I like the term “break the matrix of enjoyment.” It is only so long as we “enjoy” this movie that it strengthens our insistence on the delusion of the autonomous subject. Once we see the disturbing ideology of the movie, we can’t enjoy it in the same way, but we begin to “enjoy” it within a different discourse which produces a different kind of subject–that is, discussions like this one are the alternative structural option which could force a change, getting more people to forfeit their emotional/libidinal enjoyment for an intellectual/social enjoyment. The subject this produces would be, I think, very different from the desiring subject of capitalism.

That is what I want to say: If we want to learn something about our condition, we do not need to go to the local sangha. We can go as well to the cinema.

To illustrate this, one possibility is to see Leonard’s condition – stripped down to the basic structure apart from ingredients like drug dealing etc. – as a metaphor for our condition. I think this is much more yielding than to reconstruct what the protagonist said. (The latter of course has also its value, but it depends on the point of view. Probably the anthropologist has much more interesting things to say about the protagonist than a buddhologist how reconstructs What the Buddha Thought.)

Indeed we need “a certain theoretical apparatus” to break the matrix of enjoyment. (Perhaps that could be a motto of this site: Breaking the Matrix of Enjoyment.) The question is how can we develop one? With this in mind, I think, it is not so much a question of what kind of solution the film seems to suggest. It is me as the onlooker who should try to see the breaking points. One of these points, maybe the crucial one, is when Leonard “recognizes the demand of (the superego) Teddy for what it is.” We can speculate what would happen if he writes down on Teddy’s photo, for example, “He told me the truth!” I say, at this point Leonard is free to decide what to write. He might be structured in a way which makes it impossible for him to write something other than “Don’t trust his lies”. But there is the possibility to ‘write’ something different and to cause therefore a different chain of events. The “theoretical apparatus” can develop out of seeing this possibility. Of course it needs effort to look out, to see and finally to decide.

Looked at it in this way such a movie doesn’t necessarily “produces a capitalist ideology of the subject.” Nobody knows what happens if we ‘write’ something different but we can certainly enforce seeing different possibilities (in contradiction to x-buddhism). The possibilities can enforce outrage and this can lead to change. The so called arab spring shows this on a grand scale (that the change is oftentimes debatable is another question – and the Occupy-implosion shows that outrage is not enough).

Seeing the possibility that I could ‘write’ a different ‘text’ leads to aporetic dissonance and possibly to aporetic inquiry. Hopefully anchoric loss follows.

Yesterday I had real-life chance to see aporetic dissonance. I was speaking with a friend and he told me about his working conditions. By contract he has to work 40 hours a week. In reality he is available for much more time via his mobile phone and as a manager of a car-rental service he is asked for help until late night by his colleagues. In this way he works much longer then what he is paid for and there are no unions who step in to question such practices. Than he made the following point: “If I would put off my mobile phone at five in the evening and would be online again the next morning at nine it would not be my boss being upset but my colleagues.” For him this state seemed natural – just like Leonard finds it natural to trust Natalie – but we came to the conclusion that this strangely is a state that would not have been possible in the sixties, seventies and eighties when unions would oppose such an exploitation (and it is again a perfect example how the society of control works: no more boss needed to control the workforce. They control each other – and my friend even remarked that his colleagues feel good doing something for the company). So we have here a clear case in which aporetic dissonance unfolds – and it could unfold in Memento for Leonard at several points. We can see these bifurcations. What kind of solution we find is an different question.

In this way I see the movie as a way to train a different point of view. It does not necessarily “reinforces our acceptance of the desiring subject.” It is possible not necessary. It could even lead to a contradictory outcome and this shows the possibility of resistance. The question then is, is resistance necessary?

So, I think your questions Tom are valid and important: “What remains completely invisible and unthinkable in this film?” But I think it is equally valid to see the film in the way that it just can show the bifurcation. Your question tackles that what comes after the crossroads.

All film, by the nature of the business of filmmaking and the amount of capital required, is bound to produce capitalist ideology. This one produces a capitalist ideology of the subject. We certainly can learn something about the structure of that subject, and how the structure is reinforced, by examining this movie. But we need to bring a certain theoretical apparatus to the movie in order to do that–otherwise, we wind up enjoying the movie, and being re-interpellated as desiring neurotic subjects. We should work with the film as a psychoanalyst would, as you suggest–and not as a psychologist would. We should avoid smoothing over the repression and restoring enjoyment to the subject, and should instead work all the way through to the social production of the repression. What remains completely invisible and unthinkable in this film? Why is all meaning for Leonard’s life dependent on revenge for or recovery of the past, and never on expanding his interaction with the world? Why is there no possibility of any meaningful and productive work–the entire “economy” of the movie is the drug trade, right? Why must we assume all life is a neurotic postponement of death, as Leonard suggests his life is? He has not meaning, he says, except the repetition of his senseless act which he must delude himself is worthwhile, since as Natalie reminds him he won’t even remember it.

I wouldn’t say the discussion of the uncertainty of memory is unnecessary. Rather, it is crucial to the movie’s ideology, because it reinforces our acceptance of the desiring subject, the subject for whom desire with no truth is the source of purpose and meaning.

I think you’re right that “every Buddhist dreams about his personal no-self,” and that is a major misunderstanding and one reason Buddhism can so easily become a new capitalist ideology. There’s is no possibility of a “personal no-self,” there is always a “self” in the ordinary conventional self as constructed by the social symbolic/imaginary system, and this conventional self is very real, just not at all personal and not at all permanent.

Enjoyment in less capitalist films… My subject of interrogation is the “capitalist film”. ‘Hollywood’ is thematizing topics which flourish more or less obviously in the discourses of society. The advantage of film (or any fiction) is that it is not bounded to the strict regulation of, for example, a scientific discourse. Therefore fiction can speculate – it is unbounded from the right/wrong-binarytisms and as it speculates it makes more obvious specific topics.

Your analysis that this is an reenactment of the oedipal dilemma might be right but the point I want to make is different. Leonard is confronted with points of decision. I say that at these points he could decide to learn but he won’t.

The killing of Teddy happens because he does not want to know the circumstances of ‘his’ story. He has to kill Teddy to get rid of reality, not to recover the repressed memory. I think the equation Teddy=father doesn’t hold. I also find the discussion about the

uncertainty of memory

not at all superficial or unnecessary. To the contrary I say that it is of great importance to know more about it in regard of no-self. The episodic memory and the individual narrative are points where we can learn about how we are structured. This is all the more important knowledge because it is used by the dream-machine in which we have to live to create and commodify desires.

Regarding no-self. The more I learn about different (re)constructions of early Buddhist thought the more I come to the point that we are dreaming about no-self. Everybody of us who is interested in Buddhism dreams about his personal no-self. I have mentioned only two of these (re)constructions. To think about the protagonist as a process-thinker is as much an anachronism as to think about him in terms of perennial philosophy. What are the consequences? We have to learn here and know what we are. The narrative of such a film thematizes knowledge in our society about what and how we are. Therefore I wouldn’t discard it as “enjoyment in capitalistic film” but I would regard it as en expression with which we can work – just as any psychoanalyst works with an ordinary patient.

So one way to read this movie is to recognize in it the uncanny as Freud defines in his essay on “The Sandman,” and to see that our “pleasure” in it results from its reproduction and strengthening of our subjective structure, the structure of the desiring and neurotic subject of capitalism. Once we see this, we can try to view the movie differently, or perhaps try to cultivate enjoyment in less capitalist films.

yes I think so. Established knowledge has more inertia. But of course this is nothing new. Perhaps more important is the ability of an old truth to incorporate a new truth.

I think one can see this in the relation of process-thinking to everyday reality. Process-thinking on a theoretical level, how Gombrich reconstructs a certain Buddha, is well established in the humanities and social sciences. We see the human literally in an ongoing process, permanently valuing, weighing, revaluing etc. On the other side the individual today is pressed in a certain kind of autonomy which disengages her from relational being. For economy the more a human is a discrete entity the more valuable it is – where value means countable fact and not reasonable judgment. Process thinking becomes a tool for inertia when it is used for quantitative optimization. It is about how to fit in. A utility. Processes are optimized. Qualities are klick-counts, absolute binary truth-elements again, and above all we can only say “like”. “Don’t like” is no option anymore. Somehow the process of being interconnected with other beings and only becoming a human through this, becomes a disconnection of everybody from each other through modern process-thinking. In this way the new knowledge about process is incorporated into the old knowledge of an economy whose only measurement is return. Then process-thinking becomes an even better fetter to press everybody into risc/return-thinking.

So maybe one can say today it is not so much the point that new knowledge is overlooked or discarded but that it is incorporated into the old knowledge to make it more efficient.

One part of your answer is clear to me. A generalised strategy for evaluating interpretive productions would not be responsive to context, i.e. it would implicitly assume one right way, at all times and in all contexts. I’m not quite so sure about the second part, are you saying that new information is more likely to be overlooked or discarded, particularly when it threatens older accumulated structures of knowledge?

The postmodern everything-is-equal, every-answer-is-somehow-true is based on a generalisation and therefor it isn’t even postmodern at all. It still rests on an absolute truth.

I think answers are only possible in regard to a certain given situation. And it is the question how we react when confronted with contradictions. The paradigmatic situation in Memento is the moment when Leonard decides in a way that will lead him to kill a person to guard his being wrong. Of course it is seldomly that easy to see but “consequences of enacting a truth world” as you put it might be the way to judge actions.

One point which is very important in my view is the distinction between fact and value. This distinction is a fiction. The situation in the film I describe towards the end of my text exemplifies this: Leonard sits there and he has two fotos in front of him, with two persons on them, and on both is written “don’t trust her/him”. He decides in a sequential manner. The fact decided on first has more value then the second, younger one. Truth is build on an original truth which in itself takes a sequential time as its master-value so to say. He does not value the new information. He does not play around with it, he does not speculate, he doesn’t let crisis happen. In this sense I would compare without hessitation the murderer Leonard with Robert Thurman: both are perennial philosophers unable to see any historical con-text. They dream on.

Value on the other side develops out of con-text. Sometimes the con-stellation makes explicite something. Something becomes obvious. In 2008 in became obvious that the Greenspan flooding of the market with cheep money lead to the crash of the housing market. We dream on. The Federal Reserve is still flooding the market. What can we do? Most of us nothing, but certainly we can value happiness-buddhism against this con-text. What are the consequences? For example building criteria what Buddhism has to say anything valuable in regard of the situation we live in.

Sorry if my answer doesn’t come in handily.