As long as I can remember, I’ve had an intense fear of forgetting. I try to capture memories in as many ways as possible—keeping track of everyday moments in journal entries, playlists, photographs, hastily written (and sometimes cryptic) messages on my Notes app. Recently, I realized there’s a secondary underlying anxiety: what if, after all the work I’ve done to archive my life, my photo gallery is somehow erased? If the songs on my ‘summer 2017’ playlist are taken off Spotify? I had to remember that memory, by its nature, is ephemeral—and so are all the ways we try to prolong it. Film negatives, once destroyed, are gone forever. Photographs fade, just like memories do. That particular anxiety of mine, I realised, revealed how much I rely on, and believe in, the sanctity of my externalised archive.
Memory is one of those central-to-life things that cinema has always been preoccupied with—how do you portray something so personal, so nebulous, and something that rarely is as clear as a photograph? Our memories aren’t always visual—sometimes they’re a feeling, a sense, a snippet of experience. When film does need to engage with memory, it does so most often through flashbacks. It must take new and inventive routes to visualise the process of memory making—something that is still fairly mysterious to the best of us. Some films, often science fiction stories about memory loss, like Paycheck, are almost laughable in how neatly they imagine memory: as if our brains are databases, as if we remember events with crystal-clear, cinematic clarity, and as if memory files can be neatly excised and rewritten. A film like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though, is less cut-and-dry; in that world, memory is messy.
In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, K. (Ryan Gosling) learns this truth about memory from a memory creator, Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), who tells him, “Anything real should be a mess.” K. is a replicant, a synthetic creation in a post-apocalyptic world; replicants are with artificial memories in order to make them empathetic and human-like. Memory in Blade Runner 2049—for the replicants—is objectified, commodified, and depersonalised. Replicants like K. straddle a strange duality; they’re aware their childhood memories are fake, but they still possess them and are meant to draw some kind of learning from them, despite knowing they are entirely invented. Memory creators use “memory orbs” to dream up these artificial memories, where every little detail is customizable. K.’s memories are searchable, almost like a database: Stelline uses a device that allows her to see K’s memory just by pointing it at him. “Think about the memory you want me to see,” she says. “Not even that hard. Just picture it.” There’s something interesting in the pointed artificiality of memory in Blade Runner 2049: it combines the hackneyed, uncomplicated memory world of Paycheck with something much more real in how memories can affect personhood. Memory is a cornerstone of personality and identity—it’s how we understand and define ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. For K., the first time he entertains the possibility of being someone important (someone worth valuing, someone with rights, a “real person”) is when he believes in the truth of one of his supposedly false memories.
In Kogonada’s After Yang, we meet another created being—Yang (Justin H. Min) is a “technosapien,” a robotic teenage boy who functions as a big brother of sorts to a young girl, Mika, in her adopted family. When Yang malfunctions, Mika’s dad Jake (Colin Farrell) tries to get him repaired, but much like you’d experience taking a resold laptop to a shady-looking repair store, it isn’t as easy as he hopes. Jake eventually discovers that Yang was fitted with a camera that his original creators denied the existence of, on privacy grounds. These cameras were a secret experiment in “trying to understand what technos considered memorable,” allowing the techno to record a few seconds every day. When Jake finally accesses the data bank (on digital space, of course) it appears as a constellation of data points that together form a forest, with each data point resembling a nebula in itself. It’s striking how Yang’s memories, when played back, feel familiar in the Tiktok/Reels age, kind of like watching someone’s 1SE—a popular app that functions as a sort of visual diary, prompting you to record a second from your everyday life. For Yang, these are ordinary but important moments: shadows and sunshine, interactions with Mika, a long look at himself in the mirror. What he considers ‘memorable’ slowly builds into a picture of himself—revealing how he understands his own being.
For both K. and Yang, memory is endlessly rewritable, externalised, both corporate and corruptible—they are products before people, and their memories are owned by and at the mercy of their corporate creators. Jake must go to increasingly illegal lengths to extract Yang’s memory bank, since he’s a resold product and the original store that sold him is now defunct. The world of Blade Runner 2049 makes it abundantly clear that the use value of replicants is much more important than their supposed rights; K.’s memories are meant to be carefully manufactured, manipulated for just the exact result. But in both cases, there’s a reminder that memory is never as simple as it seems, even in a world where someone can access someone else’s memories with just a click of a button. The reality of a corporate entity that has the power to control and erase their memories, implies, in effect, that they also have the right to grant or deny them personhood.
Memory and personhood is also a cornerstone of Pixar’s Inside Out series, which imagines the inside of a young girl, Riley’s, brain as if it were run by five ruling emotions. There are plenty of delightful imaginative moments across Inside Out and Inside Out 2—aspects of Riley’s personality, held together by core memories, become “Personality Islands.” The “train of thought” is a literal train, and the “stream of consciousness,” a literal stream. Memory itself takes the form of tiny, byte-sized clips from Riley’s life, held in little orange marbles. A slew of anonymous mind-workers organise and categorise these marbles in the enormous library of Riley’s brain. Forgotten memories end up in the “Memory Dump,” and suppressed ones in a memory vault. When Joy and her merry gang of emotions decide a memory is worth recalling, they bring it up on their control centre, where it gets projected to the front of Riley’s mind.
I find these ideas fascinating—imagining memories are categorized like a data bank, the formation of these memories being primarily visual and mostly byte-sized like Yang’s, and especially, leaving the decision of which memories are worth saving and recalling entirely up to the emotions. A key aspect of Inside Out is that the emotions—Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Disgust—are not Riley herself. Though they know and love her, they are separate from her, and they view her as an entirely removed entity that they influence and control. On a very basic level, memories in the Inside Out universe are also depersonalised and externalised to an outside entity—albeit one that lives within Riley’s brain. Riley’s brain is run like an office, complete with headquarters, security personnel, and a room full of frazzled artists working overtime (run by Anxiety) to dream up every worst-case-scenario possible. The ending of Inside Out 2 complicates this somewhat, but until then, decisions on memories—and thereby personhood—seem largely in the hands of five well-meaning alien creatures inside Riley’s mind. Actual corporate influence is not far away from Riley’s mind either, writer Richard Brody notes that Riley’s only culture-related memory, “her one musical connection, an earworm that gets a droll behind-the-scenes representation within her mind, is a song from a gum commercial.”
There are no easy data banks of memory in Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, which is a kind of feature-length exercise in memory-mining. It’s the story of a holiday to Turkey that eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) takes with her father Calum (Paul Mescal). In the present day, grown-up Sophie looks back on camera footage taken during that holiday in an attempt to understand both the events of the trip and her father as a person. Scattered across the film are hints to a deeper emotional weight that Calum suffers, hints of depression—in one scene, we watch him walk deliberately into the ocean at night. But none of this is (or needs to be) explicitly stated; like Sophie, we are finding meaning only in what we can see and feel.
As a film, Aftersun is a remarkable attempt at capturing the nebulous quality of memory through its fragmentary and dreamlike structure. Through the film, we see use of long shots, overlays, double exposures, refractions, shadows, and reflections to evoke a sense of ongoingness—a living reality that cannot be captured in the limited space of a screen or a photograph—and portrays how meaning eludes Sophie despite all her searching. Sophie’s memory is much like the actual footage captured by her video camera: disjointed, limited, and offering a partial view of a complex reality. Toward the end of the film, we watch a Polaroid of Sophie and Calum develop slowly, a memory fading into view.
In these films, in different ways, memory becomes something external, corruptible, and often distinctly digital—dependent on cameras, projectors, or some futuristic technology. In the case of Blade Runner 2049, After Yang, and Inside Out, memories are owned, controlled, or corruptible by external entities. When I think of my own memory-keeping processes, I am struck by how much of it is dependent on the cloud, depersonalised externalities that I have limited control over. My carefully kept log of movies and books I’ve seen or read, on websites like Goodreads and Letterboxd, are dependent on the intricacies of enormous companies and websites. I was once locked out of the Instagram account I’ve had since I was sixteen—full of photos and videos like Yang’s—and the mechanics of the enormous Meta machine meant I had practically no method of recovery. These technologies don’t care who I am, or what my little memory means to me.
Everytime I watch a movie about memory, I’m drawn to the ways it tries to imagine these murky corners of our minds—as neat data banks of memory, that mimic the byte-sized ways in which we contain our memories in external devices—or more like the nebulous recollections of Aftersun, complex, uncontainable, impossible to pin down. To me, Ana Stelline’s words ring truest: “Anything real should be a mess.”