Post Class 10/3

On my flight back from Paris yesterday, the man sitting next to me turned on Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. He must of gotten about 15 minutes into the film and then went back to the menu and chose to watch a different movie. It was fascinating to me that he was so quick to quit the film as soon as he was lost, not giving it a chance to unwind. The sad truth is that without having to sit and watch it in class, I would have done the same thing. Why is it that most of us enjoy the more straightforward, predictable story lines within movies? Why do we get frustrated and give up when our mind is challenged to do some thinking?

Later in the flight, we actually started to talk about Memento, as I told him about our class and what we had discussed. He ended up going back to the film and completely finishing it. I realized that the ending of this film is an example of the recently discussed term, bricolage, and the notion that everything seems to come together.

The most interesting thoughts I had about Memento were the ideas hat we can make up our own truth and overall construct our own realities. Looking back to Baudrillard’s text “The Precession of Simulacra” and “The Desert of the Real”. We can relate the main character of the movie to Baudrillard’s passage that states, “To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence” (454). In Memento Leonard is subconsciously pretending that his wife has been murdered when in fact she is very much alive. Throughout the movie, he is creates the desert of the real exemplifying Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra.