The weather was dreary yesterday and so far this morning. I sink a little without the sunshine, which means I'm very, very spoiled. My husband and I went to a matinee with our younger daughter and her boyfriend yesterday afternoon, and it could have been taken from Shakespeare, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". It was fine, as all we wanted was to be entertained, and without the stupid 3D, thank you very much. But the theme was memory, and I was struck by how the movie's vision of memory was that people remember and re-remember exactly the same each time. The hero stores his memories and trots them out to comfort or torture himself, but the flashback scenes remain the same.
This is not my experience of memory. Memories alter, both from aging or gaining other perspectives and also by the tricks the mind plays on us. Our very inventive minds create false memories, or alter and eliminate certain details. And new knowledge and experience may makes us "see" the memory in a new way. We finally get it that the two year old's rage at Mommy cutting her hair is wanting control over our own bodies and image, not necessarily that our mother was trying to torture us with a bad haircut. She wanted the bangs out of our eyes, we wanted to look like a fairy princess.
But the silver screen seldom gives us authentic experience, and it won't be found in a summer blockbuster, it will arrive in the package of a film with subtitles or an independent film that was made for a pittance, but with a hell of a script. Those films generally arrive in the fall, and for now, I'm okay with biting my nails and laughing in astonishment when the road moves up perpendicular to the hero, and he blithely walks up at a right angle.
No comments:
Post a Comment