Today, years after abandoning a professional interest in the topic, I’m finding myself smack dab in the middle of it again. I just finished season two of Big O, a Japanese anime series about a futuristic city in which everyone has lost a huge chunk of their memories; the protagonist wanders about pondering who he really is, wondering if those without complete memories can be fully human. I discussed Colum McCann’s Songdogs (1996) at a reading group meeting last night, a novel about a guy trying to make sense of his family past by exploring a collection of old photographs. And I recently enjoyed re-watching the action flicks The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and The Bourne Identity (2002), tales about assassins who’ve forgotten they used to kill for a living.

I’m not a David Cronenberg groupie—I’ve only seen three of his movies—but the slow-moving and carefully constructed Spider (2002) stayed with me after a first viewing last fall. Here was a movie about a severely faulty memory with murderous implications. The aptly named “Spider,” whose fondness for creating large latticeworks of twine provides both symbol and vehicle for his pathology, habitually misremembers. Unlike the hero of the popular Memento (2000), whose short-term memory fails after a tragic, isolated event, this protagonist’s memory appears to have always been faulty. The schizophrenia which isolates him and skews his perception immediately begins reconstructing events after they occur, and in a way that harms those around him.

Which begs the question, at what point do our own, constantly changing recollections become problematic? To varying degrees, we each fashion our memories of the past from imperfect recollections shaped by present emotions and events. Some psychologists argue a measure of self-deception is necessary for healthy living, that we need to privilege the positive, hopeful—often intangible—aspects of reality just to function in an unpredictable world. Failure to self-deceive, some would argue, opens the path to clinical depression.

What, then, of historical, personal “truth”? Is it the artificial construct modern philosophers claim, a chimera forever out of reach? Is the mental condition of Cronenberg’s anti-hero, that is, an only slightly exaggerated representation of a universal human condition? Or do most of us have access to some roughly objective record of past events, a record we are responsible for rediscovering and reconciling ourselves with?

I think my own, rather optimistic answer to this question would place me firmly within a seemingly credulous minority. What do you think?

written Jan. 24, 2005