Memories and the movies Nocturnal Animals and Dark City

Both Nocturnal Animals (from 2016) and Dark City (from 1998) are movies that deal with memories, albeit in different ways. I watched both recently and both made lasting impressions on me. Nocturnal Animals is a 'story within a story' thriller about a divorced woman, Susan Morrow (played by Amy Adams) whose ex-husband Edward (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) has written a novel and sent her a copy for her to read. They've been out of touch for twenty years; she left him for another man, Hutton Morrow, (played by Armie Hammer) whom she eventually married and with whom she had a daughter Samantha (now twenty), but not without first aborting her ex's child. Edward has not remarried. It was apparently a bitter divorce, as he pleaded with her not to leave their marriage. His pleas fell on deaf ears, as she was more interested in acquiring a lifestyle more in keeping with how she grew up, whereas he was more of a romantic dreamer who was not interested in money. She characterizes him as a weak and unambitious person. Her present life is unhappy; Hutton is cheating on her and she knows and accepts it. She doesn't sleep well (hence the title Nocturnal Animals, a term coined by her ex-husband to describe her). She hates her job as a modern art curator, and when she receives the novel from Edward on a weekend when Hutton is out of town on business (as he tells her), she begins to read it and finds herself immersed in its story. It is dedicated solely to her, and while she reads it, it brings back many memories of how she and Edward met, fell in love, married, and then parted, as well as memories about what they each wanted and how different they were. His novel is a violent and unsettling story about a man (Tony Hastings) whose wife (Laura) and daughter (India) are raped and murdered in west Texas while they are on vacation and how he was unable to protect them. The story spirals into a revenge thriller where Tony gets the chance to take revenge on the killers; he is given that chance by the local sheriff Bobby Andes who is dying of lung cancer. But even though he gets his revenge, the outcome for him is not a good one. The movie goes back and forth between events in Susan's present life, events in the novel, and her memories of her life with Edward. By the time she finishes reading the novel, she understands that she still loves him, and she makes plans via email to meet him for dinner at a restaurant while he is in town. He never shows up, and she understands that this is his revenge on her for how cruelly she treated him. His novel has jolted her out of her inert and unhappy life and made her feel something besides boredom. She may even be feeling guilt. She understands that her treatment of Edward has found its way into his novel; Tony calls himself weak because he could not protect Laura and India. They are raped and murdered by three depraved psychos out for a 'good time' on a deserted Texas highway. The anxiety and dread are palpable; we know that his memories of their relationship are so harrowing that the only way he can deal with them is to 'kill' her and to kill the man/men responsible for killing her (and his relationship with Susan in real-life). Their daughter is already dead (aborted years ago). He could not protect his marriage or his daughter. Susan understands this when she read his novel, so how she could actually think that he would be interested in her again after all that has transpired between them simply shows what a superficial and cruel person she really was. I may have misunderstood the ending, but the fact that she removes her wedding ring and dresses up to meet Edward is indicative of a woman looking for a second chance with Edward. But he never shows up. All she has left are her memories, now that his novel has awakened her heart and emotions. They will haunt her and likely persecute her for years to come. One could hope that her awakening leads her to change her life, but that remains a mystery to the viewers. The ending is ambiguous and you can read into it what you'd like, which in my estimation makes the movie a memorable and outstanding one.  

Dark City asks the questions, who are we without our memories and how are our souls involved? Are our memories and our souls intertwined? If you remove the memories, do you render people soulless and identity-less? Dark City is controlled by aliens called The Strangers who want to know the answers to these questions. As we find out along the way, they have created a world and populated it with a group of human beings in order to experiment on and to study them. Their civilization is dying and they need to understand what it is in humanity that makes humans survivors. The city is perpetually dark because they cannot tolerate sunlight. They wear the bodies of dead humans as their own, giving them a vampiric appearance (they reminded me of Nosferatu at times--tall, thin, white entities floating in the air). Their civilization is defined by collective memory, where no individual has his own private memories. Collective memories are what each of them experience, so they have no individuality, no soul. They mistakenly believe that the soul is found in men's minds that hold their memories, so they create experiments with the help of a neurological scientist, Daniel Schreber (played by Kiefer Sutherland), to remove the individual memories from the brains of each human being and to imprint their brains with new memories that are concocted by the scientist following the orders of the Strangers. This naturally leads to a sort of chaos in the city, as people can wake from one day to the next and not remember who they were or what they did yesterday. They no longer know who they are. But one man, the main character John Murdoch (played by Rufus Sewell) has not been imprinted completely; he awoke while he was being imprinted and he begins a quest to find out who he is/was based on the flashes of memory that plague him. What he knows is that he is not a serial killer of prostitutes, as his imprinting has told him he is. Unfortunately the imprinting of individuals is leading to collective memory in the humans; they have begun to forget who they are. It is almost impossible to fight against the Strangers because a person never knows when he or she will be picked out of the crowd to be imprinted. But John Murdoch decides to fight the Strangers with the help of his wife Emma (played by Jennifer Connelly), a police officer, Frank Bumstead (played by William Hurt), and Daniel Schreber who wants to end the experiments. They succeed in finding out what Dark City really is and about the experiment in which they are involved. In doing so, they destroy the community of the Strangers. The movie is quite good, even though it deals with an extremely complex topic. But sci-fi is allowed to do that--to entertain us and to create questions that perhaps cannot be answered (in our time). 

In the first movie, it is the individual memories of Susan and Edward that define who they are and their very different lives in the present. Both suffer but in different ways. Susan's husband betrays her as she betrayed Edward; Edward writes a novel to help him deal with the crushing memories of her betrayal. In the second movie, the idea of collective memory negates individual memory. Individual memories would eventually become part of the collective memory and humans would cease to feel and to be human. There would be no need for revenge, guilt, sorrow, or forgiveness, because all individual memories would be erased for the good of the whole. This is what the society of Strangers has misunderstood. Our physical (chemical neurological) memories may be found in our brains, but all facets of memory are not. They are also found in our hearts and souls and are probably a very complicated and hitherto inexplicable combination of all three. 

We are who we are as a result of the memories that we have built up and stored over time. Is that buildup orderly and coherent? Does the brain control the storage of memory in an orderly fashion? How the brain stores memories › Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (fau.eu). All the more terrifying to contemplate what dementia patients experience on their gradual downward progression toward oblivion. Without coherent memory, we lose our 'selves', our individuality, our identity. This is not to say that memories have died in dementia patients, just that their disease has tangled and fragmented them, and in doing so, has fragmented their lives. Over time, the brain cells atrophy. There is much to be learned about memories and how they are created, stored, and retrieved in the brain. But all facets of memory cannot be explained by the brain alone.