Final Blossay: Memory

Memory is something that humans rely on to make their decisions or to relive memories of happiness or sadness. We remember things which is why we remember whose birthday it is or what our sisters favorite color is. A memory can also recall a moment that truly changed our lives a moment that made us who we are today.  The films I have chosen to write on memory are Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…Spring, Ikiru, Sandakan 8 and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. All of these films feature characters whose stories are truly affected by their past and their own memories.  

            Ikiru is an obvious film that shows the life of the main character and how he reflected on his own life at the discovery that his life will end.  When someone hears that their life may end they reflect on their own past and on what they want to do with the time left. Watanabe sits in a funk when he learns that he will soon die of cancer. We see Watanabe’s reflection on his own life and life as he raised his son alone after the death of his wife. Watanabe’s memories of how he raised his son changed how he lived his life after his untold diagnosis. Watanabe and his son have a strained relationship to begin with, when Watanabe learns that he is dying he thinks of how he cared for his son and for how he wishes his son would care for him. When Watanabe thinks of his son when his appendix was taken out as a child he thinks of how he wants to be cared for and how absent he was as a parent.

            Death and memories are highly associated in Ikiru. We see Watanabe and his son in front of him in the car leaving Watanabe’s wife’s funeral. We see Watanabe’s sad face, with his open eyes that is the main facial expression in the film. We see his son looking so blank, so confused but also filled with emotion. Watanabe holds and cradles his son, knowing how much their life has changed now that his wife has died. When Watanabe cradles his son it shows a new beginning a start of their lives as just father and son. This memory stuck out to me because of the new life that it symbolized for Watanabe, he held his son and was his sons only provider. This moment is shown throughout the film, when Watanabe and his son are in scenes together. We see Watanabe not being the greatest father figure in the flashback scenes in the film.   

            Most of Sandakan 8 is Osaki telling her story as her life of a prostitute when she was a young woman. She tells her story and is reliving her story during her interview and discussion with Keiko. While she relives her story she gets emotionally attached to Keiko. Another reason she gets emotional is because of her new attachment to Keiko and the fact that so many people abandoned her because of her past with prostitution. Reliving memories of the pain and sadness that she felt when she lived in the house in her youth created such a horrid memory of her own past.

            Osaki tells her story throughout the film, we tells her story of how she survived as a prostitute in her youth. Those memories of her pain and of how much she worked shaped who she was. Not only did being a prostitute change her because of her experiences working but it shaped her life after she left Sandakan 8. When Osaki goes back to live with her brother he mistreats her simply because she was a prostitute.  She was isolated from her own family that wanted her safety and happiness more than anything else. I remember when she went on the boat to leave and her brother ran to the top of the mountain just to watch her sail away. Where is that brother, that wanted to say he last goodbye to his sister? After she slept with so many men she was discarded from her own family. She worked so hard to make sure that she and her family were able to live a better life. Her brother discards her and wants her out of her life because she was a prostitute. After she leaves her brothers home she marries a man and has a child, a son. When her husband dies, her son lets her take care of him and then after he marries and has his own family he disregards her, and sends her an allowance as his only way to have a relationship with him. Her decision, no not even her decision but being forced into prostitution ruined Osaki’s family relationships and her reputation as a woman in society.

            Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon shows Jen in her captivity with Lo. We see Jen and Lo together we see the love between them and the intimacy in their relationship. We see Jen not as a fighter but as a sensitive woman in love. Jen and Lo have a passionate connection that we only see in flashback scenes in the desert. We see Jen as a vulnerable woman, which is a complete 180 from the strong fighter that she is after she is trained by Jade Fox. As I personally watched the film I began to warm up to Jen when I saw how vulnerable a character that she is and watching a woman in love shows a different side to a tough woman, though it is a cliché. We would view Jen differently if we did not see her time with Lo in the cave in the desert. We also learn of the troubles that Jen feels towards her own family. This foreshadows to the broken relationship that she has with Jade Fox. When we see Jen as a woman in love we see how she could grow so attached to Shu Lien. Jen is someone that wanted to be nurtured and loved, not thrown into battle or into a forced a marriage.

            Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…Spring tells a story of life lessons, youth, and dedication. We see a young monk who tortures animals by tying a rock to a fish so it sinks to the bottom of a pond, tying a string around a frog so tightly that we see air puff up between the tight string, and the boy ties a string around the neck of the snake, making it hard to breathe. The animals torture is a foreshadowing of the murder that the monk commits later in life. Would we view the monk differently if he committed the murder, and we didn’t know of his torturing past? Is the torturing of the animals showing us what he is truly capable of?   Was the animal torture just a curiosity inside of him? Or was he truly rebelling from the path of peace and enlightenment that he was going on? When the young monk thinks of how his actions ended up killing the fish and the snake, he cries. After he kills his wife he later reacts emotionally like he did as a child. I wonder is he thinking back to that time as a child, when he was so vulnerable and so distraught, after the realization that he killed two people. We also see the pattern reemerge when the new young monk, is torturing animals in an even crueler way. Filling the animals mouths with rocks and watching them drown and suffer in the pond. When we see this, we see that the cycle will continue and maybe it will even grow worse.  Since we knew the past of the old monk does this change how we view the younger monk while torturing the animals?

            All four films show the past of the protagonists or in some cases the antagonists of the films. Does what they did in their past affect what they did in the films? How do they react to what they have done in the past? How does the audience react with knowing, or not knowing what has happened before the film even started? Like most films these films started off with the unknown, we did not immediately know who the characters were or what previously had happened to the characters. As we learned of the characters past and memories we learned more about them and about the relationships and hardships that each character went through in their life before the film.  

            Another theme in the memories of all for films is that it showed our main characters in such vulnerable places in their life. We see signs of weakness and of moments when they didn’t make the greatest decisions, moments when they might regret something or moments when they had to make huge moral decisions that changed their lives and the lives of those that surrounded them. When you think of a weak moment in your life it is easy to feel vulnerable again. We see this when Watanabe thinks of leaving his son after he goes into surgery, or when Osaki thinks of the first time she has sex as a prostitute, when Jen decides that she has to go back home and leave Lo and when the monk thinks of the animals that he has hurt.

            In conclusion memories affect everyone, not only in these films but in our world. Memories help shape the experiences we have and how we react to certain situations and to people we communicate with. The four films that I wrote about dealt well with memories and how they affected the characters’ lives. I learned so much about memory and storytelling while analyzing these four very different films.