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. 

Remembering Frank

I found out yesterday that one of my former bosses at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where I worked in the 1980s, passed away this past August. Frank was one of the cytometry triumvirate at the Laboratory for Investigative Cytology together with Zbigniew and Myron. Myron passed away in 2013 after battling pancreatic cancer for six years. I remember when I interviewed for the job of daily manager of the flow cytometry core facility, I ended up interviewing with Myron and Frank, as well as with Don, who was another senior scientist in the lab. I had experience in biophysical techniques from my first job, and I guess that contributed to my getting the job. 

Myron, Zbigniew and Frank were wonderful men to work for, and I treasure my time in their lab. I've written about this lab several times before in this blog. I had most to do with Frank on a daily basis. He was my immediate boss and he taught me everything I know about flow cytometry. There was almost no scientific question he couldn't answer, and he was generous with his time and help. He was also very protective of his employees and stood firmly on our side whenever conflicts arose with external labs. He seemed to be unflappable, but when he did get mad, which happened once or twice in the seven years I worked with him, it was best not to be on the receiving end of his anger. I pitied the scientists who ended up having any sorts of conflicts with him. They knew that without his help, their projects would become stranded. If he thought something was stupid, he said so, complete with sarcastic comments and a roll of his eyes. And he was usually right. He didn't waste his own time or others' time, and he didn't allow anyone else to waste his employees' time. He put his foot down firmly and simply stopped the nonsense in its tracks. I learned a lot from him about how to protect my own employees through the years. I could wish that some of my other leaders in recent times were as good a leader as he was.  

I have fond memories of my time in the lab--we worked hard together and traveled together to conferences. In August 1987, our lab went to a Society for Analytical Cytology meeting that was held in Cambridge, England. It was my first trip abroad, and I was so looking forward to having a proper British tea experience. I am quite sure that I never shut up about it, and probably drove most people around me crazy. But when we got to Cambridge, I wandered around the city together with Frank and Jola, a postdoc in the lab, trying to find just the right tea shop. It had to be just the right one. Frank was very patient while I hunted around and settled on just the right one. And then we enjoyed great tea, good scones, raspberry jam and clotted cream. I was in heaven. I'm sure Frank humored me, but that was the kind of man he was--he had infinite patience with people he liked, and I was one of them. 

I also remember that all of us (there must have been at least six or seven of us from the lab who traveled to Cambridge) decided to go punting on the river Cam. Frank and another senior scientist Jan took turns trying to punt, which turned out to be not at all easy. Steering a large boat without banging into the other boats and without losing your balance were quite challenging. Frank managed it, but just barely, and I remember thinking that it would be terrible if he fell into the river. There were a couple of times when he and Jan very nearly fell into the water. The fact that Frank was the consummate New Yorker--well-dressed, with nice shoes and leather jacket--would have made falling in even worse as it would have ruined his clothing and shoes. But that was Frank; I don't think he considered the possibility that he could fall into the water or that he couldn't learn to punt. They didn't fall in, and they did learn to punt. Other things I remember about him--he smoked too much, and we were always trying to get him to quit cigarette smoking. One of his technicians would bring him a big bowl of sliced carrots, celery and cucumbers so that he wouldn't smoke on Great American Smokeout Day in November of each year. But he never quit as far as I know. I also remember that at one of our lab parties at his Manhattan apartment, he played Roxy Music's Avalon album for us. To this day, I cannot hear the song More than This without thinking of him. 

As fate would have it, I met my husband Trond at the same conference in Cambridge when he came to sit with our lab group one evening at one of the local pubs. That was the kind of lab group we were--welcoming to others from all countries. You could sit down with us and just start chatting. Our lab in New York was multinational, with scientists from many different countries--among them Poland, Italy, Sweden, and Germany. Scientists visited the lab while traveling through on their way to other meetings in the USA. My husband did just that; he said that he remembers seeing me in the lab when he came to visit Frank and the others. I don't remember that. But we did end up meeting again in Cambridge. Even though I moved to Norway, I stayed in touch with the Memorial lab. Working there was one of the best experiences of my life. 

Thirty years ago today

Today, July 25^th, would have been my father’s 97^th birthday had he lived. He passed away thirty years ago, in March 1985. There is not a day goes by that I don’t think about him or my mother, who passed away in March 2001. I always remember my father’s birthday now, because my cousin Karen is born on the same day; when we were children, it was the opposite way around—I remembered her birthday when my dad’s birthday rolled around.

Thirty years. The passage of time. I remember my father and my mother in ways I never knew existed when I was younger, because I could not imagine them gone at that time. My father was 67 years old when he died; that’s young. They are both a part of me; I need only scratch the surface of my heart, mind and soul and they are there, waiting to talk to me.

My parents married on July 9^th, 1955, sixty years ago. Their thirtieth wedding anniversary was within reach when my father passed away. It seems like a short amount of time for them to be married when I look back now (my husband and are nearing twenty-five years married), but they had married later in life and became parents in their late thirties. I was remembering one of the things we children used to do for my parents when their wedding anniversary came around each year. We would buy a box of M&M candies, vanilla ice cream and cantaloupe, cut the cantaloupe in half, scoop out the seeds, and fill each half with ice cream and M&Ms. Our anniversary gift to them, at least for three or four years. The last thing my father probably needed was to eat ice cream full of saturated fats given his health problems, but he ate it because we made it for them. That was the kind of dad he was. As I peruse his reading list and write about it for my blog, I feel my father’s presence in my life. I welcome those memories and feelings.

A walk down memory lane

I am A New Yorker in England at present, in Cambridge to be specific. My husband and I are on vacation, and this year, we decided to return to the place where we first met twenty-six years ago. We met at a scientific (flow cytometry) conference that was held at Cambridge University (scroll down to end photo). The majority of the lectures and parallel sessions were held at Trinity College. It was my first time in Europe, and my first opportunity to attend an international conference. I arrived alone in London a few days before the conference, and made my way to the Belgravia section of London where I had booked a room at a small boarding house run by an immigrant Italian couple. I spent those days touring London, Bath, and Stonehenge on my own before heading north to Cambridge by train from King’s Cross station. It was an exciting time—making my way around London and taking day trips from London by bus at a time when internet, cell phones and social media were non-existent. 

The first time I was in Cambridge, I became completely captivated by the city and the university. I soaked in the university atmosphere. What made the experience complete was being able to live in a dorm room for the week of the conference. The room was austere, fit for a monk, containing a bed and a desk and chair, and not much else. The bathroom was down the hall, to be shared by the inhabitants of the dorm rooms on that floor. The dorm building was a stone’s throw from Trinity College, so it was a pleasure to wake up and to walk across the street to get breakfast in one of the main dining rooms with long tables (think Harry Potter at Hogwarts where he and his friends sat at those long tables, and you’ll get the idea). This is where we ate breakfasts and dinners—formal affairs where the food was served from the head of the table and passed along down to each diner. I remember some really good dinners—roast beef and roast lamb with different sauces. The organizers of the conference made sure that we experienced real university life. I spent some time wandering around the city’s many bookstores; the end result was that my luggage became much heavier, and I ended up having to ship the many books I bought back to New York as I could not haul them around for the rest of my stay in England. After the conference was over, a colleague and I took the overnight train from London to Edinburgh and toured Scotland for several days, before returning to London for the trip back to New York. I met my husband a few days before we left Cambridge, and we managed to spend some time together wandering around the city and getting to know each other before we returned to our respective countries. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yesterday, we wandered down the same streets as we did when we first met. We discovered that some of our memories of what transpired many years ago were faulty, whereas the walk through the city brought back other memories that had been buried. We stood on one bridge overlooking the river Cam and watched the amateur punters trying to steer their boats in the right direction in order to avoid crashing into other boats. It brought back memories of punting with my colleagues from Memorial Sloan-Kettering; my former boss was the designated punter, and he did his level best to keep from falling into the water and ruining his leather jacket and shoes. He managed that amidst our laughter and teasing. My colleagues also joined me for a traditional English tea with scones and clotted cream at a tea house in the city center; my two wishes upon landing in England, both of which were fulfilled, were to experience a traditional English teatime and to eat fish and chips. We also enjoyed a beer together at the Eagle pub that Watson and Crick (of DNA fame) frequented.

Today, we met an old friend, Judith, whom we both know from the time when she did her doctorate in Norway; she and Charlie kindly made the trip from London to Cambridge, and we met at the Fort St. George pub/restaurant on the Midsummer Common for lunch. It was a beautiful warm sunny day and three hours passed in pleasant conversation. On parting, we made plans to keep in touch and hopefully they will visit us in Norway at some future point.

One of my ‘bucket list’ wishes is to take a summer literature course at Cambridge University. I have already found some online information about the different courses available. It would be a real privilege to study at Cambridge, even if only for a few weeks, and I hope it comes to pass.

These photos of Cambridge University are from 1987, and were taken from the tower of Great St. Mary's Church, which provided me with wonderful views of the university buildings and city. The photos of the Bridge of Sighs were taken during our punting trip on the river Cam. 

notice the beautiful lawns 

King's College

Bridge of Sighs, St. John's College

Bridge of Sighs