I recently saw the most amazing film, a documentary, called
"Capturing the Friedmans". It will no doubt be nominated for an Academy
Award, and it may well win. Whether or not it does, it will stick in your
mind for some time.
It is about the grandest drama each of us ever participates in:
growing up in a family. How parents treat the kids, how we learn how, or
whether, to comfort (or hurt) our siblings, how we pick up the social
rules of the family world, the regular deployment of intense
emotions--this is the everyday stuff of family life. Enough drama to last
most of us a lifetime. And the core material on which we build our sense
of self.
The film focuses on one particular middle class family and how it
unravels after a charge of sexual abuse is leveled at the father and the
youngest of three sons. But the family story eventually becomes
inseparable from the story of sex crimes investigations and of the very
elusive--and illusive--nature of memory. And especially whether--or
not--any children who took after-school computer classes in the Friedman
home were sexually abused and, if they were, how they acquired that
memory. Because of the hundreds of kids who took classes there, none of
them ever came forward on their own with stories of any
impropriety.
The film is brilliantly constructed to raise so many questions in
your mind about what goes on in families and about judging others that
when the lights go up afterwards you want only to stay in place and
continue to think about the family tragedy you have just witnessed. More
than 48 hours after I had left the movie theater, the film was still very
much inhabiting my thoughts.
Which brings me to the subject of memory and what it is. A topic
very much under scrutiny by top scientists. And a subject central to
knowing who we are.
One of the most important findings of researchers is that memory,
this thing we consider so firm, is really highly malleable. It is
perpetually shifting. So memory to begin with is an imperfect reflection
of what is, or was.
And people can actually invent memories of events that never
happened., because the exact same centers of the brain that get activated
by perception, that is, by actually witnessing something, also get
activated by imagination. So if we generate images, or are fed images, of
an event we never personally experienced firsthand, they get recorded in
our brain cells as if they were real.
Helping this process along is the fact that we remember the content
of memories--but not what the source of that memory is. As time passes,
we tend to forget how we know something; we just know that we know
it.
And we "know" it with a very emotional certainty. Because the
emotions associated with events carve their own strong pathways in our
brain, and these pathways are lasting.
What we don't realize is that most memories are, as one researcher
says, "creative blendings of fact and fiction, where images are
alchemized by experience and emotion into memories."
So why memory feels absolute, it is not. It is not at all a camera
but a highly impressionistic painting.
You'll need to remember that as you see the film. And it would be
wise to remember that as you approach everything else in life.
Tags:
abuse,
academy awards,
capturing the friedmans,
core material,
deployment,
documentary,
family tragedy,
film,
friedman,
impropriety,
intense emotions,
judging others,
lifetime,
Memory,
middle class family,
movie theater,
no doubt,
school computer classes,
scrutiny,
sense of self,
sex,
sex crimes investigations
