Wineskins Magazine

New VHS/DVD release Tuesday, September 4, 2001

By Darryl Tippens

Memento and the Death of Memory

Christopher Nolan’s award-winning movie about a man trying to find the killers of his beloved wife is an experimental film noir thriller, which doubles as a provocative inquiry into the nature of truth and reality. Whether taken as violent murder mystery or a visual essay on the problem of knowledge, Memento is entertaining, provocative, and decidedly thought-provoking. Ultimately for Christians the movie may serve as a haunting parable of the danger that arises when a person decides that he should be his own exclusive judge of the truth.

As in any mystery, the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) must piece together the clues that will tell the tale. However, in this case, Leonard (Lenny), an insurance investigator, is severely handicapped in his quest for the murderer because he has only fleeting recollections of events and persons. The night of the murder the intruders struck Lenny in the head, destroying his capacity to store short-term memories.

The film requires the audience to experience the events only as Lenny recalls them. They come to us fragmented, fleeting, and most importantly, backwards. Thus, viewers see a photograph develop backwards (going from full picture dissolving into white; a gun firing in reverse, etc.) In this movie, as in the life of Lenny Shelby, there is far more here than first meets the eye.

One great pleasure of Memento resides in its multiple levels of meaning. On one level it is inspired movie-making–a scintillating story, cleverly delivered, with a surprise ending. Nolan has constructed the story with extraordinary care using carefully repeated scenes, rich with essential clues, which entice the viewer to join Lenny in his obsessive quest to discover the murderer. I cannot think of another film that demands so much from the audience. It absolutely requires the audience’s collaboration in making sense of the story. Yet along the way, the whodunit plot proves to be a mere frame for director Nolan’s much more substantial concerns.

At another level the film is a remarkable visual essay on the way the mind works to construct reality, as it shows us, with almost scientific precision, how Lenny’s mind collects and pieces together sensory impressions into a coherent whole. Memento is an amazing picture of a disturbed and obsessive mind at work.

At still another level, with its repeated ruptures and reversals of the narrative plot, as recalled by a doubtful and perplexed narrator, the film qualifies as an intriguing, though accessible, discourse on epistemology. The film raises basic questions about the nature of the self and reality. What do we know and how do we know it? What happens to a person when he loses his memory? What happens to his sense of self, to his relationships, values and beliefs? What, finally, is the relationship of empirical fact and ultimate truth?

Even before the murder of his wife and his traumatic wounding, Lenny–an insurance investigator–was a man who lived his life by the facts. And long before his own tragedy, he should have seen (but did not) what happens when one reduces his life to fact, ignoring the human, the personal, and the intuitive. Now, as self-appointed detective, Lenny becomes obsessed with finding “the facts” and piecing them together. Yet because of his brain injury, he cannot hold the facts for long. He therefore takes instant photos of all the evidence he can, writing brief explanatory notes on the backs and margins of the photos. He plasters the walls of his room with the facts. He even tattoos his body with crucial clues. It appears that when all “the facts” are in, Lenny will have his murderer, but will he?

Behind this question lies the pleasure (and the conundrum) of the film: What if “the facts” do not add up to the truth? Lenny, with the audience, continues to collect fact after fact, clue after clue. Yet the viewer may wonder if William Faulkner’s paradoxical observation is apropos: “Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” Only the ending (and perhaps multiple viewings) will settle the truth of this tale told by an amnesiac full of sensory confusion.

Memento may at first seem like mere entertainment or celluloid philosophy, far removed from spiritual concerns, but the film raises important questions for all people who take truth seriously. The film is particularly challenging for rationalists who believe that reason and truth are synonymous. Great thinkers as diverse as St. Paul, Pascal, and Blake have taught us to recognize and respect different kinds of knowing. There is a spiritual knowledge which passes earthly knowing says the Apostle (Eph. 3:19). Pascal elaborates: “The last act of reason is to recognize that there are an infinite number of things that are beyond its grasp.” William Blake expresses it bluntly: “Rational truth is not the truth of Christ, but the truth of Pilate.” Unfortunately, Lenny knows nothing of this.

Lenny’s failure is two-fold: naive trust in his own rational powers to read the facts correctly and the greater failure–a tragic lack of awareness of what is required beyond the brute facts: namely, history, an interpretive framework, a heuristic lens – in other words a worldview through which to read the facts.

In this respect Memento is a parable of modernist persons (which includes some contemporary Christians) who have no concern for tradition or the past. Their robust self-confidence leads to a fateful indifference to memory and tradition. Like Lenny, they confuse fragmentary, present-tense “fact” with the whole truth. Confusing the facts with the truth can sometimes lead to comedy (and there are indeed moments of ludicrous absurdity in Lenny’s dark story, as when in a tense chase scene Lenny forgets whether he is the hunter or the hunted). Such confusion born of forgetfulness more often leads to misfortune. Without giving away the plot, one can say that Memento is Exhibit A in what happens to those who forget the past. They are doomed to repeat it.

Memento is a sophisticated reinterpretation of the classic murder mystery. It is a thinking person’s thriller–what Raymond Chandler might have conceived had he been touched by postmodernism. But the film is also a sober warning to anyone who is cavalier about the past. In Memento there is something almost as horrifying as the killing of Lenny’s wife, and that is the brutal murder of Lenny’s memory. What is true for a fictional character may also be true for a living person or even a social group, like a church.

As many church historians and theologians have argued in recent years, a driving principle of American religion has been the impulse to repudiate heritage and tradition, that is, cultural memory. There is ample evidence of this tendency throughout the evangelical tradition, but it is especially visible in the Restoration tradition, the early leaders of whom celebrated their glorious freedom from theology and the historic Christian tradition. In this light, Lenny easily stands as a type of the self-made American Christian in that he privileges the individual will over the collective, and he practices a solo hermeneutic, unbounded by a community or memory.

The final tragedy of Memento is not the death of Lenny’s wife or his memory; it is Lenny’s absolute isolation. Lenny has no one to help him discover the truth. He has no understanding that meaning is communally constructed; all epistemological authority resides in himself alone. Alexander Campbell once declared, “My mind was, for a time, set loose from all its former moorings.” This could have been a line from Memento, for in certain ways Campbell, Stone and many other figures in American religion are like Lenny in the way they came to function without reference to historic communities of interpretation–or at least they tried to. Campbell and the other Restoration fathers, of course, did not cause the American religious scene to turn so anti-traditional; but they participated in the process, and they encouraged the tendency within the Stone-Campbell movement. Today we face the consequences of having forgotten our historical roots.

Memento, taken as cautionary tale and spiritual parable, warns us of the eminent danger inherent in the revolt against memory. Spiritual amnesia is, finally, not so much a strike against others as it is a perilous self-wounding. Perhaps we will come to understand with Somerset Maugham that “tradition is a guide and not a jailer.” Perhaps the day will come when we will confess the tragic misfortune that the disregard for historical consciousness has been for evangelical Christianity generally. Simone Weil is right: “Destruction of the past [and memory] is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.”

Memento released on VHS and DVD Tuesday, September 4, 2001.

Rated R for violence and language.

Hot Debate

A book review on Two Views of Hell: A Biblical and Theological Dialogue, by Edward William Fudge and Robert A. Peterson, Intervarsity Press, 2000.

By Greg Taylor

For two millennia Christians have credulously believed the Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul, says Edward Fudge, in Intervarsity’s new book, Two Views of Hell. Fudge says these Greek ideas have devastated the church’s doctrine of hell. He believes the Bible teaches that the wicked will be completely annihilated rather than consciously tormented forever.

The book is a debate between Fudge and Robert A. Peterson, who holds the traditional view, held since the time of Tertullian and Augustine, that unrepentant sinners will be tormented in hell without end. Where we come down on this issue, say the authors, shapes our views of God, sin, the end times, and evangelism. So the exchange between Fudge and Peterson is, like the subject matter, hot.

Fudge believes the traditional view is based more upon human philosophy than scripture, is not consistent with the nature of the merciful God revealed in Christ, and seriously affects the Christian witness. Peterson, on the other hand, says Fudge's conditionalist view, also called the annihilationist view, represents a growing scholarly and popular trend to portray God as "gentler and kinder." Peterson, however, believes this picture of God to be out of focus contradicting clear teaching in scripture. He believes the idea of conditional immortality does serious damage to evangelism and leads to watering down of key church doctrines.

The book is brief, and in its 228 pages--which includes endnotes, name index, and scriptural index--Fudge presents his case for conditionalism, and Peterson responds. Then Peterson presents his case for the traditionalism and Fudge responds.

The book opens by establishing doctrines upon which the authors agree. Both deny universalism, the idea that all will be saved and hell does not exist. Both reject post-mortem evangelism, "the idea that persons have an opportunity after death to believe the gospel of Christ." This is not to be confused with the end times scenario portrayed in the wildly popular Left Behind book series. The plot begins at the beginning of the dispensational tribulation and portrays a second crack for living unbelievers to repent and believe in Jesus Christ. I asked Fudge and Peterson about Left Behind and both were quick to make a distinction between a second chance before death, as Left Behind portrays, and a second chance after death—they reject the latter, leaving the former, the Left Behind scenario, speculative. They agree that scripture teaches a future Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment, followed by terrible suffering for the lost.

The firestorm of debate, however, is over exactly how the lost are punished. Fudge says the wicked will be punished in hell, then completely wiped from existence. Peterson, on the other hand, holds that the wicked will be tormented without end. At the center of the debate is the word eternal. Both Fudge and Peterson say the meaning is plain in most texts—but they give plainly opposite interpretations of this word in Matthew 25:31-46. Peterson, who says this passage is the "single most important passage in the history of the doctrine of hell," says the words "eternal fire" in v. 41 mean everlasting torment. He correlates this text with Revelation 20:10, where Satan is thrown into the "lake of burning sulfur" and "tormented day and night for ever and ever." Fudge, on the other hand, believes "eternal" in Matthew 25:41 refers to the finality of the punishment, that it will stand forever. Fudge says, "once destroyed, they (unrepentant sinners) will be gone forever."

Two Views of Hell is not simply a word study book on hell, eternity, and punishment. The authors also draw from church history and attempt both scriptural exposition and theological reflection. Yet without consciously referring in the book to their different approaches, the two come to the topic not only with different views of hell but also with different theological methods. Fortunately, as Peterson points out, it’s not these methods or approaches that, in the end, make a view right or wrong.

Peterson uses systematic theology by discussing New Testament texts, church tradition, and the doctrines of man, Christ, and end times that support the traditional view of hell. While most texts were not written specifically so we could fully understand hell, Peterson seems to acknowledge this by setting up each passage in its context before drawing his conclusions.

Where Peterson builds on church tradition, Fudge employs historical theology to critique the way doctrines have come to us through church history. Fudge looks at how the doctrine of hell has been influenced by the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul, an idea Fudge believes to be unbiblical. Fudge says this leaves us with a view of eternal torment which came down to us through ideas foreign to scripture, church politics, and personal vendettas. "If we ever begin to suppose that ecclesiastical tradition outweighs scriptural teaching in authority," says Fudge, "Protestants ought all to line up and apologize to the pope of Rome." Nevertheless, Fudge and Peterson both claim to draw their conclusions based upon sola scriptura as Martin Luther claimed.

Fudge, for example, nearly a dozen times says we ought to let scripture interpret itself. The caveat of this, however, is that scripture does not interpret itself. Humans interpret scripture. And we interpret it imperfectly. So we do our imperfect best to be faithful to scripture while drawing on what others have legitimately believed in the past. Which is exactly why Peterson is right to build on church tradition, but Fudge is also right to critique the process through which we received the doctrine of hell. The church tradition, which Peterson highlights in support of his argument for eternal torment, has some weight, but scripture, rather than tradition, is our sole final authority. While giving respect to those who have lived for and died for their beliefs, we ought to continually come to old doctrines with fresh study and insight.

While much of what we know from scripture about the end times is unclear, many build their end times analogies and theories upon a dozen scripture references. C.S. Lewis approaches the simultaneous existence of a joyous heaven and a tormenting hell by taking a philosophical approach to good and evil. In his famously hosted omnibus trip to hell, Lewis compares the tiny influence of hell upon the fortitude of heaven with a drop of ink in the Pacific Ocean. Even awful torment of the wicked cannot touch those filled with joy in heaven.

Ironically, in Seinfeld, the television sitcom that defined humor in the 90s, Puddy (Patrick Warburton) is not ambivalent about the ferocity of hell, and he tells Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) plainly what hell is going to be like. "It’s gonna be rough," Puddy says with a matter of fact deadpan.

Two Views of Hell has once again opened the debate over the nature of God’s punishment in hell. Is God’s punishment eternal in the sense that the wicked are tormented consciously without end or in the sense that the torment will be done once and for all and will be an eternally lasting destruction? Can we know precisely how the wicked will be punished in hell any more than we can envision exactly how we will live forever in heaven?

Does the side of the fence where we stand on this issue necessarily shape, as Fudge and Peterson say it does, our view of God and Christ? Perhaps the foundation of our view of God is not in knowing exactly how the wicked will be punished and how the saved will live eternally but in the fact that He will graciously save undeserving sinners who repent and punish the unrepentant sinners. Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz and author of Theology for the Community of God says, "the debate raised by annihilationists reminds us of the difficulties that arise whenever we attempt to pinpoint the eternal situation of the lost."

The debate can do some good, Grenz adds, "if it leads us to realize that we ought never to speak about the fate of the lost without tears in our eyes."

Greg Taylor is managing editor for new Wineskins magazine.

Footnote:

I decided to put the scriptures used by both authors to the test of the plain reading that they both confidently say is possible. I gave each scripture one of three categories: traditional-leaning, conditional-leaning, and neutral or inconclusive. I looked at the following scriptures: Isaiah 66:22-24; Daniel 12:1-2; Matthew 18:6-9, 25:31-46; Mark 9:42-48; II Thessalonians 1:5-10; Jude 7, 13; Revelation 14:9-11, 20:11-13. Both authors chose various other scriptures to support their argument, so I included Matthew 13:30-43; 16:19-31; Isaiah 33:10-24; Revelation 19:11-16; John 5:28-29; II Corinthians 5:6-8. I found that what Peterson calls "plainly biblical" (179) and Fudge repeatedly refers to as "the natural and obvious" (63) or "ordinary" (29) meaning is not quite as clear as the nose on your face. The majority of the passages came up neutral.

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