Memories & Reality, plus some other heads-up -- Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

  The subjective nature of reality is a theme I've come back to often since childhood. Clearly, I'm not the only one.
 In The Mandela Effect (currently available as part of Amazon Prime) an unthinkable tragedy devastates young couple Brendan and Claire, sending each spiraling down into a grief-driven depression. Claire proves more classically resilient, moving through her stages of grief and then trying to reconnect with the good things in her life, trying to re-engage and restart rather than lose everything. Brendan, however, gets lost in the weeds of memory.

   Obsessing about details, he comes to realize that he remembers various things very differently from what reality informs him is the case. It starts with him coming across one of his daughter's favorite books, one of The Berenstain Bears series, which he's disturbed to find was never called "Berenstein" as he clearly remembered. He discusses this with his brother-in-law Matt (played by Robin Lord Taylor), who also remembers the family name differently, adding that they were Jewish.
A family snapshot from a day trip disturbs Brendan because it shows them at the Griffith Observatory, when he clearly remembers they went to a science museum. He remembers all the details of the day, and tries to get confirmation from his wife, but she dismisses it as him misremembering some details, and becomes increasingly worried that her husband is unhealthily trapped in a deepening cycle of denial.

 Digging soon leads Brendan to The Mandela Effect, examples of false memories commonly held by large, often disparate, groups of people. Named  in 2010 for one example, that many people "clearly remember" that South African activist and leader Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s, when in fact he lived until 2013. Other examples of these false memories include that the Monopoly man had worn a monocle, or that Jif peanut butter had been called Jiffy. 'Net searches take him down a rabbit hole of articles and often passionate YouTube videos of people pleading their cases for things they clearly and passionately remember, despite all physical evidence to the contrary.
 On the one hand are the examples being explained away as false memories that became reinforced by remaining unspoken and so unchallenged for so long, or which were reinforced by others within the shared bubbles of social media. On the other, the passion to defend these memories led some people to posit that we've been skipping from one slightly different reality to another, or that we're all existing in a simulated reality - a vast computer game of sorts - and these seemingly mistaken memories are the result of glitches or edits in the program. Brendan, whose profession is as a computer game programmer, ultimately latches onto the latter explanation and refuses to let go of it.
    The rest of the tale plays out on that basis.

    This 2019 film that had a limited theatrical distribution late October last year, but was mostly a video on demand (VOD) item. Most indications are that it was reportedly too cerebral for the audience (including most of the critics) it reached, which is sad, but in a century where we've had two of the most egregiously, offensively moronic men in the history of U.S. politics ascend to the highest office in the land, it's par for this course.

   The film's less than 90 minutes, and delivers a complete story with an emotionally satisfying resolution, and so worked for me. As ever, your mileage may vary. If you see or or have seen it, feel free to let me know how it struck you as a comment below.

   More clearly and exclusively on the topic of memories, including both traumatic ones and ones that define us, is the 2017 film Rememory (Netflix.)
   A science fiction mystery film directed by Mark Palansky, and co-written by Palansky and Michael Vukadinovich.
  Starring Peter Dinklage, Julia Ormond, the late Anton Yelchin (who was extremely busy during his final year, leading to this and five other posthumous film roles), and Henry Ian Cusick, it centers on a device that allows the retrieval and recording of pristine, completely intact memories with a clarity that normal recall lacks. The inventor intended it as a therapeutic tool, allowing a patient to revisit trauma with absolute clarity while retaining some sense of distance and control. A subset of patients suffered some potentially harmful side effects which were concealed from the system's inventor by someone just below him in this company, who primarily had his eye on the huge sums of money this astounding innovation would bring them.
   On the eve of the product's launch, the inventor dies under mysterious circumstances. We're plunged into a web of secrets and protective lies, as someone who knew the late inventor from a fateful night perhaps a year earlier, tries to sort through the clues.

   This is an instance of a science fiction film where it's set in a very contemporary setting, where only the existence of this new device separates the technology of their lives from our own, so everything else is completely pedestrian.

   Ultimately, it's a rumination about the importance of memories, the value of selecting the right ones to define and drive us, and personal choices on what to do with and about the cancerous memories that threaten to destroy our lives. To some degree, ultimately, it's also about the possible wisdom of taking someone for their actions and evidence of depth of character, rather than using every tool to ferret out every dark truth.

   On the topic of memories and reality, I'll reference episodes of a couple shows that I very much enjoyed, which dealt with elements of the above.

   One of my very favorite episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation was season seven's eleventh episode, "Parallels" which found an increasingly confused Worf as the only one aware of sudden waves of differences - alterations from what he remembered that were becoming more and more profound. Different experiences, which led to radically different relationships, career decisions, and overall histories. I think it's reasonably accessible to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the series, and can be taken on its own. (ST:TNG is currently among the offerings for subscribers to  Amazon Prime, Hulu and Netflix. I expect that eventually they'll all revert to being solely available on CBC All Access - aside from their eternal running on commercial broadcast tv - but for now they're one of the most easily-accessed series.)
    I understand that for some purists the final seasons of X-Files, the ones revived as short seasons a few years ago were increasingly lighter in tone than what they wanted. Happily, I am not among their joyless number, having found several episodes from these late seasons among my list of favorites for the series. For the record, I was always a monster of the week style episode fan, and never for an instant became invested in the "mythology" episodes that leaned on the fate of Mulder's sister, or long-term, sinister, secret government/alien collaboration conspiracies. It was painfully evident from the early episodes that Chris Carter and the others in the writers' room were making it all up as they went, so there was little reason to ever invest in the idea that there was a series bible somewhere where all of those secrets were fully-formed, just waiting to be revealed.They stories existed in largest part because people had bills to pay, dreams to fund, and resumes to build.

  In what is currently the final season of that series - their eleventh, from 2018 - is episode 4 "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat", which deals specifically with Mulder and Scully grappling with The Mandela Effect. It's done with flippancy and wit, but also with feeling, and I not only greatly enjoyed it when it aired in late January of 2018 (which seems oddly much longer ago), but did so again some months ago when I came back across it as part of my Hulu subscription. (It's accessible on Amazon Prime, too, but only if one's willing to rent or buy an episode or a season, which I never am.)
    Before closing up for the week, a couple reminders about second seasons of shows about to debut.
    On AMC, this Sunday (the 21st) the second season of N0S4A2 begins. I'd written about the first season back before Thanksgiving. I enjoyed the concepts and several of the performances enough to be interested in seeing what the second season holds, though I remain apprehensive that the show may ultimately end on a cliffhanger gambit that the ratings won't support a resolution of. We'll see. (I keep hoping that we've entered an era of ultimately curated content, where the long-term marketability of entertainment items will keep fewer and fewer shows from just unceremoniously ending - worst of all on a cliffhanger, but it still keeps happening. That's a topic I think is worth exploring, but it'll need its own piece. Here it would be too much of a digression.)
    Next Thursday, the 25th, the second season of Doom Patrol begins over on HBO Max, and for those who are subscribed to the DC Universe streaming platform. I'd written about the first season, and HBO Max in general, earlier this month. Having been generally delighted with that first season, now almost happy it took so long for me to see it because it drastically reduced my wait time for more, I'm looking forward to the second.
  I've little idea what I'll be covering next week.   In the meantime, take care, and don't forget to look around at the other six days of the week on this group blog, as the others are generally doing a much better job of it than I've been.  - Mike