Since I saw "Memento" last week, I've been dipping into the electronic pool of info on the net reading about amnesia and memory. It's an understatement to say it is a complex subject. But I did discover that indeed there is a type of amnesia akin to that in the movie in which the person's short term memory slips away after 15 minutes or so.

In reading the comments at IMDB, one of the most frequent criticisms was how would such a person remember that he had such a condition. This was regarded as a major fallacy by reviewers who appeared very upset and in serious need of some mood-altering substances.

This evening I took mother to dinner and was explaining in very general terms about what I'd read. Then she mentioned that she'd recently run into someone she knew who indicated he had such a problem. He said he could remember events for about 15 minutes, then he'd forget it. He knew that he had worked with my mother but could not recall her name.

You can imagine how flabbergasted I was when she told her story. She even went so far as to wonder if she'd talked for longer with him, if they would have had to start over.

I also came across a fascinating personal account at LA Weekly: Books Feature: Something To Forget Me By.

As you'll remember (no pun intended), "Memento" starts at the end and works back to the beginnng - more or less. As I was reading the praises and knocks at IMDB, I was struck by the fact that that is what I was doing. I was starting with the last message posted, which is the first you'll see, then working back to the beginning.

In mid-afternoon, I wheeled the vacuum into the living room and watched it gobble up dust bunnies; however, some were more akin to the size of dust buffalo. The cats hate the vacuum because of the noise it makes. (I read in "Consumer Reports" that the manufactureres made some almost silent machines, but nobody would buy them.) If a cat's sense of hearing is ten times that of we humans, then I guess that the vacuum is ten times as loud. No wonder they don't like it.

Not for the first time, I noticed the differences between the "family" he creates with Plato and Betty and the relationships with his biological parents. Of the two situations, the "family" seems far more convincing and real than the other. Even at the end, you're still left with the feeling that the parents have no idea what to do.

For anyone with the least bit of perception, Plato is obviously gay and adores Jim. I think there may have been an attempt to weaken that angle and instead play up the idea of Jim as a substitute father. In fact somewhere recently, I read that the original screenplay had a much stronger homoerotic undertone.

I've often wondered what it must have been like to see the movie at the time it came out. My guess is that many saw it as nothing more than a teenage rebellion plot.

PAX!