Its like waking, like I just woke up"

1
Its like waking, like I just woke up"

• Consciousness, Cognitive Film Theory and Memento
  (2000)

2
(Radical) Cultural Constructivism...

• One must concede that the Western humanist
  concept of the autonomous individual self is not
  universal, eternally given, and valid for all
  time and all places, but is a product of history
  and culture
• -Novelist and Literary Theorist David Lodge
• See also The General Legacy and Ethos of
  so-called SLAB-Theorists (Saussure, Lacan,
  Althusser, Barthes)

3
...And Some of Its Problems

• Experimental research has shown that people who
  have had little or no access to cinema or to any
  other form of "individualised" Western culture
  have attributed personalities, emotions and
  agency to film characters shown to them (Hobbs et
  al Berliner)
• Complexity of consciousness and self vs. the
  evolutionary recent development of language
  (Damasio)
• Evidence of human universals nearly all human
  cultures and languages have concepts of "I",
  "me", or "self", as distinct from everything else
  (Brown)

4
Outline

• The Main Argument Concerning The Singular Self
  and Its Experience in Cinema Culture AND
  Biology, Not Just Culture
• Damasian Model of Consciousness
• Application to Cinema Damasio-Smith-Currie
• Consciousness and Ordinary Amnesia Films 3
  Short Cases
• The Levels of Consciousness in Memento (2000)
• Conclusions

5
Damasio Three Levels of Consciousness (1)

• Proto-Consciousness
• gtgt gives rise to Proto-Self
• non-conscious,
  body-mind-interface
• gtgt is a necessary requirement for
• Core Consciousness
• gtgt gives rise to Core Self
• consciousness,
  "self", agency, onwership
• gtgt is a necessary requirement for
• Extended Consciousness
• gtgt gives rise to Autobiographical
  Self
• memories,
  introspection, complex beliefs

6
Damasio Three Levels of Consciousness (3)
7
Damasio Three Levels of Consciousness (4)

• Rita Carter, Consciousness, p. 235

8
Damasio Three Levels of Consciousness (2)

• Damasio, The Feeling..., p. 199

9
Damasio on the Core Self

• You know that you are conscious, you feel that
  you are in the act of knowing, because the subtle
  imaged account that is now flowing in the stream
  of your organism's thoughts exhibits the
  knowledge that your proto-self has been changed
  by an object that has just become salient in the
  mind. You know you exist because the narrative
  exhibits you as protagonist in the act of
  knowing. You rise above the sea level of knowing,
  transiently but incessantly, as a felt core self,
  renewed again and again, thanks to anything that
  comes from outside the brain into its sensory
  machinery or anything that comes from the brain's
  memory stores toward sensory, motor, or autonomic
  recall. (The Feeling of What Happens, 171-2)

10
External Features of the Core Consciousness

• wakefulness
• attentiveness to stimuli
• purposeful behaviour
• specific actions and emotions
• background emotions

11
Outline

• The Main Argument Concerning The Singular Self
  and Its Experience in Cinema Culture AND
  Biology, Not Just Culture
• Damasian Model of Consciousness
• Application to Cinema Damasio-Smith-Currie
• Consciousness and Ordinary Amnesia Films 3
  Short Cases
• The Levels of Consciousness in Memento (2000)
• Conclusions

12
Smith Person Schema

• a discrete human body
• perceptual activity, including self-awareness
• intentional states, such as beliefs and desires
• emotions
• the ability to use and understand a natural
  language
• the capacity for self-impelled actions and
  self-interpretation
• the potential for traits, or persisting
  attributes
• an enabling framework, part of the material out
  of which particular types of characterisation can
  be constructed"

13
Smith Damasio

• Damasian (Proto and) Core Consciousness
• a discrete human body
• perceptual activity, including self-awareness
• emotions
• the ability to use and understand a natural
  language
• the capacity for self-impelled actions and
  self-interpretation
• Damasian Extended Consciousness
• the potential for traits, or persisting
  attributes
• intentional states, such as beliefs and desires

14
Currie Simulation Theory

• Currie "when we see someone in a situation and
  attend to what is occurring, we take on the
  beliefs and desires we imagine they must have.
  Unlike our own beliefs and desires, however,
  these are run "off-line. They are disconnected
  from their normal perceptual inputs and
  behavioural outputs"
• Smith As with all schemata, the person schema
  and the hierarchy of consciousness it contains
  are subject to revision we may apply the person
  schema to a brain-damaged individual, and be
  forced to revise it on discovering that the
  individual lacks certain capacities pre-supposed
  by the schema.

15
Outline

• The Main Argument Concerning The Singular Self
  and Its Experience in Cinema Culture AND
  Biology, Not Just Culture
• Damasian Model of Consciousness
• Application to Cinema Damasio-Smith-Currie
• Consciousness and Ordinary Amnesia Films 3
  Short Cases
• The Levels of Consciousness in Memento (2000)
• Conclusions

16
Three Ordinary Amnesia Films

• Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
• Ziyu Fengbao / Purple Storm (1999)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• different cultures, two decades in time,
  different genres, from superstar mainstream and
  action thriller to cross-over / art house.

17
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
18
Ziyu Fengbao / Purple Storm (1999)
19
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
20
All Three Films

• The unity of the core self remains intact.
• Could be explained with approximate conventions
  of representation seem, however, to be
  ultimately grounded in an insurmountable
  biological basis of the core self
• The Core Self helps and smoothes out the
  comprehension of the anomalous characters of
  these narratives.
• Personal histories and identities are constantly
  lost, regained, readjusted, rejected, used and
  abused
• This status is crystallised in the recurring,
  off-hand, synecdocheic representation of
  autobiographies as dossiers, boxes, files or bin
  bags of clues
• A sustained Lacuna treatment would lead to a
  spotless mind not far removed from a transient,
  but incessantly recreated core self and an
  extremely short term memory.
• the brain damage in Memento, which acts
  precisely like a continuous, inbuilt Lacuna
  procedure.

21
Outline

• The Main Argument Concerning The Singular Self
  and Its Experience in Cinema Culture AND
  Biology, Not Just Culture
• Damasian Model of Consciousness
• Application to Cinema Damasio-Smith-Currie
• Consciousness and Ordinary Amnesia Films 3
  Short Cases
• The Levels of Consciousness in Memento (2000)
• Conclusions

22
Leonard Shelbys Condition in Memento (2000)

• Leonard, like David, cannot form new memories
  anteriograde memory loss
• his autobiographical self extends to his wife's
  death, but no further
• since that incident he seems to have been living
  in roughly 10 minute slots of short term memory
• Despite his handicap, Leonard tries to find his
  wife's killers, and becomes entangled in
  suspicious and exploitative relationships.

23
Amnesia and Cinematic Devices in Memento (2000)
(1)

• Christopher Nolan "making the audience think
  like Leo", "putting the audience in this man's
  head" and "in his mindset drawing "the audience
  into Leonard's consciousness"
• the inner monologue or voice-over that has no
  room tone
• the self-observation and self-questioning
  character of the voice-over
• predominantly subjective camera (according to
  Nolan there are only two shots in the film which
  happen outside Leonard's perimeter of
  consciousness)
• closed, almost claustrophobic sets
• recurrent motifs, such as the multiple
  awakenings. AND
• NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE gtgtgt

24
Amnesia and Cinematic Devices in Memento (2000)
(2)

• Non-Linear Narrative
• restricted almost exclusively to Leonards POV
• black-and-white goes forward
• colour goes backwards
• unveils situations strange, unfamiliar, virginal
  both to Leonard and the audience
• disrupts / obstructs character construction
• induces confusion

25
The Two-Fold Significance of Memento1. The
Persistence of Self

• No Clear Identity
• No Clear Past
• Yet There still is a self in search of an
  autobiography
• A unified entity with an ownership and agency
  distinct from the environment, which is
• Automatically attuned and related to its
  surroundings via its body.
• Leonard's monologue "You kinda know who you
  are" "I can feel the world" "How am I supposed
  to heal, if I can't feel time?" "So, what am I
  doing..." "Its like waking, like I just woke
  up" "Awake. Where am I?".

26
The Two-Fold Significance of Memento 2.
Character Simulation by the Audience

• Normal Person Schema gtgtgt unfulfilled gtgtgt
• Only Core Self inferred for Leonard gtgtgt
• Offline simulation of Core Self only
• Augmented by the non-linear, first person
  narrative gtgtgt
• A simulated sense of Core Self without the
  (usual) Autobiographical Self perhaps a genuine
  sense of confusion
• Yet the sense of unitary, singular self remains
  (both for Leonard and the spectator)

27
1600 User Comments (IMDB)

• "The film is constructed and told in such a way
  that you are constantly put into the shoes of
  Leonard Shelby, beautifully played by Guy
  Pierce.
• "So, go and see it be confused, acknowledge the
  frailty of all you know to be true, and then
  imagine the freedom of actually being Lenny, and
  then the horror of having nothing, nothing but
  the reliance of a pen and a Polaroid camera to
  know who you are.
• "But you might get frustrated because you don't
  know what's going on. That's normal. In fact,
  that's the whole idea.... find out just how
  twisted and complex Leonard's world is. This film
  will leave its own memento on your mind, and
  you'll have a hard time forgetting how much you
  enjoyed it.
• ""Memento" wins this year's prize for inducing
  the most audience participation. Not only is the
  film thought-provoking and unusually absorbing,
  but it also places us in the main character's
  shoes. How can we be in the same mental status
  with the main character when he cannot remember
  anything?
• It forces you to think in the same way that our
  lead character, Leonard Shelby... our perceptions
  are shattered in the same way."
• "I loved this movie because it made me feel as if
  I had a short-term memory deficit."

28
Outline

• The Main Argument Concerning The Singular Self
  and Its Experience in Cinema Culture AND
  Biology, Not Just Culture
• Damasian Model of Consciousness
• Application to Cinema Damasio-Smith-Currie
• Consciousness and Ordinary Amnesia Films 3
  Short Cases
• The Levels of Consciousness in Memento (2000)
• Conclusions

29
Summary and Conclusions (1)

• Damasio
• the universal architecture of consciousness
• unitary, singular self can be created and
  maintained without memory (and culture?)
• Theory of Mind mentalising, simulating other
  peoples thoughts
• Currie offline simulation in cinema
• Smith
• architecture of offline simulation and character
  engagement
• person schema and its refinement with Damasian
  levels
• Application of Damasian concepts to 3 amnesia
  films
• singular core self a strong representational
  convention
• autobiographical self malleable and adjustable
  (bag of clues)

30
Summary and Conclusions (2)

• Memento
• the depiction of anteriograde memory loss
• a striking way of representing the core
  consciousness only
• non-linear, first person narrative helps audience
  to simulate the core consciousness
• singular, unified self remains, even without (a
  proper) autobiography
• General Conclusions and Prospects
• A more systematic inquiry into memory loss films
• How they represent the different Damasian layers
  of consciousness
• How much can be explained with Damasian terms
• Biological architecture of consciousness provides
  the fundamental explanation for universal appeal
  of individual selves in the narrative arts
• Biological architecture of consciousness does NOT
  exhaust particular questions about the self,
  identity and personal histories in cinema the
  domain of the moderate constructivism and
  cultural history

31
Thank You!

• Harri Kilpi FL
• Researcher, Associate Tutor
• School of Film and Television Studies,
• University of Helsinki
• E-mail harri.kilpi_at_helsinki.fi
• Tel [phone]
• Web http//www.helsinki.fi/hkilpi