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. 

Memories and the concept of time

Twenty years ago today, March 4, 2001, my mother passed away. Thirty-six years ago, March 7, 1985, my father passed away. Twenty years ago and thirty-six years ago. It seems so long ago, these parcels of years, and yet sometimes they seem like artificial constructs to help me locate my memories. They contribute to the reality of memory. Sometimes the past seem so real, as though it is right there in front of me. The people in that past are gone, but the memories of them are not. The memories are vivid and real. The concept of time and the reality of memory are intertwined. I cannot explain the connection, but I don't think one exists without the other. It is when I begin to consider and reflect upon memory, that I also begin to reflect upon the concept of time. No one can or has satisfactorily answered the question--what is time? We say that time is linear, because it apparently keeps moving us forward. But is it really linear? The Oxford online dictionary defines time as the "indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole". It's a vague definition, but it's a starting point for reflection. 

It was not until I started working in a garden that I became aware of the reality that time is also circular. Or perhaps better put, a garden manifests circular time within the human concept of linear time, if that is possible. Our gardens have no memory, they just do what they do independent of the human concept of linear time. A gardener plants seeds, watches them grow into mature flowers that produce seeds, the annual flowers die, become compost and then soil again, which is used for next season's garden, as are the seeds. It's a cycle that continues annually in perpetuity, starting in spring, continuing into summer and fall, then winter, and then back to spring. It can continue in this way for many years, given the right conditions. Perennial plants come back each year barring a natural disaster--the same plant, just new stems and new growth. The actual plants don't really die. It's the closest thing to immortality that we may be witness to on this earth. Do we know why they come back, year after year? Apparently there is no specific lifespan for plants, except for the annuals. The annual plants must be seeded anew. But eventually, even perennial plants die, as do our house plants that can live for decades given the right conditions. Death comes to all living things. 

I remember my parents, sitting in their living room in the apartment where I grew up, reading in the evenings. I remember my mother feeding the birds from her kitchen window each morning. I remember eating breakfast before we left for school, listening to 'Rambling with Gambling' on the radio. I remember commuting to and from Manhattan for several years with my father, and meeting him for lunch in Manhattan. I remember my father's illnesses and knowing we would lose him; I 'saw' and 'knew' the future. I remember shopping with my mother and driving around lower Westchester County with her on one of our many fun car rides. I remembering seeing a future without her and how painful it would be to lose her too. I remember my brother, who is dead six years as of this writing. I did not 'see' his death coming. They have been dead for many years, but they remain in my memory. All those memories of beloved people, places and experiences co-exist. And that is what I wonder about. Memories are dependent upon functioning brain neurons that transmit electrical signals to other neurons via synapses. Without neurons and neural networks, there are no memories. Plants do not have neurons, so they do not have memories, and so no concept of time, or none that they are 'aware' of. We have them, and so we have memories. But how and where are those memories truly situated in time? Or can we even ask those questions?

There are some physicists who theorize that time as we know it is not real, that it is simply a construct devised to help us differentiate between the present and our perception of the past. The 'block universe' theory, as their theory is called, can be summarized as follows. "The theory, which is backed up by Einstein’s theory of relativity, states that space and time are part of a four dimensional structure where everything that has happened has its own coordinates in spacetime" (Time is NOT real – Physicists show EVERYTHING happens at the same time | Science | News | Express.co.uk). In this theory, all our past experiences co-exist simultaneously with all our present and future experiences. If that is the case, there is no 'time', at least not as we define it. Stated in a different way: "Your birth is out there in space-time. Your death, too, is in space-time. Every moment of your life is out there, somewhere, in space-time. So says the block universe model of our world" (The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion - ABC News). What made the strongest impression upon me from the second article was reading that "Everything is relative: what is past to you, will be future to someone else. So if I travel back to the past I'm travelling to what is someone else's future. That means the past won't be any different, in kind, to the present." 

My brain seems able to grasp these concepts, however briefly. But they are also confusing. The philosophy and science involved in these concepts can seem overwhelming. In the end, they are mysteries that may or may not be elucidated in my lifetime. I hope however that they will be. I also hope that one day there could be time travel between the coordinates in the block universe. How cool that would be, to be able to visit 'a past moment with loved ones who are now gone', or even in another context, visit a 'future you'. How that would come to pass is anyone's guess. I don't see it happening for several more centuries. And yet sci-fi writers have written about time travel for years. They could visualize the future, at least one they 'saw', and committed that vision to paper. We who exist now were the future to their present, but we are also the past to someone else. It makes sense, and then it doesn't. But I like the idea that all the constructs of time exist equally and simultaneously.