Things go better with coke (3/28/01)
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Memento. [Christopher Nolan, 2000.]
Kierkegaard said that the tragedy of life is that it must be lived forward but is only understood backward. [He might have said that the functor expressing the duality of the mental and the physical is contravariant and reverses all arrows, but then he would have been fucking with you.] This is a movie that explains what he meant.
The opening shot is time-reversed: a Polaroid photograph of a dead man fades and pops back into the camera, and the victim [Joe Pantoliano] gets up off the floor and coughs up a bullet which returns to the barrel of a gun unfired by the protagonist [Guy Pearce.]
The rest of the action is exhibited in brief scenes of a few minutes’ duration, which, though they run forward, are presented in reverse order; a telephone conversation between the protagonist and an unknown listener, intercut in counterpoint, provides additional exposition.
It is explained that Pearce has suffered a brain injury, during an attack by some unknown assailant who murdered his wife and left him for dead. As a result he cannot translate short-term into permanent memories, and lives in a sort of eternal present, as it were from vignette to vignette: though he may know, at any moment, where he is and what he’s doing [and seems to know who he was before all this began], he never knows how he got where he is, or how long his sense of the moment in progress will persist. [Again and again a scene begins with Pearce starting to explain his condition to someone only to receive the reply: “You already told me.” — In one amusing instance he fades in to discover himself running around a corner toward someone whom at first he assumes he’s chasing; only when the other guy starts shooting at him does he realize he’s supposed to be running away.]
Despite this handicap Pearce is attempting to find the murderer of his wife and avenge her death. In order to remind himself that this is what he is doing and to keep track of the progress of his investigation he has tattooed himself with data and instructions like the Illustrated Man, and carries with him a collection of Polaroid photographs of persons [e.g. Pantoliano], places [e.g. the lowlife motel he finds himself living in], and things [e.g. his Jaguar convertible], with brief notations upon them which remind him of their significance: axioms and facts from which he can reason his way to a conclusion.
Eventually we discover how these items entered his database; and thus find out, e.g., [though in the opposite order], how he found out the licenseplate number of the killer and tattooed it onto his arm, and how he found out that the driver of the car in question was, indeed, the guy we saw him shoot.
Whether or not Pantoliano was, in fact, guilty, whether Pearce’s barmaid girlfriend Carrie-Anne Moss is indeed the good angel she appears to be, and whether Pearce has been telling himself the truth appears in the prequel. Suffice it that the step-by-step reconstruction of Pearce’s argument [the proof carried back from conclusion to premises] is difficult to follow and produces in the viewer an exact correlate of the disorientation of the protagonist. The effect is profoundly disturbing.
The result, at first order, is a kind of deconstruction of the situation of the classical Cartesian detective. [It is very significant, a very pointed reference, that Pearce in his former life was supposed to have been a claims investigator at an insurance company — not the Fred MacMurray character in
Double Indemnity, in other words, but the Edward G. Robinson character: in the universe of film noir, the very embodiment of mathematical rationality.] Though repeatedly Pearce states his belief that there is a real objective world, that his actions matter whether he can remember them or not, and that by establishing the facts and employing his reason upon them he can take control of his life and destiny, everything that happens serves to undermine these positions. And, it becomes clear, once you start taking apart the idea of the detective — of the rational observer faced with an epistemological problem of life and death, forced to weigh evidence critically, to find the signature of the demon [the perpetrator] who is working to deceive him — you start taking apart rationality itself: the memory, the self; the world, the flesh, the devil. Usually the detective cannot trust what others tell him; but what if he cannot trust himself? What if he really doesn’t know what he has been doing? There is a rapid dissolve here from the anxiety about the foundations of knowledge that Descartes discovered and Poe codified in detective fiction through the Freudian anxieties of film noir to the anxiety about the foundations of self that lie at the root of film noir’s logical antecedent, German Expressionism — in which the Cartesian demon is embodied in the alter ego, the figure of the double. — How can you fail to love a movie that is so completely successful in fucking with your head?
Cornell Woolrich once wrote a thriller in which an amnesiac protagonist simultaneously recovered the memory of his previous life and forgot what he’d been doing since he’d lost it: restored to his former bourgeois contentment, he finds himself trying to decide why sinister figures are following him, and whether he’s committed a murder he cannot remember. But a more immediate precursor, obviously, is the story [written by Jonathan Nolan] on which this scenario was directly based [archived when last I looked at www.esquire.com.]
The original refers explicitly to a famous argument of John Searle, designed [with considerable malice aforethought] to show the impossibility of artificial intelligence: suppose that, say, the understanding of Chinese [in the sense of being able to translate it into English] could be reduced to a computer program; then, since any such algorithm would be machine-independent, it could be implemented by a guy playing the role of a mechanical translator sitting in a closed room with a list of rules written down, say, on three-by-five index cards. The linguistic input could be broken down into a string of symbols [even binary symbols — even Chinese can be digitized] written on other cards shoved in through a slot one at a time; each one could, then, be processed according to the rules and, when output is required, a symbol [an X or an O, say] could be written on yet another little card and shoved out through another slot.
Even granting the hypothesis that something like this could work, still it seems obvious that at no time would the guy in the room necessarily know what he was doing; in particular, and perhaps paradoxically, you can’t say that he knows Chinese.
So where does the knowledge reside? What knows Chinese? Something appears to be missing in the Chinese room; something like consciousness.
Thomas Gold once [quite independently] attempted a similar deconstruction of the problem of the direction of time [not a trivial problem, as it turns out, in theoretical physics.] He imagines an observer writing brief descriptions of events down on index cards in sequence and then shuffling them and handing the deck to somebody else. How could the second party put them in the correct order?
[This is Pearce’s problem with his Polaroids, of course, but also, curiously enough, exactly the problem the cinematographer hands the editor, in the making of any motion picture.]
The answer, obviously, under ordinary circumstances, is that memory sets the index cards in order; and it is memory, in this sense, that assures the unity of the Cartesian ego. But if memory fails and has to be replaced by mechanical procedure, the ego is replaced with a simulacrum; and the substitution somehow seems invalid, like Searle’s Chinese translator.
The anxiety you feel at your inability to put your finger on the gap in this argument becomes an anxiety about the reality of the ego under
any circumstances. — Perhaps you are always like Pearce, an intelligence adrift, annotating the backs of your Polaroids, never certain whether somebody else is following you around amending what you’ve written. — Perhaps the Cartesian ego is a myth. To borrow one of Kafka’s punchlines, it suggests that the world-order is founded on a lie.
____________The writer succumbs to coprophilia (3/16/01)
