The dream world in Richard Linklater’s staggering Waking Life illustrates this point beautifully, perhaps because that idea is central to its whole intention. Waking Life is an animated film about a guy (voiced by Wiley Wiggins) who finds himself inside a dream he cannot wake from. As the disjointed story progresses, both the character and the audience conclude that Wiggins is actually dead. And what’s cool about Waking Life is that this realization is not the least bit disturbing. Wiggins’s response is a virtual nonreaction, and that’s because he knows he is not merely in a weird situation; he is walking through an alternative reality. Instead of freaking out, he tries to understand how his new surroundings compare to his old ones.
There are lots of mind-expanding moments in Waking Life, and it’s able to get away with a lot of shit that would normally seem pretentious (it’s completely plotless, its characters lecture about oblique philosophical concepts at length, and much of the action is based on people and situations from Linklater’s 1991 debut film, Slacker). There are on-screen conversations in Waking Life that would be difficult to watch in a live-action picture. But Waking Life doesn’t feel self-indulgent or affected, and that’s because it’s a cartoon: Since we’re not seeing real people, we can handle the static image of an old man discussing the flaws of predestination. Moreover, we can accept the film’s most challenging dialogue exchange, which involves the reality of our own interiority.
The scene I’m referring to is where Wiggins’s character meets a girl and goes back to her apartment, and the girl begins explaining her idea for a surrealistic sitcom. She asks if Wiggins would like to be involved. He says he would, but then asks a much harder question in return: “What does it feel like to be a character in someone else’s dream?” Because that’s who Wiggins realizes this person is; he is having a lucid dream, and this woman is his own subconscious construction. But the paradox is that this woman is able to express thoughts and ideas that Wiggins himself could never create. Wiggins mentions that her idea for the TV show is great, and it’s the kind of thing he could never have come up with—but since this is his dream, he must have done exactly that. And this forces the question that lies behind “What is reality?”: “How do we know what we know?”
This second query in what brings us to Memento, probably the most practical reality study I’ve ever seen on film. The reason I say “practical” is because it poses these same abstract questions as the other films I’ve already mentioned, but it does so without relying on an imaginary universe. Usually, playing with the question of reality requires some kind of Through the Looking Glass trope: In Waking Life, Wiggins’s confusion derives from his sudden placement into a dream. Both The Matrix and Vanilla Sky take place in nonexistent realms. Being John Malkovich is founded on the ability to crawl into someone’s brain through a portal in an office building; Fight Club is ultimately about a man who isn’t real; eXistenZ is set inside a video game that could never actually exist. However, Memento takes place in a tangible place and merely requires an implausible—but still entirely possible—medical ailment.
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.[55] 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 vodka[56] 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.
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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.