I recently saw a fantastic movie - 'Memento', which refreshed the memory(yeh, I still have it crystal clear, but for some time, I did check if I do remember things correctly! For those who have not seen 'Memento' you will understand latter...) of the other great movie that I have seen - 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'
I can't fully say that I truly understand what directors(or writers) of these movies had really in their mind. But I see apparently disconnected connection here.
Both of these movies talk about memories, of course from human perspective. How important memory is for our existence? Well, as we all can imagine, memory is essential, to do our daily work and stuff. But there is more deeper meaning to our memory and these movies try to concentrate on this same fact.
Memento essentially talks about how something like short term memory can affect your life, and how something which appears so trivial to us is so important! I think this idea might have been originated from computer science's secondary memory and primary memory concepts(or at least this was the first thought that came into my mind...) CS guys can understand and appreciate what I really mean.
The guy shown in this movie(Lenny) has his secondary memory intact but he does not have any usable short term memory and he cannot add more data into his secondary memory either. The story revolves around this guy, his 'condition', what he does and finally solves all the mystery...
Direction is brilliant(if you can appreciate it, else pathetic), story line proceeds in layered manner and that too in backward direction and in pieces. Overall its not really easy to understand what is happening. But I think this is one of the way director is just trying to showcase why your short memory is important!
Eternal sunshine is somewhat different. It uses similar and weird direction technique of layers along with pieces. But here the guy(it's Jim Carey!) has all his memory intact but he is undergoing memory erasing operation(thinking that it would ease his situation). His girlfriend too, has gone similar memory erasing operation. At the end they both erase each other from their memories but when they meet again, they fall in love again to complete the cycle.
(about direction style, very famous 'Pulp fiction' also has this weird non linear direction style, but pulp fiction is way to difficult understand and appreciate in one go)
'Finding Nemo'(one of my most favorite movie) also has this short term memory loss concept, but it has been used cleverly to entertain and hence it does not highlight deeper impacts this same thing.
This memory is so important to us, still we always take it for granted, but without memory we have no meaning! Whatever we do, has meaning just because we can relate it to something... which just brings me to other conclusion that if we can just forget something, we can start all over again... no regrets, no despair, no anger!
Memory is the very thing that gives us the meaning.
From CS perspective, we have achieved the Memento thing. And that is the reason we still say that AI can never compete with human intelligence. Lenny's system is like current AI, based on fixed set of rules, it has the ability deduce, but it could all blow up one day(like Lenny makes correct decision most of the times, but not always), without violating any of the rules. The three fundamental principles of robots don't stand a chance in such case. Which brings us to the very question that, how would you know what you are doing is correct?(think from classical philosophical perspective) From coding perspective, if your objects state is not correct, your methods would never return correct output! Whatever we do, think, is only from our perspective and we just assume that its correct and respond(that is the reason of all this friction and anger between all humans), but what if somebody is setting objects state(i.e. us) already? We have our own system of interpretation, and hence we would proceed with our algorithm(like the Lenny's) and think that everything we are doing is correct! What we don't understand is that we were tricked into it... we feel like we have taken decision... we have our own control(and from limited perspective we do have, but from broader perspective we don't)(remember 'Choice is an Illusion, created by those with power for the powerless', by Merovinjian in Matrix reloaded ) and thats what spirituality talks about(and perhaps astrology too!). The interpretations are endless for me...
the Lenny guy is like a computer program calling itself again and again and changing variable state in each iteration. each time it modifies variables and produces different output, but after all its not completely random. Output depends upon initial state.(is this what astrology talks about?)
And if its so fragile, so why not just use to for better purpose? If not having short memory can have such deep impact, then why not clear all sad, things that we don't want to remember from our brain?(or at least pretend that they are not there) it would make our life so much better....
PS - Gajini is such a bad plagiarism and such a great insult of the Memento, that I feel like I should drag makers of Gajini to court!
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