Christopher Nolan rocks.
Watching Inception made me curious to watch Memento — a film he made 10 years ago and received critical acclaim, based on his brother’s short story Memento Mori. If you loved Inception, you would also love Memento (or vice versa). Both films are puzzling and complex and use up a lot of brain power.
Inception dealt with dreams, and Memento with memories. Christopher Nolan’s a genius. He deals with these two concepts, which I believe are among the few things that make us human, with so much honesty and creativity that you just get entrapped within the confines of the theater, breathing and living the films for those 1.5 hours and then making you question your very existence and reality once you step out of the moviehouse.
The movie highlighted that people create their own realities and remember only what they think can make them happy. People will remember what they want to remember. People can forget things they don’t want in their lives. No memory is perfect. Memories are unreliable, twisted, convoluted. Memories are just that – a mere representation of what has transpired, a fragment of one’s reality mixed with imagination.
This kept me up this morning, and had my brain buzzing. The script was so amazing that I have to quote some lines from the movie –
“Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts. “
“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there?… Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different.”
“I lie here not knowing… how long I’ve been alone. So how… how can I heal? How am I supposed to heal if I can’t… feel time? “
“You can just feel the details. The bits and pieces you never bothered to put into words. And you can feel these extreme moments… even if you don’t want to. You put these together, and you get the feel of a person. Enough to know how much you miss them… and how much you hate the person who took them away. “
And with that, I shall try to forget a few memories here and there, head to bed, and dream.
