Do we remember beyond our own lifetime and experiences? It is theorised in psychology that we have genetic memory, a basic idea of some learned responses perhaps being handed down. But not actual experiences.

I’ll thrown in a few films to delve a little further into the idea, having already written an article about Memory, from a different angle but it ties in here too.

Dark City – it is about injecting memories into people, to create a ‘personality’ which can then be studied, where also the landscape changes and all the people are part of the set up. A good metaphor for society but condensed into short periodic changes – the idea that you are pumped full of ‘education’ and ideas, and conditioned of how to go with a certain history given to you. Then over time the landscape changes, buildings go up, and come down, place names change and people move around, adapting to the changes. All playing their part.

Aeon Flux – In a future time, where the population is sterile and breeding occurs through cloning, reusing people’s blueprints to keep the human race going. But as with much, it’s not quite as it seems, and memories are a running theme throughout, an overlay of what once was being carried down through the DNA.

The Island – another cloning one, but also very much about memory, and how the original host memories were ‘growing’ in the copy despite a complete lack of experience of any of the events. Only fragmented and coming through as dreams or nightmares, mixing with the clone’s life experiences to that point, creating an odd thought process and ‘reality’.

And this is where I wondered about people as we know them in our society, and if you did have clones amongst us as some speculate, would there be something different about them? Where they were almost an exact copy, but not quite, because you lose something of the original when you copy, or at least you used to. Maybe like the photocopier to scanner difference in quality, it is an improvable formula.

Or are memories more important than we realise, and aren’t because of being reused, but because we remembering what came before. Reincarnation of the stages and life cycles that are theorised probably tie in here, and maybe why it is necessary to keep changing things in society. Making sure knowledge is lost, people are split up and their traditions replaced with new ones carefully formulated to give them a past. Keeping us all away perhaps from who we really are…

(c) K Wicks