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January 3, 2004
False Memories in the Movies
Doing some last minute surfing before classes start on Monday (yikes!) when I came across the Guardian article on false memories. In the article, Laura Spinney reports that Elizabeth Loftus, a UC-Irvine psychologist, has "implanted" false memories in experimental subjects, including Hawkeye Pierce, umm... I mean, Alan Alda, who developed an aversion to hard-boiled eggs based on a childhood memory of an event that never happened [Brief aside: maybe this explains my fear of wearing turtleneck sweaters?].
What Loftus describes is much more about the suggestibility of human beings, the ability of a speaker to use loaded questions and images to convince people they had seen something they really hadn't, such as seeing Bugs Bunny (a Warner Bros. character) at Disney World.
But what I find interesting are the number of films that have come out recently that are dealing with the concept of implanted memories that have appeared in theaters in the last few months and years. In theaters now (or very soon) are two major Hollywood films, neither of which I've seen: Paycheck (IMDB) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (IMDB).
In the last couple of years, we've also seen Vanilla Sky, which is a remake of Abre Los Ojos, a much superior film, and while Being John Malkovich isn't exactly about implanted memories, it's doing something remarkably similar with John Cusack and Cameron Diaz's characters assuming control over Malkovich's body at various points in the film. Strange Days uses VR to similar effect although the characters never abandon "themselves" entirely like the characters in some of these other films do. Any other films that people can remember off-hand?
I think there's a really enticing paper somewhere in this mix, but I'm still sifting through the ideas, and I'd actually like to devote myself primarily to my book project this spring, so perhaps this is just a signpost pointing towards a possible direction for future thought, but I would suggest taking a visit to the Eternal Sunshine official website for a nice parody of some of those quack-medicine websites.
Posted by chuck at January 3, 2004 7:48 PM
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Comments
Verrrry interesting. Don't forget the ur-implanted memory movie of all time, though: Total Recall.
Maybe we could implant the memory in the voters of the state of California that the gubernatorial version never took place?
Posted by: KF at January 3, 2004 10:08 PM
Right...I totally forgot about "Total Recall" when I wrote this entry. Maybe I need a memory implant? Or maybe I just want to forget Arnold.
If we're trying to "forget" elections, why not go all the way back to the 2000 presidential election? Florida was certainly close enough....
Posted by: chuck at January 3, 2004 10:46 PM
maybe someone implanted this memory in MY mind, but i seem to recall that Memento turns on this manipulation of memory, too. natalie and teddy both manage leonard's interpretation of things -- perhaps that's relevant, here. then again, maybe this one's about manipulating the absence of memory? sort of a backwards example.
Posted by: dave at January 5, 2004 3:19 PM
I definitely want to write about "Memento." I'm specifically intrigued by the film's use of the Polaroid camera (and of course the way that the film plays with time and memory), but I've been teaching all day, so right now, I'm too exhausted to bring the detaiils up from mental storage.
Posted by: chuck at January 5, 2004 5:03 PM