When watching this movie, I attempted to relate it to Time O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Amazingly, I found a similarity between the movie of the cruel life of a widowed man and the ever so confusing Vietnam novel. This similarity was the art of remembering, and how it changes.
In the movie, the protagonist with his "condition" attempts to remember things by writing down facts on the back of photographs and by tattooing them onto his body. In the novel, things are remembered by the characters through stories. The similarity-both memories are distorted. Due to a condition, memories are screwed with by those trying to take advantage of a poor character trying to get revenge. Due to the sake of story-telling, memories are tampered with to become a better or more extravagant story. This "distorted" memory leaves audiences looking for the truth or like me just all together frustrated. This makes both the novel and the movie a successful one.
I love movies I can just relax and watch, but a movie that makes an audience use their brain is a success!
Aren't all memories distorted though? By time or emotion or whatever?
ReplyDeleteOr have you ever been told something so many times, or so convincingly that you think you remember?
Just seems to me to represent what memory does in reality in a bit more dramatic of a way.
I totally agree with your thesis that you made of the similarity between this movie and O'Brien's novel. The statement by Leonard, "...Will I lie to myself to be happy? In your case Teddy...yes I will." Based on the plain fact that Leonard will lie to himself to be happy is almost the same thing that O'Brien did. "I'm young and happy. I'll never die....I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.(O'Brien, 246). O'Brien has himself and the loved ones he lost exist through stories. "We kept the dead alive with stories....Often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but it was a way of bringing body and soul back together, or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhibit." (O'Brien, 239) The difference is that O'Brien's stories are not all lies, truths are expressed in his stories as well. Truths of war, emotional pain, and violence. He uses stories to keep Timmy, Linda, Kiowa, Curt, Ted, alive. Stories is the one element that saves Tim O'Brien. This is the similar case with Leonard. He makes up the whole plot of his wife's murder over and over again, even though he has already killed the murder of his wife long ago. Leonard only does to this to keep his own existence going. Leonard lives on in the realm of lies. O'Brien lives on in the realm of stories.
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