1PaperRequirementsforPhilosophyofFilm32401Fal.docx

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Paper Requirements for Philosophy of Film 324 01
Fall 2015, University of Dayton
General Summary of What You Are to Do:
You will pick one film from those we have watched in
class and one reading selection that goes
along with that film. You will then writea paper
based on this reading and film PLUS another
film
(that you choose and watch on your own). You
will supplement the reading with an additional
source that you research on your own that connects to
the reading provided in somerelevant way.
This additional reading can be in philosophy, in
film theory, in film criticism, or in cultural
studies.
If you are unsure whether or not a source
you’d like to use will meet the requirements
for this
paper please email me for approval.
Clarification on acceptable sources:
1) One of the required sources used must be a
reading assigned for class.
2) The second required source must be a primary
source – which means that it must be by

the
original author and not a book about that author.
a. Website blogs, Wikipedia, etc. do not count
as primary sources, although they may
be used to guide your thinking provided you do
not plagiarize from them. In general
.edu sites for information on authors is better
than .com sites. Also scholarly
encyclopedia articles.
b. Good UD library search databases for articles in
peer-reviewed, scholarly journals:
EBSCO or JSTOR. Philosophy, literary theory,
film theory and studies, and film
criticism are all sub-fields from which you can choose
sources.
Consult the paper due datesto make sure you do
enough research ahead of time that you can
obtain a needed source from OhioLink or ILL if
needed.
Format:
- 2500-3000 words, based on the course
material, and class discussion.
- Single-spacedwith a blank line between paragraphs.

- 12-point font with 1 inch margins.
- It must be submitted to the Assignment tab on
Isidore for papers as an attachment in
Word.
No otherformats will be accepted.
- You will need to include a Bibliography or
Works Cited List and use MLA style both
for this
and for in-text citations. See
http://libguides.udayton.edu/c.php?g=15325&p=83392
and
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
for the guidelinesfor this. Don’t
forget that filmsneed to be listed in the Works
Cited page as well as all sources used.
- Do NOT share your paper topicor papers with
classmates before submission.
Due Dates: Paper 1: Topics/proposals due
Oct. 6, paper due Oct. 18
Paper 2: Topics/proposals due Dec. 1, paper
due Dec. 13
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Paper Content:
I. Introduction
[Thesis statement,overview of paper in connection
to the two filmschosen including
which theories you will use and how you will apply
them to the filmschosen.]
II. Body of Paper [you can organize this in your
own way to follow your thesis]
a. Set forth the theories you are using and explain
what claims they make that you will
compare and contrast your chosen filmswith,including
appropriate in-text citations.
You MAY NOT use a source without citation or
represent another author’s work as your
own. If your paper does this it will receive a
grade of F. Both direct quotations and
close
paraphrases must be cited. You can use someof
what we discussed in class discussion
as part of your analysis and thereis no need to
cite to that or to me.
b. Analyze the features of the movies you have
selected in connection with the theories
you have provided in a, above. How do they fit?
How do they not fit? What might this

mean?
c. What happened as a result of this analysis?
Do the theories stand? If not, why not? What
alternative theory is suggested instead that would
fit better? Here is where you may feel
free to provide your own, improved theory that covers
your genre! Don’t be afraid to be
a philosopher!
III. Conclusion
This should summarize the findings of your paper
plus suggest how or why this change
(or additional support for the theory provided if it
has not changed) is relevant to how
we understand the theory of film under
discussion.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Do not waste a lot of time on plot synopses of
movies
- Do not plagiarize. If you “borrow” a movie
description or critical review without citing
it
your paper will fail. All papers will be run
through the “Turnitin” plagiarism detection

system so be on guard against this
- Getting the philosophy right is the hardest part of
thesepapers for most students. This is
first and foremost an upper-level philosophy class so
the biggest component of your grade
will be based on your understanding of and
application of the philosophy at issue.
Take a
lot of care on this aspect of your paper and
email me/consult me if you’re not sure
about
your take on something.
Grading
Yourpaper will be downgraded one-half letter
grade for each day that it is late and it
will not be
accepted at all if turned in more than 2 days
late. You may turn a paper in earlywithout
penalty
but I will not pre-grade it for resubmission.
Film-Philosophy, 12.2 September 2008
Bragues, George(2008) ‘Memory and Morals in Memento:
Hume at the Movies’,
Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2: pp. 62-82. <http://www.film-
philosophy.com/2008v12n2/bragues.pd f>.
ISSN: 1466-4615 online

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Memory and Morals in Memento:
Hume at the Movies
G e o r g e B r a g u e s
University of Guelph-Humber
One February night in San Francisco, a man named Leonard
Shelby walks into his bathroom
to find his wife being sexually assaulted. In the ensuing
confrontation, he kills the assailant,
but sustains a head injury that renders him unable to form new
memories. He can only
remember what happened up to the point of the attack on his
wife, who subsequently
dies. Reflecting on the attack, he concludes that a second man
must have been present in
the bathroom that night, but the police do not believe him.
Though his memory problem

hampers his ability to sustain lengthy undertakings, Leonard
manages to focus his energies
on searching for the second assailant and avenging his wife’s
rape and murder, reminding
himself of relevant facts by carrying a police file of the crime,
taking notes and pictures,
and even going so far as to tattoo the most essential details
about his mission throughout
his body. Along the way, a couple of individuals take advantage
of his vengeful and
forgetful state of mind, tricking Leonard into murdering several
people other than his
wife’s assailant. When he discovers this, he eventually kills the
man, who goes by the name
of Teddy, behind most of the manipulative schemes. But before
this deed is done, Teddy
suggests that it was Leonard who actually killed his diabetic
wife by injecting her with too
much insulin. Teddy insists that Leonard has since
reconstructed his memory of the events

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to veil a terrible truth about his past and lend purpose to his
existence. The problem is that
Teddy’s credibility is questionable owing to his exploitation of
Leonard as an unwitting
assassin, as is Leonard’s because of his mental disability. So
what the truth actually is --
whether it was the rapist that killed Leonard’s wife or Leonard
himself – becomes difficult
to tell.
Such is the story, though much of it told chronologically
backwards, in Memento, a
mind-bending film noir directed by Christopher Nolan (2000).
Based on a short story
entitled Memento Mori written by Nolan’s brother (Nolan, J, c.
2000), the film explores the
issues of memory, personal identity, time, truth, moral
responsibility, meaning, and the
longing for justice. Soon after its release, Memento generated a
torrent of discussion on

the Internet as fans hotly debated what actually transpires in the
tale. Making the puzzle
all the more tantalizing was the director’s insistence that the
film, beneath its complexity
and ambiguity, discloses which of the two accounts of the rape
and its aftermath, whether
Teddy’s or Leonard’s, is true (Timberg 2001, cited in Klein
2001). Audiences, however,
evidently saw in Memento something more than a beguiling
riddle to be solved,
appreciating how the film engaged and illuminated profound
questions regarding the
human condition. A leading movie database website (Internet
Movie Database, 2008)
ranks the film as the twenty seventh best of all time, putting it
in the company of classics
like North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), Citizen Kane
(Orson Welles, 1941), and
Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Among the movies
produced since 2000,
Memento ranks fourth.
Various scholars have given Memento their stamp of approval
by publishing articles

on the film. Melissa Clarke (2002) argues that the uncertainty in
the movie about what is
really happening at any given point expresses a philosophic
principle advanced by Henri
Bergson, to wit, that time is the co-presence of various pasts in
the current moment
instead of a series of succeeding “now” points. Jo Alyson
Parker (2004) focuses on the film’s
depiction of time as well, by reflecting on the implications of
its backward sequencing of
events. William G. Little (2005), on the other hand, interprets
Memento as leading its
viewers to experience aspects of trauma, while Rosalind
Sibielski (2004) contends that the
film undermines Enlightenment notions of objectivity and
rationality in favor of
postmodernism. Viewing film as a form of philosophic practice,
and not just a site for the

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exemplification of philosophic themes, Phil Hutchinson and
Rupert Read (2005) hold that
Memento is a Wittgensteinian critique of the picture theory of
language.
It is a common lament that people, the young especially, are
increasingly shying
away from books and instead turning for intellectual sustenance
to video games, film, and
television - that is, images are displacing words, with the result
that the culture is
becoming less tolerant of cognitive complexity (Postman,
1985).1 Instead of vainly trying
to reform, or negate the influence of, popular entertainments, it
might be better to
embrace them, making selective use of them to cultivate an
interest in philosophic topics
among young minds. Perhaps we can lead them to the words of
the great philosophic texts
by showing them how some of the actions and dialogues
portrayed in the images they
avidly consume exemplify and explore themes, concepts, and

arguments otherwise dealt
with by the likes of Plato, Descartes, and Hume. Guided by this
pedagogical hope, this
paper aims to plumb the philosophic significance of Memento.
While touching upon the themes dealt with in the Memento
scholarship up to now,
we emphasize instead the moral dimensions of Memento,
interpreting the film as a
thought experiment conducted according to the principles of
David Hume that
illuminates the role of memory in our moral projects.
Accordingly, the main character’s
thoughts and actions are seen to operate in line with Hume’s
epistemological and
psychological teachings. Also dovetailing with Hume, the film
subverts common-sense
conceptions of our mental condition, raising the frightful
spectre of our not being able to
obtain the truth needed to bring our moral projects to fruition.
Yet this complete
skepticism is ultimately avoided in the film, again along
Humean lines, with the message
that we must simply forget the inherent feebleness of our minds
before the challenge of

truth and submit to the necessity of believing in an objective
order.
M em o r y
Memento begins with a hand holding a photograph of a body
lying on a tiled floor with
blood splattered on a wall, sprayed there apparently from a
wound to the head – or, rather,
that is where the story that the movie tells ends, thanks to the
reverse chronology
adopted in the script. Initially signaling this atypical plot
movement is the subsequent
1 For a counter-argument to Postman’s thesis, see Johnson
(2005)

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shaking of the photograph, which, rather than rendering the
image clearer, makes it fade
away into nothing, the opposite of what one would expect if
time were moving forward.
Among the vast majority of people, their past being known, and
therefore resolved in a
sense, their minds are left to take primary concern in the present
and future. This is one
reason why almost every story in film, television, theatre, and
literature attempts to create
audience interest and suspense by tending to move
chronologically forward. The
predominant orientation of present to future is illustrated in a
conversation that Leonard
has with Burt, a motel attendant fascinated with the main
character’s forgetfulness. Burt
tells Leonard: “you gotta pretty good idea of what you’re gonna
do next, but no idea what
you just did. I’m the exact opposite” (Nolan, 115). For Burt,
just like most of us, it is the
future that is uncertain and, hence, of greater concern. In a
flashback scene, Leonard also
finds it strange that his wife reads the same book over and over

again noting, “the pleasure
of a book is in wanting to know what happens next.” (Nolan,
163) By cutting against this
mental grain and moving backwards in time, the film brings the
theme of memory to the
fore, mimicking the process of recollection in taking the mind
from the present to the
past, while simultaneously generating audience suspense about
what has already
happened, rather than what might end up happening. A
consequence of this, too, is that
the audience shares in Leonard’s memory disability, unable to
use their power of recall
over previous scenes in the film to remember previous elements
of the story being
presented.
That memory is the overriding theme, the lens through which
other issues are
explored, is also indicated by the leading character’s constant
reference to his condition,
as well the fact that the other characters relate to Leonard
primarily as someone defined
by his lack of remembrance, with one of them calling him
“Memory Man” (Nolan, 211).

Telling, too, is the director’s decision to open the film with the
shaking of the photograph,
wherein images are perceived in the present but then very
quickly and irretrievably
decay, an apt metaphor of Leonard’s memory deficit. Then,
most obviously, we have the
title of the film, referring to an object that serves as a reminder
of the past. The role of
memory in human affairs, it turns out, will be evaluated by
envisioning what happens when
it is absent, very much like a scientist might test the causal
efficacy of a certain variable by
experimentally removing it and keeping every other relevant
factor equal.
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To accomplish this, the film needed to identify these other
relevant factors. More
specifically, it had to advance a coherent and plausible picture
of how the human mind
works. This was necessary, in any case, not just to satisfy the
logical requirements of the
enquiry into memory, but also to serve the aesthetic imperative
of crafting a compelling
plot. While a storyteller is permitted to begin with an unlikely
or fictitious premise – in
this case, a rare memory disorder known as anterograde amnesia
– the sequence of events
and character sketch developed out of that premise must be such
as to be plausible
(Aristotle 1984, pp. 234-236). The following sorts of questions
must be addressed: Does the
mind primarily function through images or words? Does the
human mind come equipped
with innate ideas? Does it organize experience through a fixed
schema? Does it intuit
fundamental realities? Or is the mind originally a blank slate
entirely reliant on experience
for its contents? However these questions are answered must
logically affect the movie’s

portrayal of Leonard’s memory problem. The less native and
intuitive capacity that
happens to be attributed to the mind, the more elaborate will
Leonard’s coping strategies
have to be in order for him to pursue his vendetta against his
wife’s killer and rapist.
L eo n a r d ’ s H u m ea n M in d
The empiricist answer to the questions above is that the mind
has no inborn intellectual
content or structure, encodes information and thinks via images
gained from experience,
with language serving both as a collection of signifiers of
images and a mechanism by
which to quickly and efficiently recall them for the purposes of
thinking (Locke 1975, 43-
105 & 402-408; Hobbes 1968, 100-110). David Hume, arguably
the most logically
consistent and rigorous exponent of the empiricist view in the
history of Western
philosophy, maintained that mental events, which he referred to
as perceptions, are
divisible into impressions and ideas. Included under the
category of impressions are

sensations, emotions, desires, and passions, whereas ideas are
made up of the mental
images we form of our impressions after experiencing them
(Hume 1978, 1-2). Seeing
Memento or feeling angry is an impression, whereas thinking
about that movie or
reflecting on our having been angry is an idea. What chiefly
distinguishes the two is that
impressions are more mentally striking and lively than the
latter. Watching a hurricane out
of a window is on a different order of vivacity than merely
contemplating it from an
account in the newspaper. As for memories, Hume implies that
they lie on a continuum
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between pure ideas and impressions. They are not purely ideas

because, though they
involve images of earlier impressions, they impact the mind
more forcefully than the
general run of our thoughts. They are not simply impressions
either because memories are
usually less animated than the original experience. Accordingly,
Hume refers to memory
as both an impression and an idea depending on the
circumstances-- though on the
continuum between the perfect manifestations of these
perceptions, memory evidently
lies at the point at which it is an idea equivalent to an
impression (Hume 1978, 82).
Our ideas, Hume further observes, are almost always reflective
of our impressions,
for even our most fanciful notions, such as that of a human
being with wings, though never
having been seen, ultimately breaks down into separate
elements we have experienced
that the imagination has put together (Hume 1978, 3). Since
ideas come after their
corresponding impressions – we cannot think of red without
first having seen it – Hume
concludes that we cannot, with very few exceptions, distinctly

conceive of anything unless
we have experienced it, or its elements, through sensation or
feeling. Hence, linguistic
terms are only meaningful if they can ultimately be referred to
matters than can be sensed
or felt: “When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion, that a
philosophical term is
employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent),
we need but enquire, from
what impression is that idea derived?” (Hume 1977, 13).
Insofar as Hume understands
reasoning to consist in the analysis of relationships amongst
separate ideas (Hume 1978,
73), it also follows that a person cannot lucidly pursue a train of
thought unless each of the
connecting links has been given substance via their experience.
Consider how Leonard would have to be drawn to fit the
Humean theory. He could,
of course, rely on the experience he acquired before the
accident to form clear ideas and
use these as materials for reasoning. Linguistic terms that call
forth aspects of his previous
existence would also help him to classify and make sense of the
world. Notes could thus be

taken to preserve new information, at least for those bits
analogous to word referents
established before his head injury. Such notes would also be
useful in recording the results
of an extended chain of reasoning to compensate for the fact
that Leonard could not
mentally grasp and follow every step in such a chain from
beginning to end, being liable to
forget where he started partway through his reflections.
However, to record new
information, for which words could not summon relevant details
from the past, Leonard
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would have to somehow create physical embodiments of his
experience, a tangible form

of an idea mirroring an impression, to give meaning to what he
writes down.
Yet Hume’s theory does point to a mental aptitude by which
Leonard could attain a
measure of liberation from his imprisonment to the pre-accident
and present order. As
part of his famous claim that cause and effect relations cannot
be deductively or
inductively inferred, Hume posits that people only believe that
A invariably gives rise to B
because of mental habit, or what he more formally calls custom
(Hume 1978, 102-103). This
custom or habit is formed when a person repeatedly sees A
being followed by B. So
ingrained does this become that we need only be cued by
beholding A to instantaneously
think of B, without our having to remember all the times we saw
A preceding B. As Hume
admits: “we can reason upon our past conclusions, without
having recourse to those
impressions from which they first arose. For even supposing
these impressions should be
entirely effac’d from the memory, the conviction they produc’d
may still remain” (Hume

1978, 84). On the Humean view, therefore, someone like
Leonard could fix new principles
in his mind by constantly re-enacting the same experience.
The depiction of Leonard closely follows the implications of
Hume’s cognitive
psychology. In the film’s first scene of black and white
sequences, which periodically
interrupt the reverse movement of the story, we find Lenny
waking up in a room and
looking around. Unable to figure out how long he’s been there
or how he arrived at this
place, he is able to make use of his pre-accident experience and
determine that he is in a
motel room. Indeed, his professed ignorance regarding his
location and the period spent
in the room point to his recognition of space and time in the
abstract, again concepts that
could have been obtained before. The other, specific objects he
is able to identify also
hearken back to his past life, namely the bedside drawer and the
Gideon Bible inside it. He
reveals a continuing grasp of the notions of money, exchange,
and transactional fairness, as
evidenced by his interactions with Burt, the motel attendant,

who attempts to cheat
Leonard by renting him two rooms. Similarly, he retains an
understanding of the services
that hookers provide, as well as how to look for one in the
phone book under “Escort
Services”, calling for a blond woman to help relive the night of
the attack.
Leonard’s dealings with Natalie lead to the most vivid
illustration of his reliance on
the pre-accident store of his memories. Natalie is the boyfriend
of Jimmy, a drug dealer
whom Leonard is tricked into killing by Teddy, a murder that
takes place at the beginning
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of the story, that is, the end of the film. After confirming
Leonard’s memory problem, she

befriends him and uses him to retaliate against Teddy by
handing him automobile
registration documents matching the license plate number
tattooed on his thigh. She also
manipulates him to protect herself from an associate of Jimmy’s
named Dodd who happens
to suspect her. Thus induced to go after Dodd, Leonard breaks
into his apartment and hides
in the bathroom armed with a liquor bottle in his hand. Once
some time goes by and he
forgets why he is there, he looks at the empty bottle and tries to
make sense of it by
recalling what it typically connoted in his previous life. “Don’t
feel drunk”, he says (Nolan,
156).
The most obvious way in which Leonard is consistent with
Hume’s epistemology is
that he does not merely rely on written notes, but supplements
these by carrying around a
Polaroid camera. As directed by one of his tattoos, the camera is
used to take pictures of his
residence, car, along with his friends and enemies, all instances
in which the appropriate

word signifiers do not necessarily refer to the same thing that
they did before Leonard’s
impairment and in which the signified objects continue to be
susceptible to change over
time. The pictures conveniently serve the function of Hume’s
ideas in replicating
impressions, not just because of their capacity to represent the
original event, but
inasmuch as they can readily bring past information to mind at
any future time and place
due to their portability and durability.2 Leonard always has his
pictures available in his
pockets and he does mention to Natalie that they cannot be
ripped but that one must go
to the trouble of burning the photo in order to destroy it.
Granted that Leonard always
writes explanatory notes in the white area below the photo, or
on the back of it, which may
be taken to suggest the counter-thesis that images are less vital
in processing thought
than language. Actually, what this shows is that language
happens to be useful in helping
2 Without explicitly mentioning Hume, Hutchinson and Read
(2005, 82) acknowledge Leonard’s

Humean mind in remarking: “A conception of mind as an inner
realm populated by mental
representations … which we access on the input of sensory data
is precisely that which is being
represented externally in Memento’.
Hutchinson and Read argue that Memento mimics
Wittgenstein’s example in the Philosophical
Investigations of the shopkeeper obtaining five red apples by
looking up the referents of the words
“five”, “red”, and “apples”. Like this example, it is argued that
Memento externalizes the idea of
thinking as a matter of dealing with representations. In the
process, this vision of the mind is
allegedly undermined because Leonard fails to resonate as a
person, despite externally manifesting
the kind of thinking a person is supposed to do. To this, one
may respond that Leonard’s
personhood is diminished because his attempt to artificially
construct rationality cannot replicate
what our natural faculties execute internally.
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us distinguish the vast sea of objects that regularly strike the
mind. Language is a handy
tool, rather than an essential material, for thinking, as is
obvious when one considers that
an individual can ascertain an object in all its relations to other
facts from a picture alone, if
their memory is up to the task. Leonard’s memory is not, and
that is why he needs to
provide accompanying notes. Notice that when confronted with
objects associated to a
time that he can still remember -- his wife’s stuffed toy, book,
bra, hairbrush – he does not
require any notes to distinguish them. Keeping in mind that we
all, to a smaller degree,
share in Leonard’s memory problem, his writing notes beside
pictures serves to clarify one
reason why human beings need language: We cannot, purely
through our mental devices,
possibly retain, nor promptly call forth, all the separate facts of
our experience so as to
render these of service to our minds in the future.
The Humean priority of images over words is also indicated
when Natalie asks him to
describe his wife. Wanting him to enjoy the reminiscence, she

then says: “Don’t just recite
the words. Close your eyes, remember her” (Nolan, 125). Words
just do not move the mind
the way images do. With a stream of images going through his
head, Leonard replies that
he can just recall details, “[b]its and pieces which you didn’t
even bother to put into words
… enough to know how much you miss them, and how much
you hate the person who
took them away”(Nolan, 125). There are certain things for
which words are not necessary to
express. Bear in mind, too, one of the contrasts Leonard makes
between himself and
Sammy Jenkis, a semi-retired accountant Leonard came across
prior to his injury. As the
result of a car accident, Jenkis suffered a similar condition to
Leonard, disabling him from
working. Unable to cope with mounting bills, Sammy’s wife
filed an insurance claim, which
Leonard was called to investigate during his former existence as
a claims adjustor.
Reflecting on the case, he concludes that Sammy was never able
to cope with his
condition, in part, because the latter, “wrote endless notes …

he’d get mixed up” (Nolan,
121). Words, it seems, can be a cumbersome way of recording
events. Noteworthy as well is
that Leonard is leery of speaking over the phone, enough to
have arranged a tattoo stating
“NEVER ANSWER THE PHONE” (Nolan, 84, capitalization
his), because it places him in a
condition where he cannot visually gauge the trustworthiness of
his interlocutor, a
condition in which he is at the complete mercy of the spoken
word. The person, who turns
out to be Teddy, with whom he speaks on the phone in the black
and white scenes can only
establish his bona fides by slipping a picture of Leonard under
his motel room door. Nor
7 1

should we forget that, to protect himself from being misled,
Leonard has to verify that the
set of notes he is examining were actually written by him. To do
this, he must retain an
image of his handwriting to evaluate any notes at his disposal,
which is how he discovers
that Burt at the motel has been trying to rent him two rooms.
Words must pass before the
tribunal of the image.
Also consistent with Hume’s teaching is that Leonard is forced
to summarize the
findings of his search for his wife’s killer and rapist. During his
conversation on the phone,
he admits that he cannot, all at once in his mind, grasp the
import of the police file that he
possesses. A list of conclusions are written on the back of the
file, as are six enumerated
facts tattooed on his body, namely that the culprit is a male,
white individual named John
or James G, who is a drug dealer and drives a vehicle with the
license plate “SG13 7IU”.
Helping Leonard stay focused on the hunt for John or James G
is his cultivation of Humean

custom, for in comparing himself to Sammy Jenkis he explains:
“I’ve got a more graceful
solution to the memory problem. I’m disciplined and organized.
I use habit and routine to
make my life possible” (Nolan, 121). The power of mental habit
is used to explain how
Sammy Jenkis could still complete intricate tasks, like giving
his wife an insulin shot, but
only if he had repeatedly done them before losing his memory.
Nothing but habit can
account for why Leonard continually manages to have the
presence of mind to consult his
notes and pictures as well as recognize on the spot that he needs
to take them in the first
place. Evidently, doing these things over and over again has
rendered it automatic.
P er s o n a l I d en t it y a n d M o r a l R es p o n s ib il it y
With the psychological underpinnings of Memento’s thought
experiment set on a
Humean framework, the film delves into the significance of
memory through the actions of
a man who understands himself to be engaged in a moral
project. That Leonard

understands himself as a moral agent is made clear when, upon
being asked by Natalie to
kill Dodd, he replies that he is no hired assassin. Asked why,
then, he is willing to kill for his
wife, Leonard’s response is: “That’s different” (Nolan, 186).
While Natalie suggests it is
different simply because of the love he bears his wife, this
feeling is really the symptom of
a more fundamental concern driving Leonard. For what is truly
distinctive in the case of
avenging his wife is that Leonard is not furthering some
interest, as he would in killing
Dodd for money -- he is attempting rather to correct an
injustice. At issue is what Hume
7 2
calls the “vulgar definition of justice”, to wit, “a constant and

perpetual will of giving
everyone his due” (Hume 1978, 526). As to what “due”
precisely entails, Leonard evokes
the Old Testament principle of “an eye for an eye”. Just before
he kills the man he thinks is
John G., namely Teddy, he screams: “YOU PAY FOR WHAT
YOU DID!” (Nolan, 107;
capitalisation his).
Teddy tries to save himself by insisting: “You don’t know me,
you don’t even know
who you are” (Nolan, 4). To Leonard’s rejoinder that he is
Leonard Shelby from San
Francisco, Teddy says: “Lemme take you down in the basement
[where Jimmy’s dead body
is located] and show you what you’ve become” (Nolan, 108).
The audience is thus left to
wonder whether Leonard maintains a single identity throughout
the story. Also brought
into question, as a result, is his moral project, its legitimacy
tied to the question of how
memory is connected to personal identity. The conundrum of his
identity presents itself
again in a subsequent scene, wherein Teddy, attempting to turn
Leonard away from

Natalie, remarks: “You haven’t got a clue, have you? You don’t
even know who you are?”
(Nolan., 176). Teddy says this amid a conversation in which he
is trying to make Leonard
question why he is wearing a designer suit and driving a Jaguar.
Leonard explains that he
obtained the necessary money from insurance coverage
triggered by his wife’s death, but
then we discover that this is false, as the clothes and car have
been taken from Jimmy. A
signal is given, by virtue of the difference in his clothing and
car that Leonard’s identity has
indeed changed. As if to command us to reflect on this after
viewing the movie, Memento
concludes with Leonard asking: “Now … where was I?” (Nolan,
226)
Personal identity refers to that sense we have of being the same
individual amidst
the myriad of different sensations, thoughts, emotions, actions,
and circumstances that
befall us in the passing of time. In everyday understanding, the
elements of similarity and
difference connected to ourselves are integrated by refusing to
identify a person with the

diversity of their attributes and experiences; rather, the person
is distinguished from that
diversity, being defined as the single entity that happens to have
numerous attributes and
experiences, the latter thus being construed as accidental to a
person’s essential
character. This view is implicit in our language through which
we use a person’s name as a
subject and then proceed to predicate any number of things of
it. Another common
tendency is to equate a person’s identity to their mind. Hence,
in his investigation of
Sammy Jenkis, Leonard concludes that he has changed because,
though physically still
7 3

capable of forming new memories, he has become mentally
disordered. Meanwhile,
Jenkis’ wife looks into Sammy’s eyes, the windows of his soul,
and cannot bring herself to
believe that he is a different person.
Of merely theoretical interest as the philosophic debate about
personal identity
might appear to be, the truth is that it has momentous
implications. If common sense
notions about personal identity are wrong, if the existence of a
continuous being cannot
be established, then it follows that we cannot hold people
morally responsible for their
actions. Anything they did in the past would be attributable to a
different person in the
past, not the one that they are now. An individual who pulled
the trigger in murdering
someone three days ago could literally say: “that may have been
this hand on the gun, but
it wasn’t me”. In believing Leonard to have lost a stable
identity, Teddy is consistent in
deducing that he is responsible for Leonard’s actions: “I’m the
one that has to live with
what you’ve done” (Nolan, 222).

Among Hume’s skeptical positions, none is more shocking than
his argument that
we cannot verify the objective existence of a self. Given the
magnitude of this verdict, his
reasoning is surprisingly straightforward, deduced from his
epistemological teaching
concerning the relation of ideas and impressions: we can only
conceive of that which was
initially impressed on our minds as a sensation, feeling, or
emotion; the idea of the self
must then arise from an impression; the idea of the self, though,
is supposed to refer to
something that remains identical over time; but as none of our
impressions persist, our
sensations and emotions always shifting, we cannot
intellectually grasp anything
continuous; and therefore, we have no clear and distinct idea of
the self; what we call the
self amounts to nothing more than a bundle of separate mental
perceptions. As Hume
famously stated it:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call
myself, I always stumble
on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or

shade, love or
hatred, pain of pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time
without a perception,
and never can observe anything but the perception (Hume 1978,
252).
What the removal of memory in Leonard does is bring into
sharp relief the discreteness of
our mental life. Leonard incessantly experiences the world as a
new and different scene
without an obvious common ground; he is the Humean bundle of
perceptions in its
starkest form. In watching him, it dawns on us that this flux is
the ultimate reality about
7 4
ourselves, hidden from us only because of our normally
functioning memory capacities.
Memento thereby advances the notion that our ordinary sense of

self as a simple unity,
seamlessly assimilating the differences of felt reality, is a
fiction that is imposed on our
experience through our memory.
Once again, this is in keeping with Hume, at least the one at the
time The Treatise of
Human Nature was being written. Later, when he reviewed his
philosophic system in the
Appendix to the Treatise, Hume confessed to being dissatisfied
with the account he gave
to explain how people manage to subjectively connect their
disparate perceptions and
speak of personal identity (Hume 1978, 633). Hume originally
argued that individuals
perceive a bond to exist between their successive mental
perceptions in part because
memory regularly calls forth images that naturally resemble
objects previously
experienced, rendering it psychologically easy for the mind to
connect the two sorts of
perceptions. A more important part is played by the mind’s
customary disposition to link
repeatedly succeeding events in cause and effect terms, a
process in which memory is

indispensable by bringing to mind past regularities in thought,
sense, and emotion. Once
memory establishes this bond, we then project our identity onto
periods and situations we
cannot remember on the inference that the causal chain uniting
our mental states
necessitates that it always be in operation, regardless of whether
it is under our notice
(Hume 1978, 260-262).
Here we have Memento’s rationale for why Leonard retains a
sense of personal
identity. This retention is not just indicated by the frequent
invoking of his name or his
always being able to acknowledge his name when other people
address him. It is primarily
evidenced in the pangs of guilt he feels at the thought of having
committed a wrongful act
in his unremembered past. He says, “with my condition, you
don’t know anything, … you
feel angry, guilty, you don’t know why” (Nolan, 200). Then,
too, there is Leonard’s belief that
he remains accountable for avenging his wife’s rape and
murder. Neither of these matters

is chalked off as someone else’s moral affair. Able due to his
pre-injury store of memories to
causally tie experiences from before to the present (i.e., my
wife was killed and now I am in
pain), Leonard figures that he has always remained the same
person, despite his inability to
recall his existence at different junctures. “The world doesn’t
disappear hen you close your
eyes, does it?”(Nolan, 124) It is true that a more explicit
explanation is offered in Leonard’s
assertion: “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.
I’m no different” (Nolan,
7 5
226). The point here is that our identity is a product of other
people’s recognition of us.
But this is no departure from Hume, who also remarks that

people often assure themselves
of their qualities by the way others react to them. People who
esteem themselves
virtuous, for instance, will feel greater pride to the extent that
another acknowledges it.
“In general”, Hume says, “the minds of men are mirrors to one
another” (Hume 1978, 365)
Memento’s contention, in any case, is that memory, far from
discovering or reminding us of
moral responsibility, actually produces it through an
interpretation of our mental states.
At the same time, memory need not work perfectly to sustain a
consciousness of our
accountability.
M em o r y a n d Tr u t h
Leonard’s endeavor to balance accounts and restore the moral
order can only succeed, of
course, if it is tied to a consciousness of the truth. To begin
with, the act to which he is
trying to respond must have actually occurred in line with his
understanding of it. This
understanding, in turn, must be perfectly retained in some way
so as to be recallable

whenever necessary. It cannot be forgotten – hence, why the
victims of atrocities, such as
the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust, place so much
importance on preserving the
memory of what happened to them. The responsible parties,
along with their
proportionate shares in the wrongdoing, must be correctly
identified. Any penalty meted
out must be recognized as having taken place and be recorded
somehow in order to
preclude the whole process from starting over again and
potentially going on ad infinitum.
Thus, we arrive at the most profound issues in Memento’s
thought experiment, namely the
extent to which memory is up to the task of validating the truth
necessary to satisfactorily
fulfill our moral imperatives.
Strangely enough, the need to recall the wrongful act is
rendered easier in
Leonard’s case by his very memory condition, albeit in
combination with his Humean
experience of time. According to Hume, the idea of time, rather
than being the

comprehension of an objective fact, arises subjectively out of
the awareness that our
mental perceptions, our impressions and ideas, continually
succeed each other. Should a
change come about, then, in the manner in which this succession
is perceived, a change in
one’s sense of time will inevitably follow. “A man in a sound
sleep, or strongly occupy’d
with one thought, is insensible of time; and accordingly as his
perceptions succeed each
7 6
other with greater or less rapidity, the same duration appears
longer or shorter to his
imagination” (Hume 1978, 35). In Leonard’s case, what would
be affected would not be the
rate at which the succession of perceptions occurs, but instead

the extent of the series
that he could grasp in any single mental act. Compared to
ordinary people, it would be a
smaller series because it would just include all the ideas
corresponding to his pre-injury
state in addition to his current situation, without a record of the
intervening events. We
would thus expect Leonard to always have his wife’s attack as
the last instance of time prior
to the current one, always feeling as if it happened recently and
consequently impossible
to forget. Our expectations are not dashed when we witness
Leonard burning his wife’s
personal effects, trying to forget her, but then realizing:
“Probably tried this before.
Probably burned truckloads of your stuff. Can’t remember to
forget you” (Nolan, 164). Of
course, if he could recall newly occurring events, the succession
of ideas perceivable by his
mind would continuously place her further back in the series
from the current moment
and hence more and more out of mind. Thus does the capacity to
forget make certain
things unforgettable.

With the attack on his wife always fresh on his mind, one would
think that Leonard’s
chief obstacle would revolve around the collection,
accumulation, and retention of
evidence concerning the identity of John G. In other words, the
search for the culprit
would appear most challenging and, certainly, much of
Leonard’s efforts are devoted to
that task, with the audience captivated throughout by the
popular “who-dun it?” script.
When, however, we reach the beginning of the story at the end
of the film, we are led to
suspect that what seemed the most solid aspect of his case, his
first-hand account of the
second assailant present at the attack, is actually the weakest.
The defect is disclosed in the
very foundations of his reasoning. All this comes to a head, as
everyone who has seen the
movie will easily remember, when Teddy alleges Leonard is
actually the Sammy Jenkis he
persistently talks about, at least in this one decisive respect:
Sammy’s wife decided one
day to test whether he was faking his memory problem by
repeatedly adjusting her watch

and reminding him it was time for her insulin shot; his wife
receives confirmation that
Sammy was no pretender, but dies as a result of the multiple
insulin shots. To Teddy’s
accusation, Leonard counters that his wife was not diabetic:
“You think I don’t know my
own wife?” (Nolan, 220)
7 7
Is there any way Leonard could possibly be mistaken about this?
He should, after all,
be expected to remember whether his wife suffered from
diabetes, since he can
remember everything up to the attack. Hume hints there is a
reason why even his good
memory can fail. He points out that memory is akin to the

imagination in that both involve
ideas that replicate what the mind previously sensed or felt as
impressions. The difference
is that memory retains the original order and composition of
experiences, whereas the
imagination arranges and mixes aspects of our past as it pleases
(Hume 1978, 8-9.) That still
leaves the question, though, of how to tell whether a particular
set of ideas exactly
correspond to the past or creatively assemble it. To distinguish
the two possibilities, we
cannot directly consult the past datum by reviving it. The past
is, and will always be, no
more. Echoing this in the film is the pathetic scene in which
Leonard arranges for a hooker
to come to his motel room so that she can play his wife and
relive their final night
together. With no appeal to the past available, Hume declares
that we distinguish memory
from imagination through feeling; what we remember is felt
more intensely and lively
than what we imagine (Hume 1978, 85). “Something feels
wrong” (Nolan, 143), Leonard
says in Humean fashion when trying to recall the circumstances

that led him to Dodd. No
evidence exists for a memory claim other than the fact that the
person making it is
convinced of its being true. Where past events are but felt
lukewarmly, or a false account of
them is repeatedly impressed on the mind as to render the
thought of it lively, or better
yet, where strong feelings against certain previous occurrences
create a keener sensibility
towards a reconstruction of them, Hume’s account readily
allows the possibility of
someone mistaking a product of their imagination for a memory.
No surprise, then, that
Teddy explains Leonard’s delusions by observing how the latter
has told the Sammy Jenkis
story so many times to anyone who will hear it that he has come
to believe it. “So you lie to
yourself to be happy”, Teddy adds, “[n]othing wrong with that.
– we all do” (Nolan, 218).
This last comment, that we all alter our memories to suit our
purposes, signals that
the uncertainty that Leonard confronts is not peculiar to him
because of his disability, but
applies to everyone. Note that the doubt is raised about

Leonard’s pre-accident memory.
To complete its thought experiment, the film checks the results
gleaned in abstracting the
ability to generate new memories against a normally functioning
memory, a control group
as it were, and finds no difference in their respective powers to
withstand doubt. Leonard
7 8
underlines the deficiencies of human memory in defending the
reliability of his notes to
Teddy:
Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police,
eyewitness
testimonyis unreliable. The cops don’t catch a killer by sitting
around
remembering stuff. They collect facts, make notes, draw
conclusions. Facts, not

memories … Memory can change the shape of a room or the
color of a car. It’s an
interpretation, not a record. (Nolan, 135)
Right though he is about memory, Leonard turns out to be
wrong in distinguishing it from
facts. After all, his notes and tattoos marked as facts did not
stop him from being
manipulated by Teddy. The only facts whose validity does not
depend on memory refer to
objects and circumstances currently before our senses; and even
these quickly enter into
the past, as they do for Leonard, and come under the purview of
memory. Any objects kept
related to that sense-experience, and any pictures or notes taken
to record it, are only
seen as denoting a set of facts for three reasons: we trust the
memories of those originally
present; we trust that their claim to be providing their memories
is made in good faith,
that is, that they are not lying about what they remember; and
we reckon that the account
offered accords with, or at least does not fundamentally
contradict, our own memory of
analogous events. Where the incident in question took place a
long time ago, so that the

report of it had to be passed along from one person to another,
its status as a fact would
then additionally depend on our confidence that everyone down
the chain faithfully
remembered the information they received.3
The case is similar where a fact is established about something
that no one
witnessed based on objects or circumstances subsequently found
at the scene. If we find a
dead body in a room, with physical signs that the victim
resisted, along with four gun shot
wounds to the chest, we infer that a murder occurred. But this
reasoning, as we have
already pointed out in describing Hume’s theory of causal
inferences, is only possible
because we remember past instances of dead bodies similar to
the one we are witnessing
occurring upon a homicide. We deploy causal inferences, too, in
our encounter and
managing of future facts, in predicting, for example, that
penicillin will cure bacterial
diseases or that a car built without seatbelts will give rise to
more deaths. That means

3 The argument in this paragraph is very much in the spirit of
what Hume (1978, 82-83) says in
explaining the ultimate foundations of our belief that Julius
Caesar was assassinated on the ides of
March.
7 9
memory is implicated in our thinking about the future. In strict
logical terms, we share
Leonard’s fate in being imprisoned to the present, our minds
having to struggle to
preserve the past and deal with the future – the thought
experiment that Leonard
represents serves the purpose of highlighting this struggle.
Yet Leonard persists in trying to obtain the truth that will
complete his moral
project, just as Hume does in continuing his philosophic quest

in spite of analyzing the
mind to the point of radical skepticism. Hume felt so impelled
by his passion for
philosophy, so uneasy at the thought of not correctly
understanding the human condition,
that he calculated the benefits of proceeding even with the
flawed tools of reason was
worth the risk (Hume 1978, 271-272). Leonard is so driven by
his passion for justice, so
distressed at the prospect of his wife’s crime going unavenged,
that he must embark on
the search for her rapist killer even with his mental condition.
Hume held that, for all
practical purposes, we are rightly convinced of what the mind
fundamentally pronounces
– that a meaningful and intelligible world exists independently
of us – because our natural
inclinations have left us no choice in the matter. “Nature, by an
absolute and
uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as
to breathe and feel” (Hume
1978, 183). Leonard, meanwhile tells Natalie that, “there are
things you know for sure”,
that he is sure of, “the feel of the world” (Nolan, 144), of how it

will sound when he knocks
on a piece of wood, of the texture of a glass he is about to hold.
Memento’s culminating
philosophic observation is Leonard’s statement that, “I have to
believe in the world
outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still
have meaning, even if I can’t
remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed,
the world’s still there”
(Nolan, 225). Another way out of the skeptical morass is
offered in this passage from Hume:
As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and
intense reflection on
these subjects, it always encreases, the farther we carry our
reflections, whether in
opposition or conformity to it. Carelessness and in-attention
alone can afford us
any remedy. For this reason, I rely entirely upon them … (Hume
1978, 218)
Simply stated: we should let ourselves forget about it. The
inherently forgetful Leonard is
thus revealed as a model for coming to terms with our deficient
minds. Still, though we are
not to dwell on our imperfections as to become Hamlets, too
hesitant to act, we are
advised by Hume to proceed carefully, ever mindful of how our

enquiries can lead us astray
and ready to revise our thinking should new evidence demands
it. One of the things that
8 0
Teddy imparts to Leonard in the film’s last scene is that he
already killed the second
assailant named John G., who had in fact raped, though not
murdered, his wife. Perhaps
figuring that Teddy had no incentive to confess his exploitation
of him, perhaps swayed by
the photograph showing him pointing to his heart where he
planned to mark the
completion of his mission, Leonard writes a reminder to tatoo,
“I’VE DONE IT” (Nolan, 223,
capitalization his) before ripping it up to go after Teddy. Fitting
his Humean character,

Leonard readily admits his mistakes.
8 1
B ib l io g r a p h y
Aristotle (1984) The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle.
Trans. Ingram Bywater. New
York: Random House
Clarke, Melissa (2002) “The Space-Time Image: the case of
Bergson, Deleuze, and
Memento”. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, v. 16, n. 3:
167-181
Hobbes, Thomas (1968) Leviathan. Ed. C.B. Macpherson. New
York: Penguin
Hume, David (1977) An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding. Ed. Eric Steinberg.

Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company
Hume, David (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, Ed. Peter H.
Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Hutchinson, Phil & Read, Rupert (2005) “Memento: A
Philosophical Investigation” in Film as
Philosophy. Ed. Rupert Read & Jerry Goodenough. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 72-
93
Internet Movie Database (2008), IMDb Top 250
[http://www.imdb.com/chart/top]
Accessed 7 May 2008
Johnson, Steven (2005) Everything Bad is Good for You. New
York: Riverhead Books.
Klein, Andy (2001) “Everything You Wanted to Know about
Memento”. Salon
[http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/06/28/memen
to_analysis/]
Accessed 7 May 2008
Little, William G (2005) “Surviving Memento”. Narrative, v.
13, n. 1: 67-83
Locke, John (1975) An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch.
Oxford: Clarendon Press
Nolan, Christopher (2001) Memento and Following. New York:
Random House
Nolan, Jonathan (c. 2000) Memento Mori,

<http://www.impulsenine.com/homepage/pages/shortstories/me
mento_mori.htm
> Accessed 7 May 2008
Parker, Jo Alyson (2004) “Remembering the Future Memento:
the Reverse of Time’sArrow
and the Defects of Memory”. Kronoscope, v. 4, n. 2: 239-257
Postman, Neil (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show
Business. New York: Viking Press.
Sibielski, Rosalind (2004) “Postmodern Narrative or Narrative
of the Postmodern? History,
Identity, and the Failure of Rationality as an Ordering Principle
in Memento”.
Literature and Psychology, v. 49, n. 4: 82-101
8 2
F il m o g r a p h y
Hitchcock, Alfred (1959) North by Northwest. USA

Kubrick, Stanley (1964) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb. USA
Nolan, Christopher (2000) Memento. USA
Welles, Orson (1941) Citizen Kane. USA
CHRISTOPHER GRAU
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
and the Morality of Memory
The film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Michel Gondry, 2004) is one of those movies
that people tend to either love or hate.1 Critics
generally raved about it, but if you look on web-
sites that allow people to post their own reviews,
you find a fair number of “one-star” ratings and
complaints that the film was confusing, pre-
tentious, or just plain boring. On the other hand,
those who like the film tend to really like it,
giving it five stars and admitting to having seen
the film multiple times in the theater. Why do
the fans of this film seem so, well, fanatic in
their devotion? Although I think much of their
appreciation has its base in the sensitive and cre-
ative direction of Michel Gondry, the clever

script from Charlie Kaufman, the beautifully
melancholy score by Jon Brion, and the impres-
sive performances by all the actors involved,
I also think it is not crazy to suggest that the
philosophy of the film helped it to achieve the
cult-like status it now enjoys.2
What, exactly, do I mean by saying that this
film has a philosophy? Well, I don’t just mean
that it explores philosophical ideas. It does this
very effectively, but it also offers something
more: in the course of exploring these ideas, it
implicitly offers a philosophical position. That
is, it does not just raise certain deep questions, it
suggests answers to those questions. Since it is
a movie and not a journal article, the position
that is gestured at does not come to us by way of
an explicit argument, but it is one that I think
can be unpacked and defended. Accordingly,
here I will be attempting to make explicit the
philosophical perspective that I take to be
implicit in this original and moving film.3
I. FORGET ME NOT
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Eternal
Sunshine) is a story about a group of people
who have access to a peculiar and powerful
technology. Thanks to the work of one Dr.
Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his company
Lacuna, Inc., several characters are able to
undergo a process by which they have the mem-
ories of other people erased from their minds in
order to lessen the suffering that these painful
memories can cause. After watching the film, it
is hard not to dwell on the possibility offered to

the characters of Joel (Jim Carrey), Clementine
(Kate Winslet), and Mary (Kirsten Dunst). If
you could choose to erase someone from your
life, would you? Even if you personally would
not choose to undergo such a procedure, do you
think someone else should have that sort
of choice open to him or her? If the memories
of a particular incident or relationship are truly
causing someone tremendous pain, shouldn’t
they have the option of removing those memo-
ries, provided that it can be done safely and
effectively?
The film is wonderfully nuanced and subtle,
and thus not surprisingly it doesn’t offer us easy
or obvious answers to these sorts of questions.
Nonetheless, the general sense one gets from
the film is that the memory-removal technology
exhibited in the movie does not, in fact, allow
for the “eternal sunshine” referenced in the title.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine someone leaving
the theater thinking that pursuing such a tech-
nology would be a good thing.4 Why not? Well,
the film shows us some rather unfortunate
120 Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy
consequences that result from the use of the
technology: Mary, Joel, and Clementine, as well
as others connected to them, all experience pain
and heartbreak as a result of the supposedly
secret procedure going awry through various
leaks. However, what is more important for my
purposes is the fact that the film seems to

suggest that the memory-removal technology is
problematic even if the glitches and leaks could
be worked out. There is a sense of tragedy in
Joel’s realization (while in the middle of the
procedure) that he does not want to lose his
memories of Clem, and the sadness the viewers
feel with him is not lifted by the thought that he
will eventually be ignorant of the loss. On the
contrary, awareness of the future ignorance
seems to compound the sadness: that he will
soon be clueless is no cause for celebration. The
harm done by this procedure does not seem to
be fully accountable in terms of the harm the
characters consciously feel. In going through
the philosophical issues that are raised by the
film, I hope to offer an account of why the sense
of tragic loss suggested by the film resonates
with viewers, and why the implicit philosophi-
cal position assumed by the film is a respectable
and defensible one, even if it can at first appear
to be quite puzzling and controversial.5
II. UTILITARIANISM
In some ways the most obvious and sensible
response that could be made to the question “Is
the use of such memory removal technology a
good thing?” is what philosophers would call a
traditional utilitarian response. Traditional or
classical utilitarians (such as Jeremy Bentham,
John Stuart Mill, or Henry Sidgwick) thought
that the right action is the one that brings about
the most happiness overall, where happiness is
understood in terms of pleasure and the avoid-
ance of pain. When deciding on what to do, the

utilitarian does his or her best to calculate the
possible consequences of the choices that lay
before him or her. The morally right act is the
one that (among the possible actions open to the
person) will result in the most happiness and
the least suffering, and so the utilitarian will
always strive to choose those actions that are
most likely to increase overall happiness and
minimize overall suffering. Accordingly, if a
memory-removal procedure can function in
such a way that it brings about more happiness
than would otherwise be possible, the use of
such a procedure is not only justified, but in fact
morally required on utilitarian grounds.
Now it should be pointed out that there is a
big “if” in the claim above—it is not at all clear
whether this sort of procedure could be imple-
mented in such a way that it would increase
happiness overall. In Eternal Sunshine the pro-
cedure seems far from foolproof. Indeed, we see
fools implementing it (a stoned Stan (Mark
Ruffalo) and his dimwitted sidekick Patrick
(Elijah Wood)) and they do a thoroughly medi-
ocre job.6 We also see that the acquaintances of
Clementine fail to keep her procedure a secret
and in the process cause Joel no small amount
of misery. In addition, the memory-removal
procedure that Mary undergoes seems to
increase rather than minimize the pain and
suffering for everyone affected by her affair
with Mierzwiak. These and other considerations
would lead many people to conclude that the
procedure as displayed in the film does not tend
to maximize happiness overall.

The question remains, however, whether
such a process could be streamlined so as to
reliably minimize the suffering of those under-
going the procedure while not causing signi-
ficant harm to anyone else. Putting aside the
glitches and complications present in the film, it
is natural to wonder: If memory removal was
reliable, efficient, safe, and effective, are there
still reasons to reject it?
One might plausibly argue that painful mem-
ories stay with us for good reason: they allow us
to learn valuable lessons from the past and thus
FIGURE 1. Joel (Jim Carrey) undergoes a preliminary brain
scan in order to create a “memory map” that will be used to
erase his memories of Clementine (Kate Winslet).
Grau Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of
Memory 121
be better prepared for the future. This is no
doubt often the case, and in a situation in which
it appears that the removal of memory would
limit the person in this way (by denying him or
her useful information), such a procedure would
probably not be for the best (and thus not
“maximize utility”). However, there are cases in
which painful memories seem to do much more
harm than good, and where any lessons that
could be derived from the memories could
presumably be learned via other routes. In
those kinds of cases, it seems that the misery
avoided by memory removal would more than

counterbalance any possible benefits that would
normally arise from retaining the memories. It
seems, then, that the utilitarian response to
whether such a procedure is justified should be
a cautious and conditional “yes”: if suffering
can be minimized in a particular case, then such
a procedure is appropriate in that case. In
circumstances in which the use of memory
removal would increase overall happiness, the
use of such a procedure is, on utilitarian
grounds, a morally good thing. Moreover, as
I suggested earlier, utilitarianism would seem to
require the use of such a procedure if it was the
most efficient means of maximizing utility.7 For
the utilitarian, the goodness or badness of memory
removal hinges solely on the consequences, and
if we can ensure that those consequences are
beneficial overall, such technology would be
something to welcome rather than reject.
III. THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE SHIFTS INTO REVERSE
Many people will feel that the approach we have
been considering, though intuitive in many
ways, is somehow too crude. The worry is that
even if the procedure can reliably maximize hap-
piness overall (and minimize suffering) there is
still something wrong with it. Memory removal
seems problematic in a way that cannot fully be
made out within the utilitarian framework—a
loss has occurred even though we cannot expli-
cate the loss in terms of lost utility or happiness.
We can get at one reason why the procedure
in Eternal Sunshine seems so troubling by con-
sidering a classic example that is often used to

raise doubts about the hedonistic assumptions
that lie behind traditional utilitarianism. In his
1971 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert
Nozick introduced a thought experiment that
has become a staple of introductory philosophy
classes everywhere. It is known as “the experi-
ence machine.”
Suppose there were an experience machine that
would give you any experience you desired. Super-
duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain
so that you would think and feel you were writing a
great novel, or making a friend, or reading an inter-
esting book. All the time you would be floating in a
tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should
you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming
your life’s desires? … Of course, while in the tank
you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all
actually happening. Others can also plug in to have
the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay
unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as
who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.)
Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other
than how our lives feel from the inside?8
Nozick goes on to argue that other things do
matter to us: for instance, that we actually do
certain things, as opposed to simply have the
experience of doing them. Also, he points out
that we value being (and becoming) certain
kinds of people. I do not just want to have the
experience of being a decent person, I want to
actually be a decent person. Finally, Nozick
argues that we value contact with reality in
itself, independent of any benefits such contact

may bring through pleasant experience: we
want to know we are experiencing the real
thing. In sum, Nozick thinks that it matters to
most of us, often in a rather deep way, that we
be the authors of our lives and that our lives
involve interacting with the world, and he
thinks that the fact that most people would not
choose to enter into such an experience machine
demonstrates that they do value these other
things. As he puts it: “We learn that something
matters to us in addition to experience by imag-
ining an experience machine and then realizing
that we would not use it.”9
One way to think about the procedure pre-
sented in Eternal Sunshine is to consider it a
kind of reverse experience machine: rather than
give you the experience of your choice, it
allows you to take away experiences that you
have retained in your memory. Similar philo-
sophical issues arise, as the worry is that in both
cases we are achieving pleasure (or the avoid-
ance of pain) at the cost of truth. Elsewhere,
I have discussed Nozick’s thought experiment
in the context of the character Cypher’s (Joe
Pantoliano) choice in the film The Matrix (The
Wachowski Brothers, 1999).10 There, I argued
that our natural aversion to sacrificing know-
ledge of the truth for happiness can be under-
stood as the expression of some of our most
basic values, and that these values are perfectly

legitimate and need not be threatened by a
hedonistic outlook that claims that only pleasur-
able conscious experience can ultimately have
value in itself.
Not surprisingly, I think something similar
can be said about the memory-removal procedure
offered in Eternal Sunshine. Even if the use of
such a procedure would maximize happiness, it
is understandable and justifiable for someone to
refuse such a procedure on the grounds that they
do not want to “live a lie.” To think otherwise is
to forget that many of us value the truth in a
way that cannot simply be explained in terms of
the pleasure that knowledge of the truth often
brings or makes possible. Our reluctance to
endorse (or undergo) a memory-removal pro-
cedure is one expression of this basic value we
place on the truth for its own sake.
Toward the end of Eternal Sunshine, Mary
finds out that she has undergone the memory-
removal procedure and decides that what
Mierzwiak has done is horribly wrong. This
realization prompts her to return the medical
files of all his previous patients, telling them
that she has done this to “correct” the situation.
In the shooting script for the film there is an
additional bit of dialogue that further suggests
that her actions are motivated by considerations
similar to the sort we have been considering.
MARY: Patrick Henry said, “For my part, whatever
anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the
whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.”
I found that quote last night. Patrick Henry was a

great patriot, Howard.11
Unfortunately, those not inclined to share this
intuition with Mary, Patrick Henry, or Nozick
(that truth has value that is independent of the
good consequences knowledge of the truth can
bring) are likely to complain that this position
stands in desperate need of justification. Why is
the truth valuable in itself? Why should we think
it good to know the truth in situations in which it
brings only misery? The natural response (we
just do value the truth in this fundamental and
basic way) is not likely to sway the person who
thinks a memory-removal procedure is unprob-
lematic. Although everyone agrees that justifica-
tions have to come to an end somewhere, rarely
do philosophers agree just where a proper end-
ing resides. The common response to Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s famous claim “my spade is
turned” (that is, I have hit bedrock—I have
exhausted justifications) is to tell him to pick up
the damn spade and keep digging!12 I am not
sure that much can be said to resolve this sort of
dispute, but one point that can be made is to
remind the opponent that he or she, too, hits
bedrock eventually, that is, a point at which he
or she can no longer provide a justification for
his or her own valuation. To the question, “and
what justifies the value you place on pleasant
conscious experience?” it seems little can be
said. This sort of concern appears to be some-
how self-justifying or beyond justification. If
this is right, it is unclear why we should not
allow that other concerns might well be simi-
larly foundational or beyond justification.

A further justification for valuing the truth
may not be possible; however, it is possible to
say a bit more by way of explanation regarding
why many people hold this value. Colin
McGinn has described the threat of general
epistemological skepticism as tantamount to an
individual discovering he or she is in a kind of
“metaphysical solitary confinement.” If we do
not know what we think we know, then we are
in effect cut off from the world. If the skeptic is
right, it turns out that our mind does not have
the kind of interaction and relationship with
reality that we ordinarily take it to have, and
this possibility is understandably disturbing to
us. As McGinn puts it, we want our mind to be a
window onto the world, not a prison.13
Merely losing a portion of one’s memory is
certainly not equivalent to the sort of radical
ignorance that epistemological skeptics enter-
tain, but it does involve a related variety of
detachment from the world. Having undergone
a memory-removal procedure, the individual
has consented to, if not a metaphysical prison,
then at least a pair of metaphysical blinkers and,
worse yet, he or she has consented to make
Memory 123
himself or herself ignorant of that very choice.
The individual chooses to cut himself or herself
off from the world—his or her mind represents

the world less accurately than it did before and,
accordingly, he or she is slightly closer to the
isolation and solipsism that make skepticism
threatening.14 We have a very natural desire not
to be cut off from the world in this way, and
thus it is not surprising that the removal of
memories disturbs us in a manner that cannot
simply be cashed out in terms of future unhap-
piness. The fact that in Eternal Sunshine the
memory removal involves isolating a person
from someone who was previously very close
makes the use of the procedure all the more
disturbing: it is not just a metaphysical relation-
ship that has been severed, but a personal and
emotional one.
IV. WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW CAN HURT YOU
Granting that voluntary removal of one’s mem-
ories seems to clash with the value that many
people place on knowing the truth about them-
selves and the world, a further related question
arises: Does the sort of memory loss exempli-
fied in Eternal Sunshine involve an actual harm
or misfortune to the person who undergoes the
procedure? It is quite natural for people to think
initially that such a procedure cannot be said to
harm the person if it produces no unpleasant
effects for the person. (How can I be harmed if I
do not consciously experience the harm?)
Although this seems straightforward enough, on
reflection we can see that it is far from obvious
that this simple notion of harm will suffice.
Consider Thomas Nagel’s comments on the
view that harm must necessarily be experi-
enced.

It means that even if a man is betrayed by his friends,
ridiculed behind his back, and despised by people
who treat him politely to his face, none of it can be
counted as a misfortune for him so long as he does
not suffer as a result. It means that a man is not
injured if his wishes are ignored by the executor of
his will, or if, after his death, the belief becomes
current that all the literary works on which his fame
rests were really written by his brother, who died in
Mexico at the age of 28.15
Nagel reminds us that many situations that we
would naturally want to characterize as invol-
ving harms would have to be redescribed if we
want to embrace the narrow view that harms
must be experienced. Elaborating on Nagel’s
insights, Steven Luper helpfully distinguishes
between what he calls “harms that wound”
versus “harm that deprive.”16 We can under-
stand the harms that Nagel speaks of as harms
that may not wound but do deprive the person
of some good, and both Luper and Nagel suggest
that a sensible account of harm should be able to
incorporate these latter types of misfortune.17
If this approach is correct, then it would seem
that the deprivation of the truth that Joel,
Clementine, and Mary undergo in Eternal Sun-
shine could rightly be seen as a form of harm or
misfortune.18 The fact that it is something they
bring on themselves does not change this, for
we allow that people often (knowingly and
unknowingly) harm themselves in other ways.
(The film in fact implicitly supports this notion
through characterizing Clementine as self-

destructive, Mary as easily manipulated, and
Joel as a depressive—just the types of people
who could and would harm themselves.) The
harm here is not as dramatic or obvious as some
other forms of self-abuse, but it is nevertheless
genuine: they have sacrificed a part of their
minds and in the process blinded themselves to
a part of the world.
V. IMMANUEL KANT ON DUTIES TO ONESELF
So far I have suggested that memory removal is
morally problematic because it involves a clash
between fundamental values: our concern with
knowing the truth comes into tension with our
desire for happiness. Undergoing such a proce-
dure inevitably involves sacrificing the concern
for truth and, accordingly, we are inclined to see
the person who has undergone such a procedure
as having been harmed through deprivation of
the truth. Is there more to say regarding the sort
of harm that one undergoes here? I think there
is, and I think we can get at a deeper appreci-
ation of the harm to self that memory removal
involves through a consideration of some ideas
from Immanuel Kant.
Kant famously proclaimed that persons are
unique: everything else in the world is a thing
and thus has a price, but persons alone deserve a
kind of treatment that involves recognizing their

value as beyond price. Persons, because of their
capacity for freedom and rational agency, have
a dignity that is incommensurable and priceless.
Accordingly, persons deserve respect. Kant
thought that we needed to be consistent in our
thinking on these matters, and that means we
have to acknowledge that you have a duty to
treat yourself with respect and never to use
yourself solely as a means to an end. Accord-
ingly, he argued that morality prohibits both
suicide and many forms of self-mutilation. In
the Groundwork, he succinctly lays out his
reasons for this view.
First, as regards the concept of necessary duty to
oneself, the man who contemplates suicide will ask
himself whether his action can be consistent with the
idea of humanity as an end in itself. If he destroys
himself in order to escape from a difficult situation,
he is making use of his person merely as a means so
as to maintain a tolerable condition till the end of life.
Man, however, is not a thing, and hence is not some-
thing to be used merely as a means; he must in all his
actions always be regarded as an end in himself.
Therefore, I cannot dispose of man in my own person
by mutilating, damaging, or killing him. (It belongs
to ethics proper to define this principle more
precisely, so as to avoid all misunderstanding, e.g., as
to the amputation of the limbs in order to preserve
myself, as to exposing my life to danger with a view
to preserve it, etc. This question is therefore omitted
here.)19
Many have mocked Kant's remarks, wonder-
ing if his prohibition should include such hor-
rific acts as ear piercing or haircuts.

Acknowledging that we may want to make
allowances for the permissibility of suicide and
bodily mutilation under certain circumstances,
we can still agree with the spirit of Kant's
claims here: there is something disturbing about
the idea of self-manipulation that parallels the
disturbing aspects of manipulating others, and
consistency suggests that we should recognize
that cases of treating oneself solely as a means
are morally problematic for the same reasons
that objectifying others is wrong. Just as it is
wrong to use others for advantage (even their
own advantage) in ways that do not recognize
their humanity, it is wrong to objectify oneself
simply for the sake of some supposed advantage.
As Kant says elsewhere: “Self-regarding duties,
however, are independent of all advantage, and
pertain only to the worth of being human.”20
It is a natural extension of Kant's view to
criticize the process we see in Eternal Sunshine
on the grounds that it involves a type of morally
problematic self-objectification. Part of what is
so disturbing about the memory-removal proce-
dure is that it is in fact a form of self-mutilation:
in order to “maintain a tolerable condition” one
uses oneself as a mere means and thus manipu-
lates oneself as though one were an object
rather than a person deserving of respect.
Indeed, the kind of manipulation involved here
is more obviously problematic than the sort of
bodily mutilation Kant mentions. After all, what
is mutilated in this case is not merely one’s body
but one's mind, and thus the violation of one’s
rational nature is frightfully direct. Memory

removal bears closer similarities to the sort of
mind manipulation that Kant had in mind when
he rejected the idea of rehabilitating prisoners.
James Rachels, summarizing Kant’s view,
explains the rationale behind Kant’s opposition
to rehabilitation.
[T]he aim of “rehabilitation,” although it sounds
noble enough, is actually no more than the attempt to
mold people into what we think they ought to be. As
such, it is a violation of their rights as autonomous
beings to decide for themselves what sort of people
they will be. We do have the right to respond to their
wickedness by “paying them back” for it, but we do
not have the right to violate their integrity by trying
to manipulate their personalities.21
Kant’s view is obviously controversial, but it is
easy enough to understand his concern, at least
when considering certain types of rehabilitation.
Take the film A Clockwork Orange (Stanley
Kubrick, 1971): in it, a young thug named Alex
(Malcolm McDowell) is captured and undergoes
“aversion therapy” that makes him unable to
commit violent acts but does nothing to remove
his immoral desires or convince him of the
wrongness of what he has done. He becomes
mechanical, like clockwork, rather than a free,
rational agent. It is precisely the sense that Alex
has been unjustly manipulated that causes us to
have sympathy for an otherwise vile person.
Even if he is a criminal who has committed

Memory 125
countless immoral acts, that does not give
society the right to treat him as though he is
merely a broken mechanism rather than a person.
Manipulating someone’s mind is a particularly
robust and offensive way to fail to grant him or
her the respect that all people deserve.22
One might think the parallel between mani-
pulative rehabilitation and self-induced memory
removal fails because the case of memory
removal involves a person voluntarily consent-
ing to the manipulation while the criminal does
not (presumably) consent to the rehabilitation.
This brings up some rather thorny issues regard-
ing the role of consent vis-à-vis Kantian ethics.
I am inclined to think that Kant’s account has to
involve more than simply consent in order for
an act to show proper respect, but for our pur-
poses here we can leave this debate aside, for it
seems quite likely that the person post memory
removal is likely not to consent to the procedure
that has been performed on him or her even if
he or she did consent prior to removal. (Mary
exhibits this pattern rather clearly in Eternal
Sunshine.) The postprocedure person falls quite
squarely into the class of persons who have had
their integrity and personhood violated through
the kind of manipulation that Kant criticized.
The way the memory-removal procedure
creates a later self that may not approve of the
earlier self’s choices brings to mind another
parallel, one that the film highlights in a partic-
ularly vivid fashion. The sadness we feel for

both Clementine and Joel parallels the sort of
sadness felt for people who, out of misery and
desperation, start down a path of self-obliteration
through drugs or alcohol. It is no coincidence
that Clementine is characterized as an alcoholic,
nor that Joel often appears so depressed as to be
borderline suicidal. Their choice to utilize the
memory-removal technology is presented as
being of a piece with their other self-destructive
tendencies. Kant would presumably agree that
these behaviors all involve a morally problem-
atic form of self-destruction. Discussing alcohol
(and suicide), he remarks:
For example, if I have drunk too much today, I am
incapable of making use of my freedom and my
powers; or if I do away with myself, I likewise
deprive myself of the ability to use [my powers].
So this conflicts with the greatest use of freedom, that
it abolishes itself, and all use of it, as the highest prin-
cipium of life. Only under certain conditions can
freedom be consistent with itself; otherwise it comes
into collision with itself.23
The removal of memories can be plausibly seen
as a limitation on one’s freedom, just as Kant
suggests both drunkenness and suicide limit
freedom. (The cliché “knowledge is power”
rings true here: the self-imposed ignorance
brought on through memory removal limits
your power and your freedom through limiting
your options.) As with the other cases that Kant
discusses, utilizing one’s freedom in order to
remove one’s memories involves a kind of
contradiction: you attempt to use your freedom

in order to limit your freedom. On Kant’s
approach, we have no right to do this to
ourselves, regardless of the convenience or
advantage of such a procedure.
I do not want to suggest that Kant’s positions
on suicide, self-mutilation, or rehabilitation are
clearly correct or uncontroversial—they are not,
and many smart and able philosophers have
criticized them. What I do want to claim is that
his overall position and the way it manifests
itself in these particular cases is both insightful
and worthy of consideration, and that the
insights Kant offers us apply rather nicely to the
topic at hand, that is, the ethics of memory
removal. Kant offers a rationale for why harm-
ing oneself in certain ways is particularly dis-
turbing and morally problematic. In cases of
suicide, self-abuse, and (I have argued) memory
removal, we see agents treating themselves
solely as a means to an end rather than as ends
in themselves. There is a failure of self-respect,
and this imparts the tragic sense that someone
has, out of desperation, failed to recognize his
or her own worth. This harmonizes well with
the mood of Eternal Sunshine, as the film offers
up exactly this sort of tragic situation in which
individuals are blind to their own worth: the
three people who we see using the memory-
removal procedure are all characterized as self-
destructive to varying degrees, with Clem’s
alcoholism, Joel’s depression, and Mary’s
insecurity and weakness of will making it all
too plausible that they would also engage in the
sort of harm to self that memory removal
involves. The film suggests that what they have

done is both sad and wrong; Kant’s moral theory
helps make this suggestion comprehensible.
VI. HARMING OTHERS THROUGH DECEIVING ONESELF
Watching the film, we do not simply feel bad
for Joel and Clementine because we suspect
they have harmed themselves in removing their
memories; we also naturally think that this pro-
cedure involves harming those who are erased
as well.24 Consider in particular the feelings of
sympathy that arise for Joel based on Clem’s
actions. Aside from worrying that he will harm
himself in choosing memory removal, viewers
of the film cannot help but think that Joel has
already been harmed by Clementine through
her trip to Lacuna. He certainly takes her
decision to remove memories of him as some-
thing of an insult, and we are inclined to agree.
There is a rather straightforward way of
understanding the nature of this harm, for we
see Joel’s confusion, sadness, and anger on the
screen as he learns about what Clementine has
done. He is made miserable by the news, and
the thought of removing this newfound misery
seems to be at least part of the basis for his
decision to undergo the procedure himself. We
saw earlier, though, that there are other classes
of harm that are trickier to make sense of: harms
that befall a person even though that person
does not experience the harms. I suggested that

Joel, Clementine, and Mary can be seen as
harming themselves in this way by undergoing
the memory-removal procedure; they harm
themselves through deprivation of the truth
regarding their previous relationships. I think
we can (and should) go one step further, how-
ever, and say that Clementine has not just
harmed herself but also harmed Joel in a way he
cannot experience.25 Just as in the case of unex-
perienced harm to self, this claim is initially
puzzling. It is clear enough that Clem has
harmed Joel in a very palpable way once he dis-
covers that she has had him erased, but it is a
significantly harder question whether he can be
said to be harmed even if he does not discover
what she has done.
We can better contemplate this possibility by
considering a scenario slightly different from
the one we saw in the film: imagine that
Clementine erased Joel, but Joel never came to
discover the erasure. (Perhaps he left to live in
another country before she underwent the pro-
cedure and he lost all contact with mutual
friends, family, and so forth.) Would it be right
to say that Clementine harmed Joel in her
actions? Opinions are likely to be divided here,
as we saw earlier that there are those (such as
many utilitarians) who find the idea of an
unexperienced harm nonsensical. Yet there are
also folks like Nagel, who plausibly suggest that
dismissing unexperienced harms may involve a
larger sacrifice to our ordinary intuitions and
commonsense than is initially obvious. If we
can legitimately say that betraying someone

behind their back involves harming them even
if they never discover the harm, it would
seem we should similarly be able to say that
Clementine’s actions harm Joel even if he never
finds out.
Granting that some harms are not necessarily
experienced, what is the nature of the non-
experiential harm perpetrated by Clementine?26
She has not exactly betrayed Joel, has she?
After all, one might think that choosing to
remove the memories of someone else is not
significantly different from throwing out their
old letters or deleting all their emails.27 Is it not
her right to remove mementos or even memo-
ries if she chooses? Perhaps, but here we may
be riding roughshod over morally relevant dif-
ferences between the case of an ex-lover burn-
ing letters and Clementine wiping all trace of
Joel from her mind. There is certainly a differ-
ence in degree between the two cases, and that
might be enough to make a moral difference,
but there is also something more: entirely wip-
ing out the memory of someone seems to mani-
fest a failure of respect that is distinct in kind
from merely discarding keepsakes.
On reflection, this sort of case appears to be
less like the tossing of old letters and more like
a genuine betrayal. Just as we might think that
someone who has misrepresented the memory
of someone else through slander has done him
or her a disservice, we can similarly say that
one who has removed all memory of someone
has also done a disservice to the person who has

been erased.28 Though the idea may initially
sound bizarre, it follows that we may have a
moral obligation to remember those we have
had close relationships with. Note that I did not
say we have a moral obligation to have fond
memories, or to like the person, for that would
clearly be a ludicrous demand. Rather, I am sug-
gesting that we are morally obliged to not distort
history through distorting our own historical record.
Memory 127
Consider a drug that would revise one’s
memories such that all the memories of one’s
ex-spouse become both false and unflattering.
Many would rightly regard the taker of such a
drug as having done something that is not only
imprudent but also immoral. Although remov-
ing memories is not the same as distorting them,
the removal of all the memories of a person does
amount to a form of distortion: your mind
comes to have a falsified and thus distorted
perspective on one aspect of the world. Through
a voluntary “lie by omission,” the narrative of
your life has been, in part, fictionalized.
I said earlier that memory removal is disturb-
ing because it amounts to putting on “metaphys-
ical blinkers” that partially sever the connection
between one’s mind and the world—the mind
no longer reflects the world as accurately as it
did. There is symmetry in our values here: just
as we want our mind to accurately represent the

world, we also want the world to accurately
represent us.29 If I delete all my memories
of a person, I ensure that a part of the world no
longer represents that person at all, and it is
hard not to think that I have thus engaged in a
morally problematic form of misrepresentation.
If that person were to find out what I have done,
he or she would have the right to be offended.
Even if they do not find out, it is plausible to
think that they have nonetheless been harmed
by my actions. Though the degree of wrong-
doing may vary in accordance with my motives
(as in the case of slander or other forms of mis-
representation), even memory removal done
with the best of reasons can amount to a misfor-
tune for the person erased because it involves
this willful failure to represent the person
accurately.
I suspect some skepticism remains in many
readers for, despite the considerations above, a
duty to remember can seem like a very odd
thing for morality to demand.30 If we can free
ourselves from an overly narrow conception of
morality as nothing more than a collection of
abstract rules that regulate behavior towards
others, I think we can see that what I am sug-
gesting is not really that strange. The philoso-
pher and novelist Iris Murdoch can provide aid
here: she eloquently argued that at the core of
morality is a responsibility to do our best to get
things right, and this means not just to act
rightly but to perceive the world and other
people accurately—to “really look” and see
things as they actually are.

1PaperRequirementsforPhilosophyofFilm32401Fal.docx

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