Tag Archives: Memento

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The TUBE: Can you handle the truth?

After looking at the blog assignment, a YouTube video popped into my head. It was over a year ago that my friend sent me this clip from the 1976 satirical movie “Network.” I didn’t think too much about it then, besides finding it ironic that the clip showed a man ranting against the “Tube” while being a YouTube clip. To provide you a bit of background, the movie is about tv anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch and how he is shaken by his network for his poor ratings. He goes mad while live on camera and his ratings skyrocket. The network then gives Beale his own show where he rants and raves. In this particular segment, he speaks about his disillusionment with the media and how the television, man’s miracle invention, is filled with propaganda and lies that the public feed into without knowing any better.

Barely three minutes long, this clip touches heavily upon the topics of fear, anxiety, and paranoia that our class is based on in relation to the notion of “truth”. I have below the part of his impassioned speech that really hit home for me:

“We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true […] We’re all you know! You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here! You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you– You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even THINK like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name you people are the real thing, we are the illusion!”

The words were so powerful, especially in the frenzied way Finch plays his character. With each angry word, I was filled with anxiety. We take what we see on television and other digital media, as the unspoken truth. We learn our values from television, and we just hope that we’re being taught the right things. Isn’t it worrisome that what we see impacts how we think, and if we just watched or heard something else, maybe we wouldn’t think/act a certain way?

I know this kind of diatribe against the media is nothing new. No one can trust the media because it is biased, no matter which way you cut it. From Fox to CNN, all major news channels have their own motives for getting out certain stories while minimizing others. Then again, if we choose to never watch television or connect to the world through the media, does that mean that we’re too paranoid and choose to be ignorant of the world?

In relation to the movies we’ve watched, I thought the idea of truth, how we consciously (or subconsciously) try to hide from it, and how it can destroy the best and worst of us is evident in movies like in Touch of Evil and Memento. Quinlan in Touch of Evil hides the truth and frames people for committing crimes. Yet it catches up with him and he dies for what he’s done. Then in Memento, Leonard is forever on a quest to find the truth behind his wife’s murder, yet he’s actually sabotaging his own pursuits to fulfill his own needs. Just as striking was the fact that in this YouTube clip, Beale was a man denouncing the media while he himself is a player in the arena. It was insane that right as he was on the verge of finishing his speech telling people to turn the television off in the middle of his sentence, that he should faint in the middle of his sentence!

I don’t know whether he was staged to faint, but it’s still nevertheless an eerie omen–as though the truth is too much for one man to bear alone.

Also, you can find a longer version of the movie clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qfqZ1ZIx_U&feature=related

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Neo-Noir Elements of Memento

Memento is a film about a man, Leonard Shelby with anterograde amnesia which leaves him unable to create new memories.  He spends most of the film trying to put together pieces of a puzzle to find his wife’s killer.  There are a couple of elements of this film that allow it to be classified as neo-noir. In terms of setting and atmosphere, it is not a classically noir film.  However, one of the main elements of the film that allow it to be a neo-noir is the way the story is told and the anxiety that is maintained throughout the film.  

Memento is one of my favorite films that we’ve watched in class so far because I felt it truly lived up to the name of the course, Anxiety of Cinema.  Throughout the whole film I was trying to guess what was going to happen next, and kept in this constant state of anxiety.  Much of this had to do with the way the story was told.  It was told in a non-linear narrative, so at first it was confusing and required that you pay attention throughout the whole film.  Little by little, we’re given pieces of the puzzle and then finally at the end we see the pieces come together but we’re still left unsure who to trust.  I feel this is a classic element of noir films, not knowing which character to trust.  At first you empathize with Leonard and assume he’s helpless because of his condition, but the end throws you for a loop when you find out he may have been sabotaging his memory on purpose and that you can’t trust his character either.  This only heightens the feeling of anxiety.  

Another element of noir in Memento is that appearance of a femme fatale, in this case Natalie.  Natalie is one of the constant characters in Leonard’s life, but someone he meets after his accident.  So when we meet her and Teddy, we are left wondering if these characters are helping Leonard or if they are playing on Leonard’s condition and trying to use it to their advantage.  It turns out that Natalie is the one that is lying to Leonard and using his condition to her advantage.  She fits the description of the classic femme fatale.  

Memento was one of the most interesting films we’ve watched in class in my opinion because of the heightened sense of anxiety that was created that kept you engrossed in the film.  This was done through the mental landscape more than anything else and the way the story was told, through two different narratives.  What did everyone else think of the film?