There’s a powerful scene in the 1987 Alan Parker film, Angel Heart, where Mickey Rourke’s character, Harry Angel, is staring at a broken mirror, his eyes red-ringed, his expression broken. He mutters the same five words—“I know who I am”—over and over again, but each time the declaration sounds different, more desperate, as his psyche shifts from hubristic denial to brutal self-clarity. Watch the movie, and you’ll discover that Angel’s memory loss is from an unthinkable series of events, but all of us face some degree of memory loss, or at least memory distortion, and how we reckon with that reality contributes to our sense of self. Of course, the theme of amnesia has been a trope in crime, horror, and suspense novels and films for a long time, and for good reason: memory is associated with identify, with the very concept of the human soul, and when we lose access to those memories, it is fair to ask if we have also lost access to that soul.
Scientifically speaking, there are numerous reasons for memory loss, from simple aging to psychological reasons to neurological disorders, but it is rare that somebody will suffer from complete amnesia. However, amnesia does make for a great plot device and has been used over-and-over again, from early noir novels like Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Curtain and Marvin H. Albert’s Somewhere in the Night, to dark contemporary novels like Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island and S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep. In addition to the compelling plot devices, it makes sense that so many authors and auteurs focused on memory and memory loss in those early days of crime novels and film noirs. The United States had been involved in a horrific war, and many of the soldiers returned shell shocked with real neurological memory loss. But I think it goes beyond those cases of individual memory loss. The atrocities that society had witnessed were so grotesque and inhumane that there was a collective longing for amnesia. It’s easier to marvel at new dishwashers and television sets than to stare at photographs of piles of corpses. So perhaps these amnesiac characters represented American society writ large, aware of these great crimes but not wanting to face them.
While the memories of World War II faded, these stories of acute memory loss continue into the 21st Century, but the causes tend to be more from repression of some unknown trauma. So what happens when an amnesiac is forced to investigate his own past? Take a novel like Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. The entirety of the novel takes place on an island that houses a psychiatric ward, and it becomes increasingly disorienting trying to determine who is sane and who is demented. This is especially baffling because the protagonist, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (who is supposed to be searching for a missing mental patient) himself suffers from memory loss and is a particularly unreliable protagonist. In the last decades of the 20th Century and into the early 21st Century, there was an abundance of research on how psychological trauma caused memory loss and repression, up to the point that psychiatric patients, encouraged by their (sometimes) well-meaning therapists, began recovering traumatic memories—of events that had never happened. Novels like Shutter Island represent that fear, and the end of the novel provides enough ambiguity that readers remain uncertain about Teddy’s past.
But some of the greatest horror and suspense novels deal not with complete amnesia, but instead fragmented and shifting memories and identities. Researchers now believe that our memories change every time we recall them because of something called reconsolidation. According to Donna Bridge from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, “A memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event—it can be somewhat distorted because of the prior time you remembered it” (Northwestern Now, 2012). Horror novelists have used this concept as an expressionistic art form. There is an overlap of psychosis and memory loss, sometimes within a single brain, and other times within an entire community. Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimental horror novel, House of Leaves, focuses on a family living inside of a house that seems to be changing and growing—a metaphor of our own changing and unreliable memories. A poem in the novel reads, “Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind.” Those leaves, then, are our memories, and it is easy to lose them (or perhaps lose our minds).
Iain Reid’s unsettling novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things makes great use of shifting and fragmented memories. In this novel, it become increasingly difficult to determine if the narrator, Jake, is living in his present reality or in some warped version of the past. Imagined or real memories come in conflict with his deteriorating mental state. One can easily picture him, like Harry Angel, staring into a mirror and saying/wishing, “I know who I am.” And, of course, when our narrator is uncertain of who he is, the audience loses our own guardrails and we feel uneasy and disoriented. Because an unrevealed trauma is like that monster in the dark: we can imagine the unrevealed memory being whatever we fear most.
So, yeah, I’m fascinated in memory loss and memory distortion, and that’s why those themes appear in so many of my own novels (Corrosion, The Disassembled Man, The Blade This Time, Beneath Cruel Waters and, naturally, The Memory Ward). In fact, memory loss is a bit of an obsession for me, but I can’t for the life of me recall why.
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