How to Avoid Driving Yourself Crazy!

After watching a movie like Memento, it can be hard to dive into the folds of the movie without drowning among the many different theories that can arise. We found this to be true in class the other day. In our discussion, ideas ranged Leonard being in a mental hospital, to him living the life we thought he lived (as an insurance investigator), and everything in between. We considered who the antagonist was; Leonard, John G (one of the many), or Natalie. We discussed the morality of the characters, right and wrong actions and a plethora of ideas that made your head spin. It truly was a schmorgesborg of everything we learned this year; from Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge to House of Danger, Memento covered it all.


So when we are at a cross roads such as this it is important to ask ourselves when enough is enough. When do we need to cut ourselves off from attempting to break down the film. When do we go past the authors intentions and begin to think to much about a novel. It is important that in order to get a clear cut (or at least trimmed down) message from the book, we can only analyze to a certain extent. This means that we must make certain aspects of our analysis, more importantly the strongest ones, concrete in the sense that they can not change. From here we can begin to formulate a safe and finalized version of what we take from this amazing story. We need to choose who we want to trust and who we don't to trust, in order to conclude who every character really is. In this process there is still room for analysis that is not concrete. We can still allow our mind and imagination wander, but boundaries are now set.

As we leave this class, and eventually this school, we must remind ourselves of the same concept. The world is full of manipulation, of illusions of choice and of truths and lies, and we must be able to handle this reality without driving ourselves crazy. We must choose which manipulations we find concrete and which we will allow to slide under the table unseen. We know that they are there but we allow ourselves to be manipulated for whatever reason. While at times this class did seem stressful in the amount of revelations made on human life, we must remember not to look through this lens when moving on. We must avoid driving ourselves crazy.