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Few themes in the Bible are as persistent as the call to remember: whether it is God commanding the Israelites never to forget how he brought them out of Egypt, or Jesus telling his followers to eat his body and drink his blood in remembrance of him, or the thief on the cross asking Christ to remember him when he comes into his kingdom, the role that memory plays in shaping our identities and in binding us to each other and to God is integral to the faith.
Memory has also become an increasingly prominent theme at the movies, going back a few years to Memento, an ingenious film noir about a man who has been unable to create new memories ever since he was knocked head-first into a mirror while trying to protect his now-dead wife from a rapist who broke into their house. Despite his condition, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is determined to hunt the murderer down and kill him, so he surrounds himself with notes and Polaroid photos, and he tattoos the most important clues to his very skin. These notes, he says, are more objective, more true, than mere recollection, which can be unreliable.
But the film gives us ample reason to doubt Leonard's claim. Director Chris Nolan arranges the scenes in reverse orderbeginning with the execution of the man Leonard believes is guilty of the crime, and working backwards as Leonard builds his caseand we realize there have been points in Leonard's quest where even he had the nagging suspicion that someone was trying to manipulate him into killing the wrong person. Shadowing all his efforts is the knowledge that his thirst for vengeance may never be satisfied, if he cannot remember that he achieved it; as Leonard himself puts it, "How am I supposed to heal if I cannot feel time?"
Breaking the story into shorter scenes and showing them in reverse order is a brilliant way to put us in Leonard's frame of mind. As each scene begins, he has no idea how he got thereand neither do we. It also underscores the fractured nature of Leonard's identity, and thus, implicitly, of all human identities. In "Memento Mori," the original short story (by Nolan's brother Jonathan) on which the film was based, this theme is made explicit, as the protagonist tells us that all persons are "at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain." He concludes: "Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots."
Interestingly, Saint Augustine might have agreed with this, to a point. In his Confessions, the Bishop of Hippo said it is memory that holds our experiences together, and without his memory, there would not be a single Augustine, who left the hedonism of his youth to devote himself to Christianity, but many Augustines, each one living in the moment without any connection to his past or future. However, Augustine recognized that his own memory was flawed, and so he ultimately appealed to the memory of the transcendent God, who alone has a perfect view of reality, and can thus keep our "scattered selves" united to each other and to him.
Since Memento, the theme of short-term memory loss, and the potential to overcome such fragmentation of the self through bonds of family and friendship, has cropped up in more mainstream films such as Finding Nemo and 50 First Dates. In addition, a striking number of films have also explored the role that memory plays in giving and receiving forgiveness.
Take The Bourne Supremacy, in which Matt Damon reprises his role as Jason Bourne, the amnesia victim who discovered, in The Bourne Identity, that he was, until his memory went blank, a highly trained assassin working for an ultra-shadowy branch of the cia. When last we saw him, that branch had been shut down, and Bourne had turned his back on his former life and settled down to a life "off the grid" with Marie (Franka Potente), a German woman who not only helped him stay one step ahead of his former colleagues but also humanized him, making him less of a killing machine and more of a person. Alas, any chance of a happy-ever-after is ruined when a Russian assassin named Kirill (Karl Urban) begins killing cia operatives and leaving clues behind that point to Bourne. Kirill also tracks Bourne down and tries to kill him, too, to keep the cia chasing a phantombut he kills Marie, instead, and Bourne, who survives the attack, assumes the cia is out to get him again.
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