Even though this movie was pretty good as a whole, it continuously made me question which characters were telling the truth and who were telling lies. Unfortunately, it left my mind in a spin and I could not figure out what to believe until the end. The ending scene where Leonard is in the abandoned house with Teddy was the most appealing scene to me. Teddy reveals at the end what the truth of Leonard life is. He said that you have already avenged your wife's murder, "But when you killed him I, I was so convinced that you'd remember."(Imbd) But the truth to Leonard is that he never killed the murderer of his wife. Teddy goes on even further by informing him that his wife was a diabetic and that Leonard was the one who overdosed her with insulin. Teddy makes it known to Leonard that Leonard himself created this character, Sammy Jankis, as a part of his story and the whole situation from his memory loss condition to his wife's murder. Leonard questions Teddy's claims with his own, " You don't think I know my own wife! She was not a diabetic...Jankis was a real client his wife came to me..." Leonard informs Teddy that he has all the evidence to go along with his wife's murder, but Teddy says that Leonard removed some of the content from the file to make this story. This whole conversation about what is the truth and the lie in Leonard's mission reminds me of what professor Schwartz had said,"...manipulation makes the lie the truth...". So then who is telling truth?
When Teddy says that Leonard was the one who pumped insulin into his wife's body, it got me confused about the rape, murder, and the Sammy Jankis story as well. I did not know what to believe. So, now I am left with a man who has no mental condition and is sane on one hand, Teddy. On the other hand, there is a man who has a mental condition due to an accident who relives his wife's murder investigation everyday, Leonard. Who should I believe? Leonard unfolds the ultimate truth to his survival. "We all lie to ourselves to be happy...I'm not a killer. I'm just someone who wanted to make things right. Can't I just let myself forget what you've told me? Can't I just let myself forget what you've made me do. You think I just want another puzzle to solve? Another John G. to look for? You're John G. So you can be my John G...Will I lie to myself to be happy? In your case Teddy... yes I will." (Imdb) This is the truth of Momento.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
See I have this condition....
Although this movie as a whole was quite enjoyable and definitely kept my attention, I seemed fooled at the end. I was lead through the entire film thinking that Leonard was a good guy who was just dealt some bad cards. Up until the last five minutes of the film this could have been seen as true. However, you realize that Leonard is just a killer and nothing more. His intentions may seen understandable, seeing as he just wants vengenance for his wife's murder, but when does the killing get to be too much?
In the last five or so minutes of the film, the viewer learns that Leonard already killed the man who killed his wife and that Teddy has just taken advantage of his condition to use for his own personal gain. When the viewer is showed the beginning of Leonard's story, they see that he creates "John G." In the film, Leonard says, "You think I just want another puzzle to solve? Another John G to look for? You're a John G. So you can be my John G. Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy, yes, I will." So even though Leonard doesn't believe that Teddy is the John G that killed his wife, he imagines that he is so he can "be happy." It's at this point in the film that I felt decieved; Leonard is supposed to be the good guy who's just out to get a bad guy. But in the end, he is the bad guy.
In the last five or so minutes of the film, the viewer learns that Leonard already killed the man who killed his wife and that Teddy has just taken advantage of his condition to use for his own personal gain. When the viewer is showed the beginning of Leonard's story, they see that he creates "John G." In the film, Leonard says, "You think I just want another puzzle to solve? Another John G to look for? You're a John G. So you can be my John G. Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy, yes, I will." So even though Leonard doesn't believe that Teddy is the John G that killed his wife, he imagines that he is so he can "be happy." It's at this point in the film that I felt decieved; Leonard is supposed to be the good guy who's just out to get a bad guy. But in the end, he is the bad guy.
Friday, October 2, 2009
What was I doing?
I liked the movie because not only was it action-filled and dramatic, but it was also funny. The director was able to lighten up the mood when it got too harsh. Relating to our course, it did a very good job. There was actually a line that Teddy said that reminded me of "When Things Fall Apart," it went something like this: from your memories you create what you think is true, but because you're happy with it it's ok if it's a lie. I know that's not word for word but it reminded me of the book because war veterans seemed to pull their stories mainly based on memory. And it didn't matter whether is was true or not what matter was the message they were trying to portray.
Commenting on how the movie was made is very hard because even though it made me confused at times, I would have rathered (not a word??) it been filmed that way because it gives us the sense of disillusionment the main character felt every time he woke up.
Commenting on how the movie was made is very hard because even though it made me confused at times, I would have rathered (not a word??) it been filmed that way because it gives us the sense of disillusionment the main character felt every time he woke up.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Two O'Briens, Multiple Stories, One Reason
“By telling stories, you objectify your own experiences . . . You pin down certain truths. You make up others.” Tim O’Brien approaches his novel The Things They Carried in an indirect way that may spark confusion in a first-time reader. Indeed, naming the narrator after himself is only the first perplexing detail. While this fact seems to signify a memoir, the novel is actually fiction. For O’Brien, actual events alone cannot express the emotional baggage that plagues soldiers in war. Therefore, he uses fictional stories to better relay the traumatic emotions he experienced.
The chapter “Speaking of Courage” tells a story of guilt over a close friend’s death. The platoon is stranded in a flooded field of human waste, where the stench is overpowering. Kiowa, one of the soldiers, is wounded and slips beneath the waters. Norman Bowker attempts to save him, but “it [the stench] was inside him, in his lungs,” and in a moment of weakness, he releases Kiowa’s boot. However, in a later chapter O’Brien states “Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up . . . That part of the story is my own.” This statement immediately strikes a contradiction. The story explicitly states that Norman gave up the fight with the river, so how can O’Brien’s comment be true? The story is a tactic used to express the guilt Norman felt over his friend’s death. Norman never let go of the boot, yet he was present and unable to save his friend. Thus, he still experiences the same guilt as though he had allowed the river to wash Kiowa away.
However, this is only the first step to understanding O’Brien’s intricate web. Because the novel is fiction, Norman Bowker does not exist, and neither does Kiowa. Yet O’Brien still declares it a true story. In every anecdote, O’Brien ascribes his feelings onto the fictional characters involved. Each character represents an emotion or event that he experienced during the war. The actual events of his life and the attached emotions make up an overwhelming clot of grief. But by writing stories about these individual emotions, he is able to put a face on his unruly emotions, thus allowing him to relive and come to terms with the traumatic experiences. In order to do this, he must also invent a second self—the narrator Tim O’Brien. This way, he can look on as an outsider, while still viewing the experience through his own eyes.
The novel is thus a psychological account as well as a collection of expert storytelling. It shows the tortured emotions of a man scared by war while also triggering an emotional response from the reader. With the powerful force of storytelling, O’Brien is able to recreate emotions and deliver them through words.
The chapter “Speaking of Courage” tells a story of guilt over a close friend’s death. The platoon is stranded in a flooded field of human waste, where the stench is overpowering. Kiowa, one of the soldiers, is wounded and slips beneath the waters. Norman Bowker attempts to save him, but “it [the stench] was inside him, in his lungs,” and in a moment of weakness, he releases Kiowa’s boot. However, in a later chapter O’Brien states “Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up . . . That part of the story is my own.” This statement immediately strikes a contradiction. The story explicitly states that Norman gave up the fight with the river, so how can O’Brien’s comment be true? The story is a tactic used to express the guilt Norman felt over his friend’s death. Norman never let go of the boot, yet he was present and unable to save his friend. Thus, he still experiences the same guilt as though he had allowed the river to wash Kiowa away.
However, this is only the first step to understanding O’Brien’s intricate web. Because the novel is fiction, Norman Bowker does not exist, and neither does Kiowa. Yet O’Brien still declares it a true story. In every anecdote, O’Brien ascribes his feelings onto the fictional characters involved. Each character represents an emotion or event that he experienced during the war. The actual events of his life and the attached emotions make up an overwhelming clot of grief. But by writing stories about these individual emotions, he is able to put a face on his unruly emotions, thus allowing him to relive and come to terms with the traumatic experiences. In order to do this, he must also invent a second self—the narrator Tim O’Brien. This way, he can look on as an outsider, while still viewing the experience through his own eyes.
The novel is thus a psychological account as well as a collection of expert storytelling. It shows the tortured emotions of a man scared by war while also triggering an emotional response from the reader. With the powerful force of storytelling, O’Brien is able to recreate emotions and deliver them through words.
It's not a war story. It's a love story.
This novel isn’t about truths or fabrications. It’s about feelings. Tim O’Brien tells us that the soldiers “carried their sadness” and earlier “They carried their stories” (O’Brien 10). It doesn’t matter if O’Brien actually killed the “slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty” who laid in the red clay trial outside the village of My Khe (O’Brien 130). What matters is that he felt as if he did. “I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presents made me guilty enough” (O’Brien 179). We, in our daily lives, usually don’t think about things like this, but what makes something true? Is it the empirical evidence or the feelings? O’Brien seems to think it’s the lasting impression we’re left with “a true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe”, and I agree (O’Brien 78). Would O’Brien have felt any more pity and remorse if he had actually killed the man outside of My Khe? If he experienced the emotions accompanying killing a man, it doesn’t matter if he actually threw the grenade, or if he was even there as we're led to question.
By exaggerating their deeds and giving us conversations that never happened, O’Brien allows us to see and feel for his comrades in the Alpha Company in a way that we would never have been able to if we were presented with the straight facts. By telling stories, O’Brien has not only immortalized his friends, allowing him to deal with the pain of their loss, but he has given us a clearer portrait of their characters. Who cares if Curt Lemon never painted himself up like a ghost and goes trick-or-treating naked? Even if it never happened, we know exactly what kind of guy Lemon was and we have very human feelings to relate to him.
This is what he means by “[T]hat’s a true story that never happened” (O’Brien 84). It made you feel something, something that the author felt, and felt strongly enough to put to paper and to other people. This is why he dedicates an entire thirty page chapter to “How to Tell a True War Story”. What the novel boils down to is this: author Tim O’Brien is carrying heavy emotions—sadness for the way Vietnam changed him and took his friends—character Tim O’Brien is able to react to all these real and imaginary situations the way author Tim O’Brien wished he could have. “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and god. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again” (O’Brien 180). Thus, allowing author Tim O’Brien to feel and through those feelings, experience the stories. He wants the experience and he wants the reader to feel it as well and all that feeling makes it very, very real.
By exaggerating their deeds and giving us conversations that never happened, O’Brien allows us to see and feel for his comrades in the Alpha Company in a way that we would never have been able to if we were presented with the straight facts. By telling stories, O’Brien has not only immortalized his friends, allowing him to deal with the pain of their loss, but he has given us a clearer portrait of their characters. Who cares if Curt Lemon never painted himself up like a ghost and goes trick-or-treating naked? Even if it never happened, we know exactly what kind of guy Lemon was and we have very human feelings to relate to him.
This is what he means by “[T]hat’s a true story that never happened” (O’Brien 84). It made you feel something, something that the author felt, and felt strongly enough to put to paper and to other people. This is why he dedicates an entire thirty page chapter to “How to Tell a True War Story”. What the novel boils down to is this: author Tim O’Brien is carrying heavy emotions—sadness for the way Vietnam changed him and took his friends—character Tim O’Brien is able to react to all these real and imaginary situations the way author Tim O’Brien wished he could have. “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and god. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again” (O’Brien 180). Thus, allowing author Tim O’Brien to feel and through those feelings, experience the stories. He wants the experience and he wants the reader to feel it as well and all that feeling makes it very, very real.
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Things the Reader Carried
What does O’Brien want the reader to carry? I think he wants us to carry what he and the other soldiers carried/are carrying. His stories, based on truths and lies, aren’t told for us to criticize or decipher, they are told as an attempt to make the reader feel what they (the soldiers) felt. I feel like O’Brien wrote this book because in “If I Die in a Combat Zone” he had to tell the truth; he didn’t have a chance to let him imagination go wild so the reader could get the meaning he was trying to put across. Like he said “I was afraid to speak directly, afraid to remember --- and in the end the piece had been ruined by a failure to tell the full and exact truth about our night in the shit field” (O’Brien 159). That quote is referring to his non-fiction book. In contrast, this quote is referring to his fiction book: “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and god. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again (O’Brien 180). He loves writing fiction because he can basically say what he wants and can make the reader believe that it’s the truth. Not that it matters, but it does mess with your mind a bit; like when he says that he can honestly say he’s never killed anyone and at the same time that he has killed someone.
Another point I want to bring up is how O’Brien ended with not a war story, but with a love story. Linda’s story was told wholeheartedly and in a way that makes it seem as if Tim and Linda had been soul mates for years. What the reader feels while reading that specific story is exactly what O’Brien was trying to get at.
Another point I want to bring up is how O’Brien ended with not a war story, but with a love story. Linda’s story was told wholeheartedly and in a way that makes it seem as if Tim and Linda had been soul mates for years. What the reader feels while reading that specific story is exactly what O’Brien was trying to get at.
Enduring Fame
I am extremely happy that in last Thursday’s class we talked about how it doesn’t always matter if something is “true” or not. Rather, we are supposed to look into a story to see what the author wants us to take from it. After finishing the story, I went online to try and find any quotes from O’Brien, where I found one that said exactly what I was trying to convey in this blog entry. Here it is:
"My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. … Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. …” - Tim O'Brien (http://www.shepherd.edu/englweb/362/WebQuestOBrien.htm)
In The Things They Carried, storytelling wasn’t just a way for O’Brien to tell the audience his past, but was a means of survival. They were how he was able to cope and handle the grief that came with the hard-to-handle experiences of the war and life in general. Everyone that was an important part of O’Brian’s life is now dead as he writes the novel twenty years after the war. It is important to keep this in mind when we read all the stories about Kiowa, Cross, Linda, and all the others, because those are the only people that he had to console in, and by putting them into stories, they are given an enduring fame – they cannot die because their stories will always be alive to readers.
Take, for example, the story of Linda – O’Brien’s childhood sweetheart and true love. From the first chapter of this story, Linda is the fantasy that Tim wants while at war. He is constantly thinking about her, how he wished he was with her, how she was his true love. Yet, it isn’t until the last chapter of the story that readers are made aware that the last time Tim saw Linda was when they were nine years old.
I don’t know about everyone, but had this chapter not been inserted, I would have finished the book thinking that Linda was a woman at home married to another man. But this is exactly what O’Brien wants to do with Linda and all the other characters. Even though she died of a brain tumor, he chose to invent a story that kept her alive – both on paper and in his mind.
And it isn’t just the characters that he is attempting to keep alive. I think that through his storytelling O’Brien is also attempting to keep himself alive – giving himself something to live for after the war. Had he not found this knack, he very well could have ended up like Norman Bowker at the end of chapter 13, who committed suicide shortly after returning home because of his isolation.
In the end, I don’t feel like this story has nothing to do with talking about Vietnam, thus stressing that it doesn’t matter if the stories are true or not. Rather than preserving the events that happened in the war by truthful accounts, O’Brien wanted to put together a bunch of stories whose purpose were to immortalize the lives of his close friends.
"My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. … Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. …” - Tim O'Brien (http://www.shepherd.edu/englweb/362/WebQuestOBrien.htm)
In The Things They Carried, storytelling wasn’t just a way for O’Brien to tell the audience his past, but was a means of survival. They were how he was able to cope and handle the grief that came with the hard-to-handle experiences of the war and life in general. Everyone that was an important part of O’Brian’s life is now dead as he writes the novel twenty years after the war. It is important to keep this in mind when we read all the stories about Kiowa, Cross, Linda, and all the others, because those are the only people that he had to console in, and by putting them into stories, they are given an enduring fame – they cannot die because their stories will always be alive to readers.
Take, for example, the story of Linda – O’Brien’s childhood sweetheart and true love. From the first chapter of this story, Linda is the fantasy that Tim wants while at war. He is constantly thinking about her, how he wished he was with her, how she was his true love. Yet, it isn’t until the last chapter of the story that readers are made aware that the last time Tim saw Linda was when they were nine years old.
I don’t know about everyone, but had this chapter not been inserted, I would have finished the book thinking that Linda was a woman at home married to another man. But this is exactly what O’Brien wants to do with Linda and all the other characters. Even though she died of a brain tumor, he chose to invent a story that kept her alive – both on paper and in his mind.
And it isn’t just the characters that he is attempting to keep alive. I think that through his storytelling O’Brien is also attempting to keep himself alive – giving himself something to live for after the war. Had he not found this knack, he very well could have ended up like Norman Bowker at the end of chapter 13, who committed suicide shortly after returning home because of his isolation.
In the end, I don’t feel like this story has nothing to do with talking about Vietnam, thus stressing that it doesn’t matter if the stories are true or not. Rather than preserving the events that happened in the war by truthful accounts, O’Brien wanted to put together a bunch of stories whose purpose were to immortalize the lives of his close friends.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
"He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead, almost dainty young man"(O'Brien 124).
In this course thus far, we have focused a tremendous amount of energy on distinguishing what is truths from what is lies. What I am proposing, is that it does not matter.
People always say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", so why can that not also apply to the truth. Everyone views the world differently. Everyone has his or her own opinions, stories, and experiences. Even those experiences that we might go through with someone else are still going to resonate differently with us than with that other person.
In the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story", Tim O'Brien writes, "It comes down to gut instincts. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe" (O'Brien 78). The way I interpreted that statement, was maybe not in the same way that someone else might have interpreted it. To me, it means that the actual story itself does not have to be completely true. It does not have to site every single quotation or even have actually happened. What makes that story true is if it resonates deep within you. If it hits you hard in the gut and makes you think beyond what you know. It makes you feel compassion, pain, heartbreak, or sickness for whomever it is being told about.
I do not think I really understood this statement until I read the chapter "The Man I Killed" in which Tim O'Brien is describing in detail not only the physical attributes of this dead enemy soldier, but is also describing details about his actual life. This is the chapter that hit me hard in the gut, that made me feel compassion, pain, heartbreak, and sickness for not only the dead soldier, but also for Tim O'Brien, the character. I felt like I was there, like I was sitting in Tim O'Brien's position staring at this man wondering why and how I just killed him. The reason I think this chapter in particular made me realize that whether or not any of this book is true does not matter, is because those details that made me feel something, that made my "stomach believe" could never have been told if this was not fiction. I would never have been able to know that this dead man, "...was not a fighter"(125) or that, "He hoped in his heart that he would never be tested"(125). I would not be able to feel as connected to the story because the truth is; I have never and probably will never have an experience like this one. The only way I can possibly relate to this experience is through Tim O'Brien's words. So, in that sense it does not matter that the actual details of the story, or the entire story as a whole, did not happen or is not true because it is as close to that feeling as I will ever get. So to me, it is true and in this way that is what I am trying to show. That truth really is in the eye of the beholder.
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