Tracey
I guess so, though I don't really have strong memories of watching that show.

Paul
Sacrilege!

Tracey
Well, as Aaron Nelson was discussing today on Science Friday, our memories do tend to change (even those that we think are very strong memories), and I'm just trying to be honest and say I don't have many memories of watching it.

Paul
Cute, honey. And obviously relevant. This movie about the limits of human memory does suggest that our recollections are pretty malleable and—too often—ephemeral. Apparently, some people can be made not only to misremember important people in their lives, but to forget them altogether.

Tracey
Maybe that's part of the story, but I think the real message is found in the ending, in the idea that our connections to others are created and maintained through our memories.

Paul
Yeah, which seems pretty commonsensical, and the truth of it gets played out on most of the characters. Remove the past, and you remove the connection. Remove the loved one, remove all material possessions tied to them, and it should be easy enough to erase your memory of the person. And if you can delete all the memories connected with someone, then it’s as if they never existed. An exaggeration of the human mind’s fickleness, perhaps, but with an unfortunate element of truth.

The heroine is different, though, the one character who won’t allow herself to forget the child taken from her. Even when all the physical evidence of her son's existence is gone and no one else remembers him, she doesn’t let go. Then—and this is my favorite part—the alien forcibly extracts her very earliest memories of seeing her son (his birth), and she still manages to remember him! In a surprisingly pro-life moment, she remembers herself as a pregnant woman, holding fast to the memory of the “life inside of me.”

Tracey
It's interesting that the way she claims the memory, and asks Ash to as well, is to use Sam's (and Lauren's) names.

Paul
Yeah, like names are so linked to being that merely speaking a single word could somehow bring the named individual back into being, back into one's memory. Seems kinda Biblical, like a name isn't just an arbitrary label, but a marker—even shaper—of identity.

Tracey
Right. Just like we were discussing at Emmaus Way last week, the names and nicknames given to us define, in some ways, how we relate to others. There's a real image and feel evoked by certain names.

Paul
Another thing that struck me is how this movie, like the recent War of the Worlds, hinges its effectiveness on an audience that can identify with the hero’s parental status. I think sci-fi movies that require one to both empathize with a certain, very specific kind of loss and simultaneously suspend their disbelief about extra-terrestrials are asking quite a bit from a general audience. If you can recognize what it’s like to cherish the simplest memories of daily life with a child, then you’re much more likely to be pulled into the emotional texture of this particular story, which then makes it easier to buy into the entire plot, however fantastic.

Tracey
I'm not sure this one succeeded in pulling me in emotionally. The suspense of the central mystery prevented me from really getting emotionally involved with the story--I was more concerned about trying to figure out what was going on (not really believing that aliens were involved for quite some time) than about how Telly was going to get back to Sam.

Paul
I understand that. There were definitely moments, though, when I could identify powerfully with her. When she flipped tearfully through an old photo album or gazed wistfully at the local playground, as if she could will her child back into her presence. Happens to me when I haven't seen the girls for a few days . . .

Tracey
Another thing that feels unresolved to me is how so many characters in the movie have lost important memories—I guess the assumption is that they all received aversive training/conditioning associated with the memories.

Paul
Right, the particular method of memory extraction is left to our imagination.

Tracey
So, the whole premise is that the aliens don't understand the connections between people. They want to see whether they can be extinguished by erasing memories.

Once Ash remembers that he did have a daughter, he is so upset with himself for forgetting her. I'm sure we universally, almost corporately, share this fear of forgetting.

Paul
One of my favorite lines in the movie speaks to this directly. The alien tells the heroine he's interested in "your connection, mother to child, like an invisible tissue. We can measure its energy, but we don't fully understand it, so we pose the question, 'can it be dissolved.' And it can, except for you." This suggests there is something more than just our memories that links human to human.

Tracey
We've been talking about this in terms of the relationships between people, but memories shape our individual identities as well. So, to deny these memories is to deny part of oneself. For Telly, it's the role of mother and all that entails. It seems the only way to really erase those memories would be to erase all of the memories of her life from the time she was a mother. Our identities and roles shape our choices and how we relate to other people.

Paul
Yes, and this is obviously a popular perspective—that we are the sum of our memories. Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, and a whole lot of other writers and philosophers claim it. I wonder, though, if this line of thought leaves out the eternal something within each of us. The movie seems to imply that it does . . .