On Memory

DANI: You remember everything.
CHARLES: What’s important.
- from "The Way I Danced With You"

Strange Days (1995)

Last night we saw Doctor Strange, there’s this bit at the beginning when the main character, an unusually talented brain surgeon is conducting a procedure and at the same time playing one of his favorite games where he shows off his “photographic memory” by having a nurse play random pieces of pop music and instantly reciting when it was released.

This is a game I might play, I have played this game. I could pretty much tell you exactly when a song was released until about the turn of the century. I could tell you pretty much when anything happened, until the year 2000.

No idea why, but since then I get dates mixed up the same as anyone else. I assume it has to do with my age, and where I am in my life, and I am not so quick to state without fear of contradiction what I know to be true.

There is also the very definite possibility that though I was generally accurate about pop music, when it came to things not so cleanly definable, such as who said or did what to whom, why and where and when that may or may not have happened. That is where I have truly made many significant errors.

Doctor Strange (2016)

Last year I had a deep dream. My wife discovered an app, one that - if you find the correct chair in which to sit - can allow you to travel backwards in time. There is a Siri-like AI you speak to, providing as many details as you are able, most specifically time and place, and it will transport you there.

We each had our own chairs, I cannot report where she went went, but I was successful at traveling twice. Each time I walked about, searching for those I wanted to find but with no success. At first I was self-conscious that I would be recognized and then I realized that was impossible. Seriously, if the present day you walked past your younger self, younger you wouldn't even notice you.

Though I was confident each time that I had in fact returned to those moments, each over twenty years ago, and was in more or less the right place, I was merely wandering in a melancholy memory, alone in bleak daylight. Returning to a place was no more like peering at a still picture of the location of a party the day after it has ended.

I am reminded of when my wife and I finally watched Before Midnight on DVD. We had seen the two previous films in this trilogy and while each of those were passionate, in the moment events (most of the second film happening entirely in real time) to go back to the first after watching the third would color that film with a dense wistfulness for lost youth which was not evident to me upon first viewing.

Before Midnight (2013)

These three films follow one relationship over the course of almost two decades, dropping in on them at nine year intervals, from when they first meet, first speak to each other, to a time much later when they are married and have their own children.

What would it be like to watch each film for the first time in reverse order? That would be intense. It would be like a mystery, how did this all begin? Because we can never do that with our relationships. None of us were being recorded the day we met our significant other, how could we be? We didn’t know who that person was going to remain in our lives.

For my part, I am glad there are no photos from the night I met my wife. First of all, they would probably have my ex-wife in them, too, and part that is always awkward. Also, my personal appearance in late 1989 was fucking embarrassing.

Even stranger, what if someone happened to have a video camera at the party that night, and went around interviewing everyone, and came up to ask us inane questions as we met and stood and drank and smoked cigarettes in the wee hours of the morning on January 1, 1990? What would we have said?

What did we say? What did we think? I know I was attracted to her, immediately. But then, I was attracted to a lot of people. What else was I thinking? I am lost in that. I wish I knew. My girlfriend’s punk high school pal who lived in Manhattan. I was impressed and intimidated, but she was open to me and we talked and that’s how these things begin.

Strange Days (1995)

In the movie Strange Days (1995), there is a device through which you can record a person’s memory for playback. You can use these recordings to enjoy a memory and it will feel entirely like you are experiencing the moment again.

You can also experience others’ memories, and that is where the trouble comes in. Yes, it would be fun to feel for all the world like you are back at the beach when it’s the middle of winter in Ohio. But of course, that’s not where the money is.

The protagonist is a memory dealer, trafficking in recorded memories of sex and extreme thrills, but it’s an addiction to his own recording of intimate moments with a former lover that makes it impossible for him to get over her. Does the same thing happen to people who have made their own sex tapes? I shudder to think.

It is in the absence of specific details that our memories begin to shift and mutate, perhaps never settling into one final, if inaccurate, narrative.

Doctor Strange (1978)

When you first visit a new city, much of your disorientation comes not from not knowing what is around the next corner, but that you create a picture of what might be around he corner. We are constantly prepared for what we expect to see in a familiar place, and in our mind’s eye we anticipate seeing it. Our mind creates images of what it is about the experience, it’s instinctive.

So, when we are in a new place we instinctively create an expectation, and then confront reality -- but we retain a memory of what we thought we might see, but didn’t.

The same can be true in relationships. You create a picture of what is inside another person, and you believe it is there, and maybe it is, but maybe it changes, or perhaps that was never the picture. Even after you know the new truth, you still retain a memory of what you believed was reality.

Reverse engineering your memories can be a traumatic thing to do.

Ensemble Theatre presents the World Premiere of "The Way I Danced With You," opening March 21, 2019.

Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004)

Spoilers.

The other night the Cinematheque was showing all three of Richard Linklater’s Before films - Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013).

When it was first released in 1995, I did not see Before Sunrise and probably and would never have thought again about it, if not for the fact that my brother once asked if I had seen it and telling me how much he had enjoyed it.

Before Sunrise (1995)

Indeed, if I had seen that first part, at the time, I do not believe I would have enjoyed it. I had never been any kind of fan of Ethan Hawke. I was amused by Hamlet (2000), I entirely despised Reality Bites (1994). The guy is my age and supposed to be this important Gen X indie character but he always has always struck me as just a much softer Matt Dillon, and a bit self-serious.

When I imagine watching the movie on first release, as a twenty-seven year-old, when his character (Jesse) lays down the “jump ahead ten, twenty years, and you’re married” gambit to lure Julie Delpy (Celine) off a train to walk the streets of Vienna for one night, I would have bristled at its far-too cleverness. The movie asks, "Don’t you wish you had the stones to say things like that to pretty girls?"

Of course, I know plenty of guys who do deliver monologues like that to pretty girls to try to get what they want. Those guys should know these pretty girls always tell me about these hilariously precious attempts over coffee -- and about the sprawling, defensive emails that arrive the morning after, and we laugh. It’s fun.

Actually, yes. I am one of those guys. Or I used to be. One of those guys who would say those things. Sometimes it worked, especially on one night in July, 1994, and if it hadn't, I would not have been sitting next to my wife at the Cinematheque last Sunday night.

She and I had originally planned to see all three, but her work and my need to continue certain important house projects brought us to the sound conclusion that we should see the first on the big screen, and if we liked it, we would check out the other two at some future date.

As the credits rolled for Sunrise I turned to my wife and said, "We're going to stay for the second one, right?"

Before Sunset (2004)

What seemed bizarre, and as I said, contrived about the “jump ahead ten, twenty years” speech in Sunrise is that we know now that there are now three films (to date) which chronicle a single relationship between two people which spans (to date) almost twenty years. Director Linklater could not have known, making this inexpensive, independent romantic slacker film, that any or all of the artists involved would be available or interested in producing a sequel. Name another earnest, romantic, low-budget movie with a sequel.

Nineteen years ago I couldn’t have imagined sitting where I was, either.

We ran into friends at the theater, between the first and second movies, who assured us the third one (Before Midnight) is actually the best of the three, which I found incomprehensible. My expectations for the second were now high, if only because I had just found the first so well-made film, and so moving. I was actually giddy with anticipation to watch Sunset. But how could this second film be ... different?

The fact that a duology (let along a trilogy) had never even been planned, that the director and actors came together to write another movie about the same characters at a different stage in their lives, made it about what is rather than what was. Sunrise, the fluid meandering of one long night, as two twenty-somethings get to know each other, and the places that evening's wandering takes them (palm readings, poetry for spare change) became in Sunset the frantic, desperate chattering of two people in their thirties trying to recapture something they had, uncertain as to whether they could.

It wasn’t until Monday that it struck me that the entirety of Sunset is in real time. From the bookstore to a café to a boat to a car to home, without a break. An inexorable, 80-minute progression to where they wanted to be but could never have gotten to nine years earlier.

One of the traps the second film avoids entirely is any drama about Hawke’s character being married with children. I was wondering when he would bring it up, his wedding ring is certainly conspicuous. But she already knows. She’s read about him, he’s a published author, that’s how she found him. It’s a fact of life, they’ve been apart nine years. What was supposed to happen?

Before Midnight (2013)

But that walk up the staircase, and then settling into her apartment. Making tea, listening to music, slowing down, he knew he wasn't leaving. I was reminded of when my first marriage was falling apart, when I was already seeing the woman I am now married to. We had fooled around, it was frantic, my wife knew about that. She hadn’t said no.

Then we began arranging visits. Because I wanted to know what it was like to be normal with this new person. I told my (then) wife I was planning to get back to New York, to spend time there doing things with our mutual friend.

“You want to try it out,” she said. She knew. She was absolutely right.

We left after Sunset. We had to. A babysitter was watching our kids, my wife had papers to grade, I had grocery shopping to do. It felt like a such a betrayal, stopping here, leaving Celine and Jesse behind, when we knew there was more to the story, the hardest part -- the part where they are our ages. I mean, the ages we are right now.

She and I meandered around the Case campus, trying to find a place to eat. We walked and talked. I was giddy after the first film, after the second I just ached.

But I was relieved. So much frantic longing, which I am glad to say is in my past. I hadn’t waited, I took the leap back then and while it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t nice. But it is impossible to say that it was wrong.

Ensemble Theatre presents the World Premiere of "The Way I Danced With You," opening March 21, 2019.


This post was edited 3/12/2019. These days I like Ethan Hawke quite a bit.

You can read "The Way I Danced With You (The George Michael Play)" today at New Play Exchange.