"I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different."
- Memento
I'm taking this class this semester, Film Criticism.
It's an amazing class, partly because I get to watch and analyze films for homework and partly because I think that my professor is an absolutely brilliant woman and quickly becoming my hero. She writes children's books and teaches on the side.
Or maybe it's the other way around.
Anyways, she's stellar. And she lets us watch really stellar films.
One of the last films we watched was Dark City. And if you haven't seen it, sir you're missing out. It's kind of trippy, but in that swell sort of awesome way.
Anyways, I had to do this presentation on it, and I chose to compare it to several other similar films. I talked about Dark City and Memento (a really trippy film) and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (an even trippier film).
The question that all of these films deal with is do our memories make us who we are or is who we are make our memories.
The quote at the top is from Memento.
Basically, the gentleman (played excellently by Guy Pierce) cannot form new memories, and the last thing he remembers is his wife getting raped and murdered.
So the whole thing is him trying to find his wife's killer. Since he can't remember anything from five minutes ago, whenever he finds a clue about this killer, he tattoos himself with the clue.
Trippy, right?
Anyways, in the end he does something terrible, but is trying to convince himself that it's okay because he won't remember that he did it in like ten minutes.
And the whole idea is can he be held accountable in ten minutes when he doesn't even remember doing it?
After I did my presentation, my professor told me to watch this other film called The Thirteenth Floor.
I didn't think that a film could get trippier than Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but I was wrong.
The Thirteenth Floor is an incredible film, but lord is it trippy. Kind of makes you feel like you're high or something.
The Thirteenth Floor kind of has the same idea as Memento.
In this film, these people create this entire other world in a live video game, then connect their brains to the brains of some of the people in this other world. What they don't realize is that this world they create doesn't realize it's just a created world, so it functions like a real world, with real people, doing real things and falling in love for real.
So it's like these people are walking around, doing their lives, thinking they've got this, then suddenly they get zonked and don't have any control over what the video controllers do and then don't remember doing anything.
So for example, one perfectly respectful gentleman who has been happily married for over 30 years gets zonked, and his "game controlling person" is a scoundrel who sleeps with all these women. Then when he's done, he unzonkes the respectful gentleman, and lets him live his life.
The problem is this gentleman's wife figures out he's having affairs because she smells the perfume on him. But he's really not, it's his "controller".
Watching all of these trippy films has really got me questioning reality a lot.
And the thing is, as hippie as that might sound, I think it's great. Here's why.
While I am from this world, I am not of this world. This will never be Home, because Home is with the Creator.
Maybe it's a weird and twisted analogy, but while I was watching The Thirteenth Floor, I kept thinking that I'm like the video game people - I live and breathe and love and fear and weep and smile, but there is something much more Real than the Reality I am doing all of these things in.
And it's perfectly fine for me to live and breathe and love and fear and weep and smile in reality, because after all, that's why the Creator made this reality.
But it's like, once I figure out that this reality is not the Ultimate Reality, I should live and breathe and love and fear and weep and smile knowing that one day, I'll get to leave the video game reality and go the Ultimate Reality with the Creator.
I got this tattoo a few weeks ago that says "It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me."
If I were to just go through life in this video game reality by myself, there really would be no point.
There's a point in The Thirteenth Floor where one of the characters realizes that his world is not really Reality.
He is staring out into the "world" and says that no matter what he does or whom he loves or whatever, nothing will really matter because he will die, and no one will remember him and his life will just be a video game character so who cares?
This is like what it is when we go through life on our own. It doesn't really matter.
But when we let the Creator take over and get in our heads and our hearts and direct us, it gives our lives here meaning.
Because there is no higher power than our Creator. And he knows how all of this works because he's the Creator. So he knows the best way for things to work.
So of course we want His input.
Just a thought.
I guess it's kind of like how people compare The Matrix to Christianity. Or The Lion King.
None of those really made sense to me.
But this does, somehow.
