is a movie i saw last night
about a guy in new york city who loses his memory and wakes on a train in flipflops
and turns himself in to the coney island police
he finds out he's rich with a glorious space, two dogs and two cockatiels, he's beautiful and has two beautiful ex girlfriends and he's not bothered by his past, really he's happy to not remember because he's afraid of bad memories, and his friends and family say he had multiple painful episodes none of which are specified, nor do they seek to elucidate the time leading to the dissociation and memory loss. he walked out with no i.d. and only a number and name of the mother of his last girlfriend who he'd split with two days prior. so he's a rich, beautiful, desirable artist with no memory, and what's more, he's returned more calm, thoughtful, more philosophical and a better photographer. his teacher says a creative sensibility is formed by memory, for the most part, as conventional wisdom goes, is formed by our past, it's the accumulation of our experience. if you wipe that slate clean,
how do you
develop a sensibility, how do you figure out what it is that's relevant for you? but he says his work has gained great depth, there is a sense of sadness, sense of depth, a sense of emptying out, to his portraits.
he says to his old girlfriend he's bothered by why australia keeps dogging his mind. then he falls in love with a winsome australian.
and his dogs seem to know him, and he remembers they walk off leash, or he suddenly realizes they don't need leashes.
he's at ease with no memory. everything is fresh and new. he's lost all his cynicism. he's soft, emotional.
but it's like a fairy tale, in suspension, and he waits for the other shoe to fall, he is afraid of the person he was coming back. will he lose his new personality, will he be displaced, dislocated, will he be pushed out like the other one?
he's wistful, he says memory is like being able to travel in time, and he can no longer do that, he lost his childhood, his mother who died.
some people have thought it was fake, he was faking, he was making an artistic construction. ( and interestingly, memory, the neurologist says, has no location, and itself is a construction) it's clear that he fears the past, there's a blank sadness with him, like a ghost. he leaves out the pain, he's a character formed out of the present, he's afraid of the shock of old trauma, he's buffered by memorylessness, but has been told 95% have memory return. he's vulnerable, he's like a child who needs protection, but what he needs protection from is not outside, it's within, or it's nowhere, but may spontaneously arise out of nowhere. he says
it's been made clear to me that there's been several traumatic things that have happened in my life -to revisit those-it's too abstract to even think about. will i be shocked because it's something new or will i sort of recognize them as something i knew before?
his life feels like a lacuna, deliberate after the organic split. almost like something willed, or willed in retrospect, because he likes himself now, he's a different person, it's a lacuna but a happy one.
i'm feeling jealous of him and thwarted by the story, of what's left out. it should have been a detective tale, but he doesn't want to know, and the filmmaker family friends and lovers all collude.
he's freed by the break, i'm jealous of that, but it's such a conditional freedom, it feels so vulnerable, and what would it really be like? i think i would rather keep the memories, the pain too. because he doesn't feel real. his eyes seem blank.
but his name's douglas bruce. mine and my father's first names, he's a photographer, and he walks the dogs off leash. he's a kindred soul.
