The Cerebral Catalyst

Last Night I had the pleasure of watching two different and yet interconnected movies that got me to thinking about the nature of memory. Now I set up my Netflix queue so I would receive three different movies each time against the wishes of my parents who demanded a steady stream of movies like Going Bananas with master of slapstick Tony Danza. Today I only got two, those being Strange Days and P.S. The third movie was to be Return of the Killer Tomatoes and would have killed this column in its tracks, although I could have just lied and you'd be none the wiser, ha ha.

So there have been quite a few columns about memory here, ones where yeah I was drunk and probably felt a bit weepy when I wrote them, but these two movies really hit me. We all remember; sometimes things we'd rather not and anyone who's ever gone on a three-month bender knows enough about that, and sometimes things that have given us the greatest pleasure. Sometimes we can't choose what we remember. A lot of pain can be hidden in our subconscious, and facing the truth is always tough no matter who you are. Often it's better to think of certain events the way we wished they had happened. I keep a healthy stock of selective memories at hand and some real juicy confabulations too. I suppose when I'm eighty my grandchildren will believe I actually was a captain and did once sail a sea of scotch, whatever that was. But someday we will all be dead, and someday those we knew will die, and what does the truth matter then? All that will matter is that we have lived and loved and god willing sucked the marrow out of what little time we had.

Strange Days begins several days before New Year's Eve 2000. The world presented is one similar to our own with heightened violence and excessive fire and tomfoolery. But don't get me wrong, this is a deep movie. The main character Lenny Nero (Rome is burning, get it) deals in memories; they are stored on mini-discs that are then inserted into players connected to a squid-like device (squib?) worn on the head. The memories are also recorded this way, and as one can guess the memories that come as a premium deal with sex and violence. Nero even pays female strippers to fuck each other, guys to fuck prostitutes, and so on. I'm not going to do a review of the whole movie; I'm just going to glean what's relevant. Nero is addicted to memories of an ex-girlfriend of his played by Juliette Lewis. He was a cop and she was a hooker who now is a singer in an alt-rock band. The songs aren't all that bad and I'm pretty sure Juliette Lewis does her own singing.

Nero has amassed a shoebox full of their memories; we see one where they have sex after she teaches him to roller-skate. He has become a flesh peddler of sorts and is empty inside except for his memories. He has a lady friend named "Mace", a limousine driver, who helps him to face his addiction, forcibly by smashing his tapes. It should be noted that her ex-husband was a crackhead (hmm hmm memory as a drug?) and that re helped her out after he busted her husband. She has a key line about memories: "Memories are meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason." Might seem really obvious, but to hear it said then it really got me, the notion that memories are made to be fleeting, that we are meant to move on. Everyone lives in the past from time to time; as I write this I'm still thinking about what a great time I had at my friend Chonny's wedding and how good it was to see everyone and how I wish I could live inside that memory. But something else occurs to me, being there and catching up with everyone: I've fallen short, and it's because I haven't taken enough risks with my life. I have worked but I need to work harder. I think now about how much sweeter that memory would have been if, say, I had finished grad school. Not to take anything away from it, but things have been stagnant for me and it's time to change. That's the one thing that's constant. And so soldier on.

Now I was also hung up on an ex-girlfriend for a while, and although she is not an alt-rock chanteuse (I don't know what she is now and I don't care, not being harsh, we're over) it was still hard to get over her. It took a while, and I still do think about her because there hasn't really been anyone to take her place. It's like I said before, I truly believe that my memories of her have been so distorted and colored by time and my own imagination that they are false. That can be a bad thing. Something else interesting, and this will be a good segue into our next movie, the memories Nero watches are preserved the exact way they were, all details exact and emotions as powerful as the day they were first created.

P.S. stars Laura Linney, who I have a crush on ( I get one of her movies a month. She's also a talented actress), as a woman who believes an art school applicant is the reincarnation of a teenage love of hers, F. Scott, who was killed in a car crash. She is the dean at Columbia and upon reading the letter enclosed with F. Scott's application she calls him at home and schedules an interview (besides the name being the same, what strikes her is his use of the phrase "just-add-water" life to refer to his fear of being unrecognized as an artist). L.L. visits her mom and finds old sketches her F. Scott did for her in high school. She also has one of his paintings he gave her hanging in her house, an abstract piece consisting of two giant blobs of blue paint that the artist referred to as "Mother and Child". Modern day F. Scott is outspoken and informal, but Laura Linney's character is still smitten; for her it's part of his charm. I thought his paintings were expressive and very fitting (one features a bearded man sleeping while his twin/ghost rises from the bed). But L.L. doesn't give them much attention and tells him that it's up to the board. He says fare thee well and expects that's it, but she chases him out and offers to answer any questions he may have, as well as to give him a tour of the campus. They end up at her apartment and then begin the torrid affair, with L.L. nearly raping F. Scott (they do it twice in a row with her on top and the camera doesn't cut away, making for a steamy scene) after a glass of wine.

F. Scott, whether he is truly a reincarnation or not, is basically a memory personified. It is as though her memory of him has spilled out into the real world. Things are not perfect, as nothing is, and complications arise. Now I know what you're thinking here, why the hell is the Captain watching a romance? Well, simply because this movie is not only a romance but also a meditation on time and fate. It does not work on a mystical level; L.L.'s character chooses to believe in the reincarnated boyfriend, and this is why I like the movie. It's about human confusion. If there were a time warp or a bunch of bullshit CGI and stuff blowing up, it wouldn't be as engrossing for me, personally.

The reincarnation theme got me to thinking about relationships as related to our memories of our past loves. Some times we look for someone to fill the void another has left. Sometimes we try to recapture the magic we felt the first time we were in love. This mostly futile search is directly related to drug use, in my opinion. The user tries to get the same feeling they had the first time. This is not true with drinking, although sometimes I think I try to recreate the worst hangover ever. But isn't the ideal for two people to become one? And... oh forget it I'm getting too sappy.

The rest of the night I spent thinking about my ex from freshman year at Duquesne and feeling real nostalgic and kind of fuzzy like cotton candy. I put on Neil Young's Harvest, an album I first heard in its entirety the first week of college. I had just started hanging out with her, and I remember walking her over by the convenience store to kiss her good-bye and sneak a smoke before I had to meet my parents. Harvest opens with "Out on the Weekend", and I picked out the line "See the lonely boy out on the weekend", and told her that song was right on about how I felt that weekend. I didn't tell her that I ate a whole gallon of Peanut Butter Fudge ice cream. And I remember watching the movie Smoke about a smoke shop in New York and thinking the shots of the sunlight on the pavement in there reminded me of Pittsburgh and walking around with her that first week, getting lost downtown and making out on a park bench before a thunderstorm of all things; and buying her a pack of cigarettes, she laying three dollars on my bed that night for them (only 2.50 a pack back then, imagine!). But forgive me, because I'm slipping back into that trap of nostalgia and somehow writing like a beat. Go figure. I say fight against nostalgia. Unless you're a writer, then you can call it "material", and then it's okay if you cry sometimes when you smoke a cigarette or laugh to yourself out loud. Your heart is beating. Mine is beating too, although a lot faster after the pot of coffee I just finished, and there is always, always the present and time to do anything and everything you want if you want it bad enough. So I say again, once more into the fray, and damn the torpedoes and all that jazz. Sleep when yer dead.

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Joseph L. Conty, Jr. wears a buffalo hide tunic and sips peach nectar from a chalice. Known to drink multiple flagons of mead for breakfast and chew bear fat for gum, he would like to remind the public that anyone else who dares to use the moniker of "Captain Fun" isn't fit to carry his merkin.

posted 05.23.05.

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