Thanks for the memories (redux)

We’ve all seen that spotless sunshine film where Kate Winslet and Jim Carey pay scientists to make them forget themselves, then end up deserving each other.

It’s coming true. Not Kate Winslet and Jim Carey: the bit about scientists being able to Tippex out your worst memories.

A scientist with a beard and another one with glasses, have discovered a “window of vulnerability” for eliminating a memory at the point at which its unique receptor proteins are created.

Yank out the proteins in their unstable phase; you’ve yanked out the memories. I must have said the same thing a million times myself.

Conventionally, people tend to think of these developments in terms of the possibility of wiping out painful memories. The loss, the anguish, the heartbreak, the failure, chalked off like disallowed goals.

Mr Science says it could be set to work on people who’ve suffered some traumatic experience: a soldier returning from a warzone, or something like it.

I’ve got another idea. What I want is to edit my memories so that my internal life becomes more entertaining. It should be easy: just work on the early sections and blank out key bits of information about myself that might ruin the story later.

Imagine my life story begins when I was born. Actually, you don’t need to imagine that — it does begin when I was born. So, instead of being a sort of humdrum vaguely chronological meander through birthdays and trips to the zoo, when I think about my childhood, my memory narrator (who has a deep bass voice like the Hollywood movie trailer voiceover guy) could go:

This is the story of an ordinary teddy bear (I’m adopting Superted‘s life story for the purposes of this example). When he was made they found something wrong with him, and threw him away like a piece of rubbish…

Cut.

Now we need a few establishing memories here. The actual Superted story glosses over this too quickly. I want a little bit of brain footage of me being bullied at school for being a defective bear: dunked in the toilet, dumped in a rubbish bin, that sort of stuff. But not too much. Quick, brain, back to the story.

Then from outer space a spotty man brought him to life with his cosmic dust.

Brilliant, Brain. I don’t need to know anything more than that. Spottty man; cosmic dust. Good, press on.

He took him to a magic cloud where Mother Nature gave him special powers.

Brain, you’re a born entertainer…

You get the gist of this now. It’s going to be a sort of internal Trueman Show that I inflict on myself, but then delete the memory of my doing it so as not to spoil a possible plot twist. Or if I really wanted, I could just hire myself a director.

Have to be careful though: you don’t want any old George Lucas or John Woo poking around in there. Although…

~ by David Thorley on December 3, 2010.