Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Don't Google It
The first question Prof. Schwartz asked us before starting the movie in class on Tuesday was whether or not we had researched and read about Memento. In fact, if I remember correctly, it wasn't even a question, it was an assumption. We all responded with slight head nodding, seemingly unsure of whether or not we had done this research. I'm not sure how many of you googled the movie or looked it up on IMDB beforehand, but I hope you didn't. I think the best way to go into Memento is with absolutely no background information. Someone ruined it for me before I saw it, and it definitely changed the way I thought about the movie while watching it. Instead of being manipulated by the film and how it is pieced together, I was searching for clues and connecting everything; making sense of it all. This is not to say that the latter is a bad way to see the movie. It is important to recognize that you are not being told a story in a traditional way, and to make connections and parse out the details of the story that can help you understand it fully. Without this recognition, we are blindly following a story line that we may never truly understand, (I never actually saw the end of the movie the first time) and we may miss important details. However, it is impossible to unlearn a piece of information. Therefore, I missed out on viewing Memento in the way it was, I can only assume, intended to be viewed. I was never truly confused by the nonlinear storyline or manipulated by Leonard's unreliable memory. So instead of googling the movie, watch it once, and then, once you understand how the movie really works, watch it again, but differently.
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I think there are a number of texts that are similar to Memento, where if you research it before hand or find out too much information, it changes the way you view the text (in a bad way). Some other movies we talked about after class yesterday like Shutter Island and Inception are two examples that came to mind, where if you are completely clueless going in, it makes your viewing experience that much better. In these cases, the directors want us to be blindsided in order to enhance our viewing. If we knew what to expect, we could interpret information ahead of time instead of taking it in as we go. If I had read anything more than the short synopses on Netflix of the movie, I feel as though I would have had too much knowledge going in. The whole point of Memento was to keep the viewers confused and hooked so they had to think about what was going on and piece the evidence together for themselves. If we had too much background information, it would have ruined the fun.
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