Sample Post

This is a sample post that I came up with so that everyone would have an idea of what you'll be expected to do for your own blog entry. It comes out to about 2 double-spaced pages in MS Word.

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Finally, please note that when you make your own blog post, you'll be including a title for it in the "Title" field. (I'm including mine below only for this example.) And now, on to the post...


Memento and the Horrors of Loss

On the surface, the 2000 film Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan and based on a short story by his brother, Jonathan Nolan, has very little in common with 2004’s The Notebook. Yet when taken together, the two films, while wildly different in terms of style, subject matter, and target audience, illustrate the pervasiveness of two common and, one could argue, basic human fears: fear of the loss of a loved one, and (perhaps even more frightening, in some ways) fear of the loss of one’s own identity.

The idea that films deal with fear is nothing new. The size and scope of the “horror” section in any video store is proof of the demand for films that briefly expose us to a wide range of terrors. And although the fears they deal with would be terrifying in real life, horror movies often depict particularly unlikely threats, and it can be said that the “fear” is all in good fun. Horror movies do have staying power, as we can see in the number of people who still dress up as Freddy and Jason for Halloween decades after the release of the films in which they first appeared. But their lasting power to make us feel genuinely afraid or uncomfortable is somewhat limited.

Neither Memento nor The Notebook is a horror movie, yet each has the power to affect audiences and to provoke thought and discussion not only about love, life, and self, but about fear. Although The Notebook is a much more obvious love story, Memento, in tracing Leonard’s obsessive and difficult quest for vengeance, brutally portrays his struggle as one that is, it could be argued, ultimately rooted in love. More importantly, however, although they take very different routes to arrive there, both films could be said to end on a similar concept: the lengths to which human beings will go in order to preserve reality as they define it.

For Memento’s Leonard, this means adjusting information and records of events in order to continue his quest for revenge, as the reality he is most comfortable with has become the reality in which he has a sense of purpose and can maintain some sense of self, however fragmented and distorted it has become as a result of his inability to make memories. For Noah and Allie in The Notebook, this means, first and foremost, the shared sense of connection to a past in which they were young and both physically and—more importantly—mentally whole. In their case, the ultimate solution to the problem of unacceptable reality comes in another form, which, it can be argued, restores to the couple a degree of unity that the later years of their lives attempted to deny them.

Thus, both films address what is even more frightening than the mask-wearing, knife-wielding maniacs in horror movies; they investigate the terrible threat of losing reality as we know it. Even if that reality is not perfect, when taken away it becomes not only preferable, but the only “reality” that both film’s main characters can bear to accept. Each film forces viewers to place themselves in the protagonists’ positions to some degree, and to imagine the prospect of not knowing what is going on.

Of course, throughout our lives, each of us does a lot of “not-knowing-what’s-going-on” – for example, I don’t always know what’s going on in politics, or what’s going on on Wisteria Lane. But it’s a very different thing not to know what you just did or who you can trust, as in Memento, or who you are or what has happened in your past, as in The Notebook. Though they are very different, each of these films makes it clear that there are fears that are more real and more terrifying than those depicted in horror movies.

If we continue to think about either movie after it’s over, the result (beyond the confusion and questions that often follow a first viewing of Memento, and the fits of crying that many people—yes, myself included—report experiencing during a showing of The Notebook) is something that stays with you, demanding that you consider the possibility of a reality other than the one in which you are comfortable today, and, ultimately, asking what you would do if that reality was suddenly taken away.