Memento Essay

The character development of Leonard Shelby in Memento is greatly affected by the decision to format the movie in a non-linear, or non-chronological, way. As the movie begins, the viewer sympathizes with Leonard and his condition: anterograde amnesia, which is the loss of the ability to remember recent events, or short term memory. This sympathy is increased when the audience learns that Leonard is on a mission to find and kill the man who raped and murdered his wife, and who caused him to lose his memory during the attack by hitting him and knocking him unconscious. At this point the viewer completely understands Leonard’s motives and desires, and wants to see his issues resolved and the killer taken care of.

            However, as the movie progresses, the format begins to unravel and brings the numerous issues to the forefront. We see that the people Leonard chooses to trust, Teddy and Natalie, are not who they appear to be, and Leonard can never know it because of his condition. Natalie is presented as a woman who is able to help identify Leonard’s killer, and who may even be interested in him romantically. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear that she has her own ulterior motives for “helping” him, and it begins to dawn on the viewer that she might know more about him than we do at this particular time, as the audience is aware that the events are disjointed and not in chronological order. Still, we believe in Leonard’s presumed innocence, and that his goal is steadfast and valiant. Teddy, too, is not all that he seems to be. It is unclear why Leonard even talks to him, as he has written “Do not believe his lies,” on one of the polaroids he carries around of people as a way to remember them. Nevertheless, Teddy genuinely seems to want to help Leonard find his wife’s killer, for reasons that are not revealed until the very end, where the climax completely alters the way the audience views Leonard.

            When Teddy reveals that he is an undercover cop who was assigned to Leonard’s wife’s case years before, everything begins to fall into place for the viewer. Teddy shows Leonard that he has actually killed his wife’s rapist before, and that she did not die as a result of the attack, but was actually the wife in the story of Sammy Jankis: a man with the same condition as Leonard who accidentally kills his diabetic wife by giving her too much insulin, at her request, without realizing that he had just given her a shot minutes before. He is Sammy Jankis, and refuses to accept this reality, so he creates new scenarios in which he gets to investigate his wife’s murder and be a hero each time, with each new death. Leonard refuses to accept this reality, so he deliberately marks Teddy as his new target with well placed clues that he will not remember having placed himself.

            This one event changes the entire perception that the audience has of Leonard. For the whole movie, we are on his side, sympathizing with his plight and hoping that he finds resolution in any way that he can. After the end of the movie, we see that Leonard’s intentions are not at all altruistic. He does not want to accept the fact that he accidentally killed his wife, or live with his condition in a meaningless existence, so he gives himself an objective to live out his days solving while both consciously and subconsciously absolving himself of his crime. Leonard’s entire character completely shifts with the knowledge of his intentional wrongdoings, and this shocking ending would not have been able to be achieved without the use of this format. Had the audience seen the events chronologically, we would have known from the get-go that Leonard was doing this for his own personal gain, and our opinion of him would have been polluted with this information. Not knowing Leonard’s full back story enabled the viewer to blindly accept the façade that we were being presented with, and the destruction of this construction of reality is what really drove home the phenomenal way that Leonard was developed using non-linear progression.

News Articles

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11562059

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/10/17/drc.march.against.rape.cnn?hpt=T2

            Though the news ultimately aims to broadcast information to the public, how effectively and interestingly this occurs is entirely dependent upon the media format that is used. The information we are receiving could be exactly the same, but the different cues we pick up from each format, and the way the news manipulates each format to get a point across all effect what we take away from the broadcast.

            For example, there were a couple of news reports discussing an event that occurred Sunday, October 17^th – the Democratic Republic of Congo had a women’s march against sexual violence. This sounds very straightforward, and for the most part, it is. The first lady led thousands of women around a prominent town in Congo while holding up banners that denounced forced sexual acts upon women. The text-based article that described this event, however, took a very different approach than the video-based news story. The text article made sure to go into detail as to why these women felt the need to march for their rights, informing the reader that even the country’s own government troops were raping and killing women. It even goes so far as to give an estimate as to the number of people who were raped in the past year: 15,000, an obscenely high number. This article relied heavily on logos – logic, statistics, facts – to get their point across. Text-based articles in general tend to rely on logic, as it is easier to convey numbers and hard facts with words than it is to convey pure compassion and emotion.

            Meanwhile, the video-based news story relied more on pathos – emotions – and ethos – credibility. The video shows a reporter discussing the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Anthony Gambino, a man who has intimate knowledge of the current atmosphere, considering he has spent much time there and even wrote reports concerning the issue of sexual assault and rape in Congo. The video also goes more into long-term solutions that appeal to the emotional nature in all of us. Though he uses statistics as well, they are much more broad in scope, and there is no source provided for his conjecture. The video also goes more in-depth on the role of the men who are sexually assaulting the women, as opposed to the text article which talks more about the response of the women who realize they need to stand up for themselves. It also discusses this issue in relation to economics in the country, which the news article failed to mention. Overall, the video was able to go more in-depth for many reasons: it is easier to keep the attention of people when they are able to see who is talking, and see that the person knows what they are talking about. News articles are kept brief so they don’t lose the focus of the reader, and therefore tend to only summarize the event that occurred.

            However, the two do contain similarities. Both obviously share the same overall opinion about the issue, which is that men need to “stop the sexual terrorism” that occurs in this country. Also, the overall topic is the same, even if the two media formats decided to look at the issue from different angles. Nonetheless, the two media formats appear to share the same political and social issue quite differently from one another.

           

War of the Worlds

            The impact of the 1930s radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” narrated by Orson Welles had an interesting effect on the nation. Today, we might think that it’s silly that so many people took a dramatized radio broadcast for the truth, but one must consider the times that these people were living in. The citizens, already going through the Great Depression, steadily increasing unemployment rates, and just a general sense of unease (brought about, in large part, by whisperings of misdeeds from other countries), were that much more susceptible to believing bad news, as all the news they had heard in this decade was generally unpleasant. So when Orson Welles got on the radio and started giving small, enigmatic details about explosions on Mars, people were not going to be hesitant to aim their previously hinted at ominous feelings towards this bizarre occurrence. It seemed especially legitimate to begin with, as someone automatically refutes the claim that there is anything of importance happening on Mars. However, all of the speakers on the radio soon agree with the assessment that aliens are trying to land on the Earth, specifically Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, which then turns into widespread, newspaper-printed panic. It was only at the end of the broadcast, when Orson Welles breaks character to “remind” the listeners that it was a Halloween prank that the citizens realized they had been duped.

            The aftermath of this broadcast was fascinating, and actually played a huge role in shaping the nation’s view on news reporting after that. After the broadcast and the public’s rage when everyone realize that they had been tricked, radio stations were required to explicitly let people know when there is a fake broadcast occurring. Even this did not comfort paranoid viewers, and some people say that many thought the Pearl Harbor bombings were fake, as they listened to the initial broadcast. War of the Worlds taught the American population to question information that is being fed to them, even if they believe it comes from a reliable source. It bred a generation of skeptics who did not blindly accept whatever the radio stations were telling them about the topics they were passionate about. War of the World also, I believe, helped to make the television medium far more successful than it might have been. People were easily tricked when it came to radio because all one could do was listen. If the station had lifelike special effects, or even just a dedicated team, it was easy to make people think events were taking place when in reality they were not. With the television, people assumed it would be much harder to fake visual proof. That is not the case now, but back when TVs first came out, it was very much the scenario.

            Overall, the people of the nation who fell for the broadcast were irrevocably changed afterwards. Radio went from a reliable source of information to a medium that had to be second guessed. Because of this event, people would go on to treat real life crises flippantly, not believing them to be true until there was visual evidence to corroborate the story. War of the Worlds was fascinating because the station provided just enough evidence to convince a nation that aliens had landed – an impressive feat considering the reluctant nature of humanity to accept sudden life-changing affirmations. In the end, the people naively believed Welles, and were consequently very bitter about this decision for the next decade.

Left Brained

For the "Which Side Do You Use" test, I responded as a right brained person to 0 questions, and a left brained person to 18 questions. According to the descriptions of the types of cognitive processing that I follow, this describes me pretty well. There is one part in particular that rings true: "Processes thoughts and ideas with words and symbols; likes to use letters, words, and mathematical symbols." I spend a great deal of time writing to make sense of my thoughts, and apparently this is characteristic of left brained thinkers. I did not fully agree with the last assessment: "Processes information based on reality; focuses on rules and regulations." I am pretty cautious, but I tend to be extremely optimistic, sometimes bordering on naive. I also wonder how accurate an assessment can be gathered from a quiz that only has 18 questions total, but overall it was very informative.