Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Critique of Momento
Overall, I found the movie "The Momento" to be interestng, but also a little disturbing. One of the biggest things that I liked about this film was the use of tatoos and words to tell the story, instead of mainly naration. I also liked how the film showed most of the after events, then showed the before. I think this is a huge part of what we study in media studies and also looking at postmodernism. We look at whats given to us now and put that into perspective, then we have to study and watch what happens before to lead up to that idea. One of the best ways that this film was done to show this was the cinematography and it seems like they changed the colors from black and white for the present to colors to tell the story in the past. This movie really shows how to look at signs, pictures, words, and symbols and question everything. A lot of the plot is very unexpected, and you have to watch every detail from the begining to really get its meaning. Overall, I though it was a good film.
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The thing that I found most interesting about the movie Memento (in relation to Baudrillard) is the idea of how Lenny constructed his personal history. Because Lenny did not have any long term memory, he constructed his history from tattoos and Polaroid pictures with captions on them.
In essences he was “substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double…” (Baudrillard pp. 454). Lenny did this because he had no other option. He had no memory to refer to, and he was thus forced to supplement photos and captions for his actual recollections of events.
Lenny is forced to constantly reconstruct his reality based on the (often faulty) information with which he has provided himself. He is forced to assume that this information is true, because he has no other objective way to recall the past. This concept from the movie is a bizarre characterization of how we all construct our own history.
We are forced to interpret all events in history through the lens of those who prevailed. By this, I mean that history informs our choices and actions, but we, like Lenny, are forced to assume that the recorded historical information is true because we have no alternative interpretation of past events. We are just as susceptible to the subjectivity of the past as Lenny was.
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