Memento is about a fellow named Leonard (Guy Pearce) who suffers a whack to the head and can no longer create new memories; he still has the long-term memories from before his accident, but absolutely no short-term recall. He forgets everything that happens to him three minutes after the specific event occurs.2 This makes life wildly complicated, especially since his singular goal is to hunt down the men who bonked him on the skull before proceeding to rape and murder his wife.
Since the theme of Memento is revenge and the narrative construction is so wonderfully unconventional (the scenes are shown in reverse order, so the audience—like Leonard—never knows what just happened), it would be easy to find a lot of things in this movie that might appear to define it. However, the concept that’s most vital is the way it presents memory as its own kind of reality. When Memento asks the “What is reality?” question, it actually provides an answer: Reality is a paradigm that always seems different and personal and unique, yet never really is. Its reality is autonomous.
There’s a crucial moment in Memento where Leonard describes his eternal quest to kill his wife’s murderers, and the person sitting across from him makes an astute observation: This will be the least satisfying revenge anyone will ever inflict. Even if Leonard kills his enemies, he’ll never remember doing so. His victory won’t just be hollow; it will be instantaneously erased. But Leonard disagrees. “The world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it?” he snaps. “My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.”
What’s ironic about Leonard’s point is that it’s completely true—yet even Leonard refuses to accept what that sentiment means in its totality. Almost no one ever does.
I’m not sure if anyone who’s not a soap opera character truly gets amnesia; it might be one of those fictional TV diseases, like environmental illness or gum disease. However, we all experience intermittent amnesia, sometimes from drinking Ketel One vodka3 but usually from the rudimentary passage of time. We refer to this phenomenon as “forgetting stuff.” (Reader’s note: I realize I’m not exactly introducing ground-breaking medical data right now, but bear with me.) Most people consider forgetting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there’s nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moments for later recall (which I do all the time).
Taoists constantly tell me to embrace the present, but I only live in the past and the future; my existence is solely devoted to (a) thinking about what will happen next and (b) thinking back to what’s happened before. The present seems useless, because it has no extension beyond my senses. To me, living a carpe diem philosophy would make me like Leonard. His reality is based almost entirely on faith: Leonard believes his actions have meaning, but he can’t experience those meanings (or even recall the actions that caused them). He knows hard reality is vast, but his soft reality is minuscule. And in the film’s final sequence, we realize that he understands that all too well; ultimately, he lies to himself to expand it. In a sense, he was right all along; his actions do have meaning, even if he doesn’t remember them. But that meaning only applies to an objective reality he’s not part of, and that’s the only game in town.
It’s significant that the character of Rita in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a woman with total amnesia, and that we’re eventually forced to conclude that she might be nothing but a figment of another character’s imagination.4 It’s almost like Lynch is saying that someone who can’t remember who they are really doesn’t exist. Once your reality closes down to zero, you’re no longer part of it. So maybe that’s the bottom line with all of these films. Maybe the answer to “What is reality?” is this: Reality is both reflexive and inflexible. It’s not that we all create our own reality, because we don’t; it’s not that there is no hard reality, because there is. We can’t alter reality—but reality can’t exist unless we know it’s there. It depends on us as much as we depend on it.
We’re all in this together, people.
Semidepressing side note: Eight months after reading Owen Gleiberman’s review in EW, I woke up with another tummy ache in the middle of the night (this time at a Days Inn in Chicago). The only thing I had to read was the July 15 issue of Time magazine that came with the hotel room, so I started looking at the “letters” page. All the letters were about Tom Cruise (Time had just done a cover story on Cruise after the release of Steven Spielberg’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report). These are two of them:
I was glad to see Tom Cruise, the most respected person in show biz, on the cover of Time. In general, Hollywood actors contribute little to society, other than mere amusement. Cruise, however, is different. He isn’t simply another mindless entertainer. He is a role model who overcame his childhood problems by being confident and motivated.
—Daniel Liao, Calgary
Was this article intended to help Tom Cruise regain his clean-cut image? He lost so much of it when he left his wife and children. Most alpha males need to control the women in their lives, and since Nicole Kidman has come into her own, it appears that Cruise moved on to a woman he had more control over. Are you going to be doing a cover on Kidman? She is the one who has had to go through the humiliation of being dumped by a famous husband and deal with being a single mom. She is a much more interesting person.
—Susan Trinidad, Spanaway (Wash.)
My first reaction to these letters was guttural: “Since when does Time publish letters that are written by rival publicists?” However, as I sat there in pain, feeling as though my stomach was being vacuumed through the lower half of my torso and into the bowels of this Illinois hotel, I was struck by the more frightening realization: These are not publicists! They are just everyday people, and they are some of the people I am trying to understand reality alongside. Somehow, there are literate men in Canada who believe Tom Cruise is a respected role model and “different” from all the other actors who contribute nothing but “mere amusement.” Somehow, there are women in the Pacific Northwest who think Nicole Kidman is interesting and wonderful and an icon of single motherhood, and that little five-foot-seven Cruise is an “alpha male” (even though everyone I know halfway assumes he’s gay). These are the things they feel strongly about, because these are things they know to be true.
We don’t have a fucking chance.
1. As opposed to this essay, which tends to be philosophy for shallow people.
2. Unfortunately, this does create the one gaping plot hole the filmmakers chose to ignore entirely, probably out of necessity: If Leonard can’t form new memories, there is no way he could comprehend that he even has this specific kind of amnesia, since the specifics of the problem obviously wouldn’t have been explained to him until after he already acquired the condition.
3. Holland’s #1 memory-destroying vodka!
4. For those of you who’ve seen Mulholland Drive and never came to that conclusion, the key to this realization is when the blonde girl (Naomi Watts) masturbates.
I hate punk rock.
Actually, that’s not true; I kind of like punk rock, sometimes. What I hate are people who love punk rock. There has never been a genre of anything that has made more people confused about what art is capable of doing, and they all refuse to shut up about it.
A few years ago, one of my favorite humans of all time died from bone cancer. A few hours after the funeral, I found myself in a conversation with someone who was as depressed as I was and almost as drunk. But—in order to avoid talking about our friend, probably—we started talking about pop music, and this guy kept saying, “Punk rock saved my life.” He said it like four times in ten minutes. “When I was in high school,” he insisted, “punk totally saved my life. If not for that music, I wouldn’t be here to
day. Punk rock saved my life, man.”
I have heard those exact words said thousands of times by hundreds of people, and none of them are ever joking. They exist in a culture of certainty. They want to believe what they are saying so much. They want to believe that this sentiment is literally true. And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
14 Toby over Moby 1:66
In November of 2000 I reviewed a concert by the Dixie Chicks in downtown Cleveland. A sold-out show. A big deal, sort of. And at the time, I didn’t know a goddamn thing about the Dixie Chicks, beyond what information could be gleaned from their name (which—in my defense—is probably more expository than just about any other pop moniker I can think of, except for maybe the Stooges).
I can’t recall if I liked this concert, but I suspect I probably enjoyed half of it. I mostly vaguely recall that Nathan from MTV’s The Real World 7: Seattle was somehow involved with the event’s promotion, and I clearly remember getting several angry phone calls from readers who read my review the next morning and thought I was cruel for suggesting that Chicks singer Natalie Maines had an “oddly shaped body, fleshy cheekbones, and weird fashion sense.” It turns out Natalie Maines was pregnant. I am nothing if not underinformed.
But ANYWAY, Natalie’s uterus is not the issue here. What struck me about this show was the audience, which appeared to be a cross-section of forty-one-year-old gay males outfitted from Old Navy and fifteen-year-old teenage girls with above-average teeth. I had never before seen so many teenage girls at a concert with real musicians, which is what the Dixie Chicks are. Obviously, we’re all used to seeing thousand of adolescent females at Britney Spears and ’NSYNC concerts, but those shows have nothing to do with music; those are just virgin-filled Pepsi commercials. It’s a teenage girl’s job to like that shit. But the Dixie Chicks aren’t part of that marketing scheme; there was one stunning moment in the middle of the evening’s festivities where Martie Seidel shredded on her fiddle like she was trying to start a California brushfire, and the foggy arena air tasted exactly like the omnipresent ozone from every pre-grunge, big-hair heavy metal show I attended in the late eighties. I looked around the building and I saw all my old friends from high school, only now they had breasts and were named Phoebe. And that’s when I realized that teenage girls are the new teenage boys, which is why the Dixie Chicks are the new Van Halen, which is why country music is awesome.
Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can’t really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn’t work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music “except country.” People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. All it means is that they’ve managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop sociology; they know that hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. And they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. Hipsters hate it because they hate Midwesterners, and they hate Southerners, and they hate people with real jobs.
Now, obviously, this hipster distaste doesn’t apply to old country music, because everybody who’s cool loves that stuff (or at least claims to). Nobody questions the value of George fucking Jones. It’s completely acceptable for coolies to adore the idea of haggard nineteen-year-old men riding in cabooses and having their hearts shattered, which is why alternative country is the most popular musical genre of the last twenty-five years that’s managed to remain completely unpopular (if you follow my meaning). I once asked Uncle Tupelo founder Jay Farrar about how his audiences changed as alt country became a phenomenon. “What audiences are you talking about?” he asked me back. “Do you mean the two hundred rock critics who actually care?” Farrar was sort of joking when he said that, but he wasn’t laughing. And he was probably more right than wrong. Columbia decided to rerelease all of Farrar’s early Uncle Tupelo albums on the imprint label Legacy, but it seems like the only people buying them are simply buying them again. On the surface, that’s a bit sad, because it seems like Uncle Tupelo wrote great songs that deserve to be significant. However, the operative word in that sentence is “seems.” What they really wrote were great songs that had no genuine significance whatsoever. I think the person who explained this most clearly was indie rocker/average poet David Berman of the Silver Jews, speaking to the Nashville Scene right after he moved to Tennessee. One gets the impression the reporter must have made reference to the “authenticity” of modern country music when she asked Berman a question:
“One thing that cracks me up in the Nashville local music scene,” Berman said in response, “is this verbal battle between Music Row and alt-country. Alternative country, to me, is just as ridiculously empty in a different way—it’s just that they’re not in power. All these people singing about a life they never knew—it’s really a fetishization of Depression-era country life. If authenticity is the issue, then there’s something more authentic to me about Wal-Mart country, which speaks to the real needs of the people who listen to it, more than talking about grain whiskey stills.”
Granted, the best alt country songs feel authentic, and that should be enough (and in the idiom of pop music, it usually is). The problem is that guys like Farrar embrace a reality that’s archaic and undesirable; the only listeners who appreciate what they’re expressing are affluent intellectuals who’ve glamorized the alien concept of poverty. The lyrics on a track like “Screen Door” off No Depression have the texture of something old and profound, but they’re not; technically, those lyrics are more modern than everything off Nine Inch Nails’Pretty Hate Machine. And more important, they’re only viewed to be profound by people who’ve never had the experience described in the lyrics.1 Truly depressed people don’t need depressing music. I don’t think I would have had any interest in hearing lines like, “Down here, where we’re at / Everybody is equally poor” when I was sixteen, sitting in my parents’ basement in rural North Dakota, only vaguely aware that I (and everyone I knew) had no fucking money. I probably would have thought Jeff Tweedy was whining. Oddly (or maybe predictably), I love that song today. But that’s because the lyrics no longer apply to the actual condition of my life. I would guess the prototypical Uncle Tupelo fan earns around $52,000 a year and has two VCRs. I would also guess they don’t shop at Berman’s aforementioned Wal-Mart, which is where mainstream country music sells like Pokémon.
“I definitely don’t feel a part of what I call the straighter country music industry of Nashville,” said critical alt country darling Lucinda Williams in a 2001 Billboard interview. “I’m definitely not connected with that world. Nashville is so straight. I guess I’m sort of considered an outlaw here with Steve Earle. They used to write grittier stuff. It’s gotten so puritanical…I don’t want to be identified with the stuff that’s on country radio now. Country music to me is Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.”
Well, good for you, Lucinda. It’s nice to see you’ve jammed the pretension of Kill Rock Stars into country music. Granted, there is some truth to what Williams says; she’s certainly doing what she can to keep her own music “grittier,” inasmuch as she likes to make albums about gravel roads. But this quote is really just an example of why Lucinda Williams’s music won’t matter in twenty years. Oh, she’ll be remembered historically, because the brainiacs who write pop reference books will always include her name under W. She’ll be a nifty signpost for music geeks. But her songs will die like softcover books filled with postmodern poetry, endorsed by Robert Pinsky and empty to everyone else. Lucinda Williams does not matter.
The Di
xie Chicks, however, do matter. They matter in the way big things matter…which is to say they matter without duplicity, which is to say they matter the way Van Halen did in 1981.2 What you have with the Dixie Chicks is real bluegrass music that doesn’t sound like traditional roots music, just as Eddie Van Halen played blues-based guitar licks that didn’t sound anything like John Lee Hooker. Like Van Halen, the Dixie Chicks added a blond singer to make the band an arena-ready megaforce, and—like Van Halen—the Dixie Chicks kicked a singer out of the band when she seemed like dead weight. The Dixie Chicks’ best song is “There’s Your Trouble,” which is about the pain of seeing your man with the wrong woman, and Maines ain’t talkin’ ’bout love, because love is rotten to the core. But all those coincidences are really just peripheral. The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls.
Here’s what I mean: For the past twenty-five years, culture has been obsessed with making males and females more alike, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s even enlightened. But what I’ve noticed—at least among young people—is that this convergence has mostly just prompted females to adopt the worst qualities of men. It’s like girls are trying to attain equality by becoming equally shallow and selfish. Whenever I see TV shows like Fox’s defunct Ally McBeal or HBO’s Sex and the City, I find myself perplexed as to how this is sometimes viewed as an “advancement” for feminism; it seems to imply that it’s empowering for women to think like all of the stupidest men I know (myself included). We’ve all heard the argument that there is an eternal double standard about promiscuity: The cliché is that girls who sleep around are inevitably labeled “sluts” while guys who make the rounds are dubbed “studs” (in fact, I hear people making this particular point far more often than I hear anyone literally calling women “slut s” or men “studs”). What’s interesting about that argument is the way it’s been absorbed by my generation and all the generations that have followed: The consensus is that this double standard is wrong, so—therefore—we should all have sex with as many people as possible, regardless of our gender. Somehow, this became logical. And that’s why modern fifteen-year-old girls are like fifteen-year-old boys from 1981: They’re saturated not only with internal sexual intensity, but also with the social belief that they should be having sex. And this manifests itself in strange ways. In the 1960s, the Rolling Stones realized that if you could make an audience unconsciously think about fucking, you could control the way they respond to music. Mick and Keith manufactured sexual aggression. Van Halen didn’t have to manufacture that sentiment, because their audience was already an ocean of lust, desperately wanting The Big Loud Show. In 1981, that ocean was adolescent boys. But Sarah Jessica Parker and Calista Flockhart have turned adolescent girls into adolescent boys, and those girls want their own Van Halen. And their version of Van Halen is Martie Seidel playing “Eruption” on a fiddle.