of the film remains.  The Matrix is the real world.                        

Seven: The Grim Masterpiece

In its basic form and structure the movie Seven falls into the genre of the police procedural.  It's a familiar genre.  Two men on the trail of a killer, digging up clues at crime scenes, following leads that sometimes lead nowhere and other times right to the killer's doorstep.  But there is an element to Seven that raises it above this genre.  The murders under investigation are not mere crimes, but rather, part of a work of art; a twisted and psychotic work of art that disposes of human life in its composition, but a work of art nevertheless.  This is not to say that the movie is an advocacy or an admiration of what John Doe does.  It is simply that the crimes are by definition art. 

            THE WORK

There are several defining factors which qualify John Doe's murders as art.  First, there is a message and abstract meaning to the murders.  They are demonstrations of the lethal consequences of the seven deadly sins.  In each case it is the sin itself that is the victim's undoing.  The situations they are placed in are extreme and contrived, but this is seen by John Doe as a way of forcing them to confront the transgressions which have become an habitual part of their everyday lives.  But these demonstrations are not primarily meant for the edification of the victims, but rather for the population at large and the citizens of the unnamed city of the story.  The crimes are not committed simply to satisfy a murderous impulse and then covered up in the darkness.  They are exposed before an audience, to be admired, appreciated, and contemplated as a work of art.

Secondly, the limited number of the crimes also shows a sense of composition and control that helps define them as art.  Again, they are not the result of an unbridled impulse.  There is a carefully planned structure behind them.  They are a series, predetermined by the seven sins.  There is a completeness to the work; an aesthetic unity of form characteristic of art.   This is not say that the work is beautiful.  Far from it.  It's revolting, disturbing, and disgusting.  But it has a clear and well ordered design.  John Doe stands back from his blood-stained canvas and nods in satisfaction.  

            THE ARTIST

For John Doe the truly inspired touch to his masterpiece is his own inclusion in it.  He is practically giddy with excitement as he rides in the back of the squad car.  To him, this is the element that will make it contemplated and "puzzled over and studied and followed, forever."  It is the fact that he has not excluded his own guilt, that he has not stood outside or above his message, that he feels will give his work the mark of authenticity.  He is not "special", he declares, and the anonymity of his name testifies to this.  The work of art itself is all that matters, and John Doe is quite willingly to literally lose himself in it.  He sees himself immortalized in it.  Artists speak of suffering and sacrificing themselves to their art, but John Doe paints with his own blood.  His victims have been laid out in a morbid composition like sculptures molded out of human remains and John Doe eagerly climbs onto the last pedestal marked "envy" and becomes absorbed into the work.

And Envy is indeed his sin.  He lives on the margin of society.  It's easy to mistake his smug insinuations for insincerity when he tells Detective Mills how much he envies his life.   He is baiting him, stirring his wrath.  But if he's smiling, it's only because he's rehearsed this moment countless times in his mind, and he knows he's about to put the finishing touch on his work.  Still, he means what he says.  It is envy that has driven him to lash out in spite at the world that has rejected him, denied him the life and the things he wanted.  He believes the sinful nature of the world is to blame for this injustice, and that guilt has to be thrown back in its face.  But this "throwing back" is driven by his own sin, and he has to atone, just like the rest.

            THE THEME

But the work is not complete with the murdering of the representatives of each of the seven deadly sins.  There is another murder which is necessary to complete the composition, both practically and thematically; the murder of Detective Mills' wife, Tracy.  Tracy is killed in order to stir Mills to wrath, but she herself is innocent.  In the work, she assumes the place of the "victim."  She is made to suffer and die for the deadly sins of the others.  It's hard to say whether this was intended by John Doe, or just the inevitable consequence of his plan.  It's possible he only killed her to provoke Mills, and gave no thought to the significance of the act, although considering his intellect and his attention to detail in regards to the rest of the work, this is doubtful.   At any rate, there are always subtexts and meanings in any work of art that grow beyond the control and the intentions of the artist.  

Whether he intended it or not, Tracy's death assumes an important place in his work and makes a significant statement about its meaning.  John Doe may be the artist, but in the composition he is only a marginal element.  Tracy, although her death is almost a side note  in the fall of events, is actually the centerpiece.  Her death is a demonstration of the innocence that is destroyed by the seven sins.  The fact that she is killed, not for her sins or even for any real personal reason, but rather merely as a means to John Doe's artistic ends, only serves to drive this point home even more.  It makes her a sacrificial victim in every possible sense.

So, what is the point of a movie about a man who composes a work of art out of brutal murders?  It seems like an appalling glorification.  But that's the point.  Through-out the film Somerset and Mills have an on-going debate about the corruption of the city they work in.  The issue is raised again and again by Somerset of how to deal with it, how to go on being exposed to it and not to lose your humanity.  The city could be any city.  It doesn't really matter.  It's the world's corruption pushed to an extreme, and in this world murder is an art form, a subject for macabre fascination, a public spectacle placed on display.  John Doe stands in judgment of this corruption,  and ends up as the ultimate symptom of it.  It's not a particularly pleasant vision, but Seven isn't a particularly pleasant movie. 

Memento: The Burden Of Memory

Memory may be the most essential element of the human mind.  It serves as our connection to the past, all that we have known, learned, and experienced.  It also serves as the expansive reservoir of our personality, which we draw from moment by moment in all of our responses, our actions and reactions to everything in our lives.  It is the weathered and worn seat of our souls and the cornerstone of our emotional existence.   A song or faded photograph or even a faint scent in the air can tap into this deep well of stored feelings.  All of our triumphs and regrets, our shame as well as our fond recollections, reside in out memories.  But even aside from all of these lofty characteristics, memory also serves a simple, utilitarian purpose.  It facilitates our practical ability to function in life.  It grants us the ability to retain the knowledge of who, what, and where we are, and most importantly, what we need to do.  It is primarily with the nature of memory in this last capacity that the movie Memento is concerned.

To start with I want to share three examples of things I do to help me remember things that I need to remember.  They're certainly not unusual examples, but they'll serve as useful illustrations that I'll be able to refer back to.  Anyway: 

1. When there's one important thing that I absolutely need to remember I usually write myself a note with a pen on the back of my left hand between my thumb and my forefinger.  Being left-handed, it would probably be easier to write the note on the back of my right hand, but being left handed also means I use my left hand more, so I definitely see more of the back of that hand.  So the gain in visibility is well worth the awkward effort of trying to write with my right hand.
2. I don't make a routine practice of making "to-do" lists; it's definitely not something I do every day.  But when I feel like I have an overwhelming pile of stuff to do, and especially when I feel like I'm having a hard time jumping in and getting started, sitting down and making a "to-do" list can be very helpful means of breaking it all down and making it all seem just a little more manageable. 
3. Like most people I keep a list of contacts in my cell phone.  I have it all organized by people's home, cell, office, email, etc.  One of the first things I do when I get a new phone is sit down and copy all the contact information from my old phone.  I refer to this list regularly.  If I'm talking on my home phone, I look up the number on my cell phone before dialing.  If I'm using the cell phone itself, I don't dial; I just hit a button.  If I'm filling out a job application, I have the numbers of many of my previous employers saved on the phone, so that I can refer to them.   

 Now, I noticed something about the first two things.  Although their primary purpose is a means to remembering things, I find that they also bring a certain sense of relief.  Once I write the note on the back of my hand, I'm pretty much free to forget about it.  I can release the tight grip my concentration has on this little piece of information.  I no longer have to worry about forgetting it.  The information is right there on the back of my hand.  In fact, I find that nearly 80% of the stress in my life comes from this endless responsibility to remember things.  That's why the "to-do" list comes in so handy.  More than half the aggravation of having a pile of errands to attend to is the necessity of having to remember it all and keep it straight in my head.  The "to-do" list removes that problem, and reduces it to the simple task of checking things off one by one.  So while these techniques help me remember, they also help me manage stress.  They take the edge off the burden of my responsibilities.

However, like most things in life, there's a trade-off, which brings us to the third item on the list.  Since putting these numbers on my cell phone, I've noticed a definite drop-off in my ability to remember phone numbers.  In the old days, I used to have dozens of phone numbers floating around in my head that I could recall effortlessly at a moment's notice.  Now that I've started putting them on my phone, I have trouble even remembering my own mother's number.  I don't even remember the number to the cell phone itself.  It's on the the phone itself under "phone information", so why bother?  So it seems the phone has taken the place of my memory.  While this relieves the stressful burden of remembering the numbers, I'm in serious trouble if I lose or break the phone.  

Although this may all sound like a dry and difficult subject to present dramatically,  Memento manages to pull it off.  It does so by presenting an extreme case, a man who has no short term memory whatsoever, a man who relies completely on the kind of reminders described above.  Rather than writing notes on his hand, he covers his body in tattoos that remind him of who he is, where he is, and what he has to do.  The task of which needs to be reminded is more that simply buying groceries and paying the water bill.  He's trying to to find the man who murdered his wife and robbed him of his ability to form new memories.  Yet, despite these exaggerations, the essential principles remains the same.  

For Lenny, the protagonist of the film, these "mementos" take on a life of their own.  Others take advantage of his condition and use this system of his to confuse and manipulate him.  In  fact we eventually learn that Lenny has even used the system to trick himself.  He is at the mercy of these mementos.  If he writes a note on a Polaroid telling him to trust someone, the note itself achieves the status of an unquestionable judgment, even if it turns out that he made a huge mistake when he wrote the note.  The mistake is long forgotten, and only the note remains as his sole guide.  Even his own drive and purpose fade way, replaced completely by task set down for him in this accumulated pile of notes and information.   In the end it seems that the task may have even been completed long ago, or might not even have been real to begin with, but Lenny deliberately perpetuates it because these notes and what they tell him to do are the only sense of direction and purpose he has left.

By showing us a man robbed of his memory, Memento demonstrates the importance and function of memory through its absence.  Lenny is a man adrift in life.  He lives in motel room, and the only reason he knows he lives there is because he has a picture of it in his coat pocket.  His entire world revolves around the leads that he believes will help him find his wife's killer.  He thinks of nothing else.  He has surrendered completely to his mementos.  He has been freed from the stressful burden of memory, and he has lost all control of his life in the process.  So the next time you write a note reminding yourself to "buy milk" or you jot down a phone number, and you breathe a sigh a relief that now you don't have to worry about the information slipping your mind...just remember that relying on your own mind might not always be a bad thing.