"There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory": Memory in pop culture and fictional famous people

In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a new character is introduced but in a very unusual way. The new character was Buffy's sister, Dawn, and this wasn't a sister who had lived with Buffy's father and had come to visit, or a long lost half-sister, but rather she appeared in an episode and everyone simply acknowledged her as Dawn, Buffy's younger sister, who had always been around. Fans of the show were confused as in the previous seasons Buffy had had no sister. What was even more confusing was that this wasn't cleared up in a single episode where it was revealed that Dawn was a monster who could alter memories, or was a weird ghost, but the storyline of where Dawn came from was the subject for the whole season and for a number of episodes nothing was made of her sudden appearance at all. At the time I had been convinced that they would never explain where Dawn came from and that Buffy had always had a sister but she had just never happened to be present or ever mentioned. I swore to stop watching the show if that was the case. Fortunately Joss Whedon had not elected to do a Stalin-esque style reimagining of history and there was a suitable sci-fi/fantasy reason for everything that had happened and indeed everyone's memories had been altered and Dawn had only started to exist a few months ago.

Michelle Trachtenburg playing Dawn - because of her
character's arrival I nearly stopped watching Buffy

This leads me to a curious and potentially terrifying idea, how do we know any of the people around us are genuine and our memories are correct? This is even more of a problem with celebrities and public figures in that most of us will never meet them. I raise this issue because I feel I have found two such instances of people who did not exist until very recently, two "Dawns" as it were. The first is Amy Schumer, star of Trainwreck, who I had never heard of before the publicity for that film. Now, I am a fan of American comedy, I watch a lot of standup and listen to a number of American podcasts where they discuss pop culture and I had never heard of her. Schumer was not some overnight star and people referenced her successful career to date but the fact that I had never heard of her was very suspicious indeed. Who was this woman who was so funny? YouTube is full of Amy Schumer clips, interviews and more, she has a wikipedia page, a website, twitter, IMDB page and more.

The potentially fictional Amy Schumer

The second example is even creepier. A few months ago I first heard the name Wilkie Collins, for those who don't know (which until very recently included me) he is a nineteenth century English writer known for such works as The Woman in White and The Moonstone and was a friend of Charles Dickens. I think I first heard about him on Robin Ince and Josie Long's Book Shambles podcast and all of a sudden he was everywhere. He was mentioned in books, articles, other podcasts and here is the really creepy bit...I recently read a book called Canonbridge, which is a novel about a mysterious nineteenth century author named Matthew Canonbridge who never really existed and was only created recently. And who does Canonbridge meet at one point in  the book? Wilkie Collins. That has to mean something very important and is definitely not just a coincidence.

This can't be the real Wilkie Collins - he's what an acting agency
would send to play stereotypical Victorian novelist

What is going on here? One conclusion is that I am not as well read and culturally savvy as I think I am (I think we can safely rule that out), the other is that new and interesting people are being inserted into our collective culture and memory. Look at the evidence, Wilkie Collins is not the name of a Victorian novelist, it's what the frontman of an obscure American indie band is called (probably Grandaddy) and as for Amy Schumer, many people seem to think women are inherently not funny so she must be fake. This could mean that all the other women I've thought were funny are perhaps fictional as well but we'll leave that to one side for now.

Memories are by no means an immutable record of exactly what has happened and are easily influenced.Groundbreaking psychology experiments by Elizabeth Loftus showed just how bad memory could be, in perhaps her most famous study people were shown footage of car crashes and then later on asked questions about what they had seen. Simply by changing one word in the question completely changed people's answers, so they were asked about what they saw when one car "hit" another or "smashed" or "contacted", these small cues had people inventing all sorts of details. If you phrase a question like in certain ways it affects the answers, far more people reported seeing broken glass when asked "did you see any broken glass" than asked to simply recite the things they had seen.
Pop culture is obsessed with memory, whether it's Guy Pearce's anterograde amnesia in Memento, which prevented him from making new memories and made him very vulnerable when trying to investigate his wife's murder, or  Arnold Schwarznegger in Total Recall playing a spy given a false memory of a boring every day existence.

Guy Pearce in Memento - he used tattoos to record important information

One of the most interesting and terrifying uses of memories is in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series of books which contained a truly terrifying villain, Aornis Hades who has the ability to manipulate the memories of her victims, at first she uses her power on the hero, Thursday Next, to try and empty out all her memories, When Thursday Next defeated this attempt Aornis has a new weapon. Instead of erasing memories she gives Thursday new memories, to be exact she gives her the memories of a non-existent daughter; Jenny. From time to time she will ask after Jenny and her family play along, "Oh Jenny is at a friend's house," or whatever but sooner or later Thursday will work it out and every time she goes through the horrible realisation that a daughter she thought she had didn't exist and goes through a unique and devestating mourning. All of Jasper Fforde's work is an absolute treat of quirky ideas, well-written and intensely likeable characters and to those well-read enough to get all the references in the literature themed Thursday Next series there are constant delights - please note that I don't get all the literature references and have to consult my girlfriend, Spooky Reading Girl, to explain reference to Austen, the Brontes and many other classics.

The first of the brilliant Thursday Next series

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind features memories as characters, most of what we see of Kate Winslet's character Clem is not the real Clem but the memory of her. The film was about a very niche company who would erase unpleasant memories and their clients are often people who want to forget about past loves, which is what Clem does and in response what Jim Carrey's Joel does in retaliation. The film is genuinely heartbreaking as memories are erased from Joel and inside his mind he tries to fight it as he realises the value of these memories and even if in the end their relationship didn't  work out the memories were too important to lose.

The confusing world of Joel's memory

So as we've established memories can be changed, deleted, or invented so is it really so hard to believe that both Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer are fictional creations the real questions are who has done this and why? Admittedly it gets a little more complicated with Amy Schumer seeing as she is...well, alive, but still not impossible. I suspect it to be a sinister and shadowy government organisation responsible for creating elaborate illusions of famous comedians and writers but unfortunately I am still at a loss for why. I am hoping that there will be a Wilkie Collins-Amy Schumer vehicle, probably an action-comedy buddy cop movie featuring Wilkie Collins and Amy Schumer in which not only do they solve time travelling crimes against literature but she learns valuable lesson about motherhood - but perhaps I am reading too much into Schumer's IMDB page.

Fan Theories - The X-Files, The Tommy Westphall Universe, Lost and more

Major spoilers for The X-Files, St. Elsewhere, Lost, The Shining

As I watched The X-Files the other day I noticed something slightly peculiar. The episode was Chinga, which is about an evil cursed doll, but what was peculiar was the actor playing the sheriff had appeared in The X-Files before, in Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space', where he played a detective. I have looked it up and he has been in the show five times playing different characters. This happens quite often in television, especially American shows where they might have twenty episodes a season, But it perhaps offers an interesting additional insight. In the world of the show are they meant to be completely separate characters? The X-Files has had episodes about clones and about creatures that change their appearance, is there more going on here? The short answer is no, I'm sure the producers just knew he was a good actor so why not keep using him? There a lot of fan theories in television and movies, sometimes involving just the world of the show, sometimes more about how it was made.

Larry Musser - this guy played five different characters in The X-Files

The best fan theory has to be the "Tommy Westphall Universe" theory from the tv show St. Elsewhere. It's not a show I've ever watched but at the end of the show it became apparent that the entire universe of St. Elsewhere existed only in the imagination of one of the characters; Tommy Westphall. That isn't the weird part, the weird part is that some characters from St. Elsewhere have appeared in other television shows, which would suggest they only exist in Tommy's imagination as well, such as Homicide: Life On The Streets. Currently The Tommy Westphall Universe blog has listed 419 tv shows as potentially only existing in Tommy's mind. Really though it can effectively cover all of film and television as any actor appearing on St Elsewhere was just a creation of Tommy, so it could follow that Denzel Washington is his creation, and all of the films Washington has made are his creation and that all the actors in all those different films are Tommy's creations and on and on.....
To see the complete list of shows and more ideas about the theory go to https://thetommywestphall.wordpress.com/the-master-list/

Tommy Westphall - who imagined hundreds of tv shows

There are three main fan theory categories that have been suggested for so many things they've become a little cliched:

1. It's just someone's fantasy - examples -Harry Potter, Titanic, Saved By The Bell, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Friends - all these and more have been suggested as the fantasy of one of the central characters or a large part is fantasy. Something like Harry Potter, where a person is whisked away from a dull or bad life into something new and exciting and where they are very special is a common psychological problem in people who have had traumatic lives. Ferris Bueller's Day Off is said to be largely the creation of Ferris's friend, Cameron, the neurotic stressed out, weirdo who created the figure of Ferris Bueller to allow him to do stuff he really wanted to do.

Ferris Bueller...this guy was a fantasy

2. They're dead - Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Rug Rats, Grease, Mad Men, Interstellar, Breaking Bad - this is perhaps the most common, a central character has died and the story taking place is either the dying dream of the person or their perception of the afterlife. In The Fresh Prince of Bel Air Will was actually killed in the fight shown in the opening credits and living in rich Bel Air was Heaven. Just looking up these theories I found the one about Rug Rats, in that all the children apart from Angelica, are dead most disturbing.

Will Smith...this guy was dead

For category 1 and 2 it should be a distinction made between films where this is a fan theory and what is actually supposed to have happened in the story, so far example Grease is a film where there is a theory that Sandy has been dead all along, but  in The Sixth Sense Bruce Willis's psychiatrist actually has been dead all along.

3. Everything is connected - Tarantino, Pixar universe- these are theories about connected pieces of work and how they share a deeper connection, for example with the works of Quentin Tarantino. It started with the idea that Kill Bill starring Uma Thurman as a member of a team of assassins is very similar to the tv show described by Uma Thurman's character, Mia Wallace, in Pulp Fiction, is Kill Bill simply the film of the fictional tv show from Pulp Fiction? It has since been expanded with Inglourious Basterds into something far more complicated, in this film Hitler is gunned down, set on fire and blown up, which is obviously different to reality and a theory suggests that in an alternate universe that is what happened. In this alternate universe as these acts of violence brought an end to World War 2 pop culture is far more violent and aggressive so films like Kill Bill or Django Unchained are made. So there are two types of Tarantino films - first the ones like Inglourious Basterds which are the audience seeing this alternate reality, and second type like Kill Bill which are movies from that alternate universe. Tarantino has recently confirmed that this theory is right insofar as Kill Bill is the film version of the tv show mentioned in Pulp Fiction.

The interconnected Tarantino films

The Shining is a film with so many bizarre theories they made a film about some of them, Room 237. What is the film really about? One of the most interesting theories is that it is Kubrick's confession that he faked the moon landing footage and while I don't believe this for one second there is a somewhat convincing argument.  The proponent of this theory goes to some lengths to show how everything in a Kubrick film is put there intentionally - another documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes showed the huge lengths Kubrick went to to get things exactly right - so why is Danny wearing a jumper with the Apollo 11 rocket on it? That was Kubrick's subtle clue that he had filmed the moon landing. Other theories include the film is all about the genocide of Native Americans, or that it's about the holocaust. Many peculiar little features are pointed out, the layout of the hotel doesn't seem to make sense and why does the typewriter Jack used change colour? And if you think that these odd little mistakes are just some oversight on Kubrick's part then you don't know Kubrick. As mentioned if something was in shot it was there for a reason, if that typewriter changed colour it's because it meant something to Kubrick.

The Shining - Kubrick's elaborate confession that he faked the moon landing

In terms of fan theories Lost is very much The Shining of the television world (but is certainly not it's equal in quality or originality). I gave up on Lost as I felt like the writers had no idea where it was going and that their plots were picked the same way South Park claimed jokes were written for Family Guy. Every week something new and weird popped up and there came a point where I realised the writers were never going to be able to satisfactorily explain it all. In fact, fans of the show had guessed the plot-twist, that they had been dead all along and the island was some weird purgatory, quite early on but this was denied by the writers. Lost is the perfect show for fans to make up their own theories as the show was so overly complicated and had all kinds of weird stuff going on and even when the "real" explanation was given fans have kept coming up with their own "better" theories.

Lost - there are far too many theories for this show

Here are a few of the suggested theories:

• The island is Hell, 
• The island is Eden (as in Adam and Eve Eden), 
• The island is Atlantis.
• The island is a broken time machine from the future.
• The island is an alien spaceship
• The island was created when the moon and Earth collided,
• The island is a "Truman Show" style reality tv show/board game played by powerful people/social experiment
• The black smoke monster is a cloud of nanobots 
• The whole thing is caused by the Y2K virus
• Clones!
• Dinosaurs!
• Zombies!

Increasingly some of these theories don't have much evidence behind them other than just being weird. The actual finale to the show was considered to be a disappointment by many as it failed to tie everything together in a pleasing way. I think to do that you need to know from the beginning what is going to happen and where the show is going and I can't help but think they just made it up as they went along. The reimagined Battlestar Galactica struck me as a show where the writers had planned everything out in advance and broadly knew what was going to happen every season but Lost just seemed to have the weirdness turned up to 11. In many ways Lost is similar to The X-Files in that The X-Files showed lots and lots of weird things happen and for all of it to make some kind of logical sense was impossible.

So we're back to The X-Files which is back on television and I am watching very closely to see if this guy turns up again.

"Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories".- Villains who have inspired me

Major spoilers for Die Hard, The Matrix and Blackadder


In an earlier blog I picked three characters from films that were a big inspiration to me, to the person I wanted to become - they were Westley/The Man In Black from The Princess Bride, T.E Lawrence from Lawrence of Arabia and Gustav H from The Grand Budapest Hotel. These three are the heroes of their films and with the recent death of Alan Rickman I put some thought into if there might be villains who were equally inspiring.


Hans Gruber  - Die Hard

The benefits of a classical education

Alan Rickman was a great actor and had a career that gave him a chance to play every sort of role but for me, and for many others, his best role was as German criminal mastermind Hans Gruber in Die Hard. It may not have been Austen or Shakespeare but Die Hard was a great film, but it was a great film with a terrible flaw, the villain was so much better than the hero. Every time I watch it I'm on the side of the articulate, well-dressed and composed European, not the frantic New York cop running around with no shoes on. For those who don't know in the film Die Hard a group of mainly European criminals take over the Nakatomi building and hold the staff hostage. They are professional, well-prepared and know exactly what they are doing. At first it seemed that these men were terrorists, wanting the release of fellow terrorists but actually they were planning on stealing the millions of dollars in the building. Their plan was thwarted by John McClane, the estranged husband of a high-ranking employee, who was also a cop back home in New York. The criminals were lead by Rickman's Hans Gruber, the most effete criminal mastermind this side of Raffles the Gentleman Thief.

Certainly if I was to be a movie villain I'd be more Hans Gruber and less Scarface or Hannibal Lector. McClane doesn't think much of Gruber seeing him as little more than an ambitious bank robber but I think McClane has underestimated him. The safe they are trying to break into is protected by electronic locks that they can't disable and throughout the first half of the film this was presented as an unsolvable problem but Gruber has thought about this. When McClane managed to alert the local authorities of the hostage situation, Gruber didn't really care, this was because his plan was centred on the police being made aware - why? Because in a hostage situation the FBI would follow procedure and cut the power. Gruber had the FBI do what was impossible for him to do, turn off the electronic locks. For all that he is the villain of the film Gruber is not even the most unpleasant person in the film, that honour fell to the coked up businessman douchebag Harry Ellis, a thoroughly terrible person and a pastiche of 1980s businessman/executive cliches. There is also the hideous news presenter who through sheer stupidity almost caused the death of McClane's wife. True neither Ellis nor the news presenter killed anyone but they were self-serving idiots who didn't care what happened to other people - at least Gruber was more up front about it.

What I took from Hans Gruber whatever you're doing it never hurts to be well-dressed and well-read.

Agent Smith - The Matrix

"Mr. Anderson"

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I don't think being in the matrix is all that bad, certainly a lot better than many movie alternatives. But admittedly the agents who helped control that world were a pretty ruthless bunch. Seemingly the leader of the agents was Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith. Of all the unflappable, calm and in control agents he is the most unflappable, most calm and most in control. Hugo Weaving does an excellent job playing Agent Smith and before it was explained exactly what he was it's clear he wasn't a normal human just from the way he acted. I am a big fan of Hugo Weaving and that started with this film and a lot of it was based on the way he said "Mr. Anderson" the name of Keanu Reeve's character. He spoke in a dull monotone but still managed to convey contempt and disgust. Agent Smith's best moment was when after getting in a fight with Keanu Reeves he was hit by a subway train. The train screeched to a sudden stop and a second later Agent Smith stepped out of the train unscathed having taken over another body and still looking entirely unfazed by the entire incident - like I said, unflappable.

Agent Smith was cold, emotionally distant, rational - aside from the occasional rant about how he hated living in the Matrix, he took his time and spoke calmly. He wore a simple black suit unlike the over the top leather coats and sunglasses the humans wore. Agent Smith looked like someone in control, his movements were measured and precise. The humans were obsessed with all this mystical nonsense about finding "the One" but unsurprisingly the agents had more straightforward and concrete plans. There is an admirable amount of dedication in Agent Smith (and yes in the film he's the "bad guy" but the humans and robots are fighting a war of survival and the humans blocked out the sun so maybe they're not the "good guys") for example at the end of the film when it has been demonstrated that nothing they can do can kill Neo he stands his ground.


Edmund Blackadder - Blackadder

Edmund Blackadder shooting a pigeon...scarcely a court martial offence

I have loved the tv show Blackadder for a long long time. In the dark days when it was prohibitively expensive and space consuming to own all your favourite shows I had a single tape of Blackadder -the first three episodes of the fourth series - Blackadder Goes Forth, the World War I years, and I watched it over and over again. The star of Blackadder was Edmund Blackadder and each series took on a different time period and a different Edmund Blackadder. The first series was the uneven and least loved War of the Roses era Blackadder, with Edmund being the unloved and useless second son of the king, the second series was set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, or Queenie as she is known in the show, and Lord Blackadder is a member of the court. Series three was set in Regency England Blackadder is the butler for the Prince Regent. The last series is set during World War I and Edmund is now a professional soldier who doesn't much like soldiering.

The character was transformed between series one and two from the stupid and useless but hungry for power fool to the charming and fiendishly clever courtier and it was the latter Edmund that I liked so much. Edmund Blackadder wasn't just clever and funny, he was witty, he always the knew the right thing to say and outwitted all those around him. The clever Blackadder is surrounded by idiots and he relies only on his cunning to survive and prosper. This is of greatest importance during World War I when those idiots are very keen on sending thousands of soldiers to their deaths on a daily basis. Blackadder's despair at the handling of the war is summed up by him declaring it was  "a war which would be a damn sight simpler if we just stayed in England and shot fifty thousand of our men a week" and the scary thing was  that was probably right. In series two and three Blackadder had been a cad and a rogue but in series four he was battling the insanity of the First World War and it is hard not to be on his side. My favourite book is probably Catch 22 and what Joseph Heller did in that book - show that war was not only Hell but it was ridiculous - the writers of Blackadder did in that series.

Of course in Blackadder we are supposed to be on his side, in that sense he is not too much of a villain at the same time he does do a lot of terrible things - murder, blackmail, theft, assault and many of these cruel acts are against blameless people. Even when picking on the harmless Baldrick we laugh and feel little sympathy for him. When Rick Mayall turned up in Blackadder Goes Forth as the heroic Lord Flashheart we still want Blackadder to come out on top. Flashheart is over the top, loud, and has no self-deprecation, not traits to endear him to the British public. We much prefer the sarcastic smart alec always insulting people.

So for my three villainous heroes I have a well-dressed German bank robber, an emotionally devoid computer programme and a cowardly and devious wit. The one characteristic they all share is being good with words - even Agent Smith has great lines- and while I didn't have that in mind when I picked them it is certainly a trait I really admire.