This semester I am teaching a course "Philosophy through Film" using a text by that same name. Inadvertently, the first few weeks of the course have turned into a Christopher Nolan Film fest. We first watched and discussed his recent "Inception" and are now mulling over his 200 film "Memento", a film noir masterpiece. A sort of black companion to Peter Segal's 50 First Dates.
The premise of the film is relatively simple to state. The main character, Lenny, suffers from "anti-retrograde amnesia". Brain damage makes him incapable of moving short term memories and experiences from that short term bucket, over into the long term bucket. He suffers periodic "resets" that place him back at a point after an attack on himself and his wife. She was raped and murdered by the attacker, Lenny was knocked out, and suffered the brain trauma. He is searching for the killers, seeking revenge, and dealing with his "condition" as he calls it. The film does a masterful job of recreating the severe disorientation that one would regularly experience in Lenny's place. It's also a film that positively impels you to watch it again. As soon as the last scene fades, you will find yourself, against your will, returning to the beginning, asking: "Wait a minute. What the hell just happened here? Is anything really resolved here?" "Who is Sammy Jankis?" "Who is Lenny?" "Are they one and the same person?"
I don't want to ruin the experience by going into too much more detail, for those that haven't seen the film. But, here's a taste:
Now, what's all this business in the post title about ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides? Read on (and click the links):
Lenny cannot store short term memory. We see him 'blank and reset' not only after sleep, but occasionally during his waking life. He then has to scramble to reorient himself, once we see him having to do this literally on the fly.
Now, there are two ways to take this, two ways to read things philosophically, with regard to personal identity, both of which, Lenny voices.
1. At each reset, even though he has intact memory of pre-incident history, he is reborn, a sort of new person. That new person inherits the mementos of some other person. He can choose to familiarize himself with them, or he can choose to dispense with them before the next reset. He usually chooses to keep at least some of them, and has taken steps to permanently keep a set by tattooing them. But, the key here, is that there is the potential to give all of them up as resets occur. In a real sense, upon reset, a new person is born, who finds himself surrounded with things intentionally left for him by the previous person. We see that this is used to various characters' advantage in the film, Lenny's condition is clearly being manipulated for personal ends. We are also left with the question whether or not Lenny has manipulated himself, or rather, an upcoming self, by altering mementos with a view in mind how the future self, that "new person" just around the bend, would naturally take the clues.
Call this the Heraclitean reading of Lenny's condition.
2. Lenny is another way frozen in time at a moment where he is always and repetitively coming too after the incident. Because he cannot accumulate memories, he is not changing in the normal and significant ways we all do, thanks to our having the normal ability to store short term memories in our long term buckets, moving on, as it were, with a real sense of our first person history, a real sense of the passage of our time on Earth. Lenny's position is very different than this. Time cannot heal the wound. Because he resets, he cannot go through a normal grieving process. In fact he says he has no first person feel for the passage of time since the incident, since he lost his wife to the killer. He feels he is doomed to being frozen in that initial aftershock phase. He cannot change. He cannot heal. He is simply vengence.
Call this the Parmenidean reading of Lenny's predicament.
Which reading, if any, do you think is paramount, and what do you think the cases of Lenny and Sammy Jankis say about the relationship that exists between personhood and ability to cognize one's long term personal history? How many Lenny's were there, and, is Lenny in fact Sammy?
What can we learn from such fictional explorations in regard to dealing with people that have had traumatic brain injuries that place them in such trying circumstances as a condition of living?
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