If there ever was a deadlier power over humans, memory manipulation stands alone as a deeply personal one. 

Many famous serials and stories use memory as a premise for their plots and people, which is unsurprising: immediately there’s a plot device of mystery and intrigue surrounding the character – whether it be internal or external – and for the rest of the story we want to see why, what, and how it all happened – the genesis, the origin, the forbidden fruit, we’re hooked on piecing together what exactly is going on. 

Memory manipulation, of course, occurs to varying degrees. There’s the traditional all-out amnesia, which can be seen all the way back from old folk and fairy lore like princes who forgot their true beloved in stories collected by the Brothers Grimm; there’s classic science fiction elements of wiping out a personality and replacing it with another, as seen in Total Recall starring Arnold Scharzenegger (“If I am not me, then who the hell am I?!”); the selective erasure from a portion of memory, which drives Jack Harkness to pursue and find out why a previous organization did so to him; residual memories that are passed onto the next generation by unique means, like in The Giver; stories that deal with real world medical issues of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s in Away from Her; and then the murky past that serves both as a beacon of light and a haunting, driving obsession to either resolve or run away from it, seen all too often in serials like Jason Bourne. 

Why are memory narratives so engaging? Foremost they are psychological: more than the physical actions at hand are the underlying pulsations of nerve signal, the undulating nuances of electrochemical messages spiking back and forth, to and from somas to axons to dendrites of neurons; yet beyond these neurobiological bounds there is something more science has yet (or if ever) to fully encompass and objectify what exactly composes the arena of irrational emotions – the enigma of psychology. 

We can never be sure if our memory is 100% accurate. Details are lost, omissions are consciously or subconsciously made, facts vary slightly, retellings and subsequent recounting dilutes the actual event more and more: it’s a very fickle component of our cognitive existence – essential, but fickle. Evolutionary, memory serves as a compilation of survival and social skills needed to get by – instinctual muscle memory and habitual memory, you could say. And while humans have evolved to exist on secondary resources (e.g. money) as a means to indirectly survive off primary resources (e.g. soil, water), thus leading to cultural and infrastructural development as we know it, memory still plays an integral part of our daily lives. Whether it’s habitually checking your car mirrors,  playing a piano piece without sheet music or even balancing on your bike – memory is all over the place, instinctually and habitually so. 

Memory is more nuanced than instinctual and habitual tendencies. There are instances we remember for various reasons. From what your boss told you this morning (“Do you still have my stapler?”) to how beautiful your spouse looks on the eve of your honeymoon, what we choose to remember is essential to how our lives function, and invariably these memories – regardless of intention or purpose – are driven by deeply personal reasons. After awhile, the truest aspect of memories is the emotion associated with them – emotions of love, hate, happiness, pain, joy, sorrow, wonder, trauma, all of it. In this sense, memories are incredibly raw in the undulating, hidden reservoirs of our cognitive conscious. This is why memory manipulation is such a engaging and haunting narrative premise to play off of. 

Take for example Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. John Anderton, upon discovering a glitch in the pre-cog system, soon learns that he will kill a man he has never met. Despite great efforts to evade a highly computerized (optimistically futuristic) society, Anderton eventually finds the room of the alleged victim, Leo Crow. 

This scene is crucial: Anderton sees the man’s bed covered with pictures of children, one of which is of the man with his missing (and likely deceased) son, Sean. Upon seeing these photos Anderton completely breaks down, and when Crow returns into the room Anderton violently rushes at and brutally beats down Crow in a fiery rage and passion. 

What’s noticeable about this climatic scene is that up until now, Anderton methodically and cooly found clues to who could possibly be framing him. Yes, there are moments of action, but nothing compared to the almost bestial fury he unleashes when he’s led to believe Crow was the pedophile who kidnapped (and probably killed) his only son years ago.  And despite the orgy of evidence evident upon the scene (as Danny Witwer later determines, “this [was] a set up”), Anderton lets go of logic to act upon his primal emotions of anger and pain, to unleash upon this alleged man all the emotional scars that never found solace or closure for all these years. Haunted by guilt and long, long episodes of desperation and disillusionment, Anderton holds his memory of Sean so closely to his heart that in a moment of weakness, he loses all his cool and nearly fulfills his own predicted destiny. 

Anderton’s reaction results from an external and intricate manipulation of a memory deeply personal and painful. It’s a very low blow, but considering the perpetrator accomplished other personal goals prior and after it’s not surprise they used such effective and cruel psychological puppeteering. His emotional response is a powerful one not because of what happened, but because it is raw and unrefined beyond any measure of objectivity. 

While Minority Report explored the consequences of a memory past, Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough Memento explored individual fragments of memory leading up to the final consequence. 

Structurally, Memento is one of a kind: it begins with a man being shot, and then a backwards (and eventually forwards) progression to where it all began, where we the viewer finally piece together what has happened to the character of Leonard Shelby, who suffers from anterograde amnesia (the loss of ability to create new memories after the event which caused amnesia due to damage to the hippocampus or surrounding cortices). 

Shelby is haunted by memories of his wife, who he believed was killed by the same burglars who caused him to suffer from retrograde amnesia. He gets by by taking pictures of people and scenery, and then writing himself notes about what he feels or knows about the subjects in the moment he can still recall these feelings or knowledge; that way, he hopes, he progress forward and not start over again from scratch. Lastly, the most important information that he can absolutely never, ever forget – he tattoos them on himself. Fool proof, right?

Wrong. As we can see from an outsider’s objective lens, the people around him manipulate Shelby’s artificial memory mechanism for their own exploits: Shelby’s landlord charges him for two rooms while he only occupies one; Natalie uses him to drive out a man Dodd from town; and Teddy uses Shelby’s investigative vigor to track down his own set of criminals (or so he says). 

There’s a lot of discussion about the fabula and sujet of Memento, but for writing purposes I won’t discuss them here right now. Instead, I believe the implications of Nolan’s breakthrough indie speaks volumes for a few reasons: 

As I’ve said before, memory is not 100% valid: it is a figment of collected information stored in our brains, clipped and edited to our needs and liking. Even if we document the actual events via writing, photography or film, there is always the question of who’s perspective these forms of documenting come from, and whether or not they capture enough of the whole event to merit factual validity. We don’t necessarily need these types of documents to remember an event, but they very much help us remember certain details and emotions that would otherwise be lost to the crevices of cognition. In Shelby’s case, he takes polaroid pictures because he needs to write down his thought process immediately: he relies on a artificial means of memory building, and though it is quick it is no where near the processing speed of the human brain. This limited time frame is just enough for people to take advantage of him for their own needs – and by extension, this time frame is the same time for something to seep in and “tamper” our documenting process. 

Minority Report masterfully combines film noir aesthetics with chique science fiction elements, highlighting a very classic form of memory manipulation – the haunting effect that drives the protagonist to act the way they do, an echo from the past leading to the ultimate conclusion. Memento, on the polar opposite fold, is a generously unconventional film that explores memory manipulation in the opposite way, where we know the conclusion but not the beginning, the echo from the past. Both films were released around the same timeframe (Nolan in 2000 and Spielberg in 2002), so it’s especially interesting to see how two films that explore memory resonate and diverge so much from one another. 

Memory is a very intricate arena of the mind, and any tampering of it invariably violates our own identity. At its core, memory manipulation is incredibly intriguing, terrifying, and deeply emotional – enough to make it a terrible power to have over another. 

Additional Recommended Reading

• Is There a Minority Report? (or What is Subjectivity?) – by Matthew Sharpe, PhD in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne.