The autobiographical author of fiction and non-fiction Primo Levi said, “Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.”
For most of my life, I believed my memory for movies was an exception.
When I was young, my father had seen more movies, and more good movies, than anyone else I knew. He had been a film buff since the late 1930s, when he and his friends spent their weekends watching double and triple features. Decades later, he became the film critic for the CBS television affiliate in Washington, D.C.
His responsibilities included reviewing the bad films along with the good ones. When a universally panned sequel arrived in the 1980s, he developed a strategy for avoiding it. He would first see every new foreign film, independent film, and promising studio release playing at the city’s many theaters. With luck, the sequel would leave town before he got around to it.
Movies also shaped my childhood. I saw older films at the Georgetown Theatre, the Biograph, and the Circle. Later, I worked as an usher and cashier at the Tenley Circle Theatre, a position that came with free admission to movie houses across Washington. In 1983, I made a list of every movie I had seen. I could have called it simply “All the Movies.” Somehow, despite my dedication, I missed Terms of Endearment.
For many years, I had seen more films than my younger brother Oliver. Eventually, after he became a film critic himself, he passed me. My twenty-year-old son Truman may soon do the same. Truman approaches film history as a completionist. When he encounters a list of the greatest films ever made, he fills in the gaps. He has worked his way through lists compiled by critics, scholars, and the American Film Institute.
At a Poetry Night afterparty earlier this year, one of our regulars asked Truman what he thought of the films of Jacques Tati. Truman had plenty to say.
I still have the advantage in total films seen, although Truman’s knowledge of canonical films already rivals mine. This unsettles me slightly. I have studied film as an undergraduate and graduate student and taught film and film theory classes at UC Davis. For much of my life, I also possessed a peculiar form of movie memory. I could recall the Washington theater where I had seen almost every film between about 1978 and my departure for California in 1989. I could often remember who had accompanied me. I had confidence in my own mental archive. I believed I could reach into it and retrieve the circumstances surrounding almost any significant film from my youth.
Recently, I have been reflecting on how confidently memory invents.
My wife, Kate, asked why my then recently-divorced father had taken Oliver and me to see Kramer vs. Kramer when it was released. Oliver was about the same age as the little boy in the film, so she could imagine that the story of divorce might have unsettled him.
I corrected her immediately. My mother had taken us, I said. We had seen it at the Embassy Circle Theatre near Dupont Circle.
Even now, that recollection feels precise. It has a person, a place, and a family context. Yet my recent experiences have made me wonder what precision proves. A memory can arrive with architectural detail and still contain mistakes.
The clearest example came this past Monday, when Truman, my niece Clementine, and I went to the Tower Theatre to see John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Truman always finds us the greatest cinematic opportunities. He agrees with Truffaut’s comment: “The most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.”
I entered The Tower Theater confident that I had seen the movie before. I remembered one scene with unusual clarity. In it, James Stewart’s character wears an apron while bringing food to a group of cowboys and other demanding customers. I could picture the clothing, the public dining hall, and the tension created by the sight of a man serving food in a setting governed by masculine codes.
As the movie began, however, I recognized almost nothing.
At first, I assumed the familiar parts would soon appear. Then I began to wonder whether I had once fallen asleep during the opening half hour. More unfamiliar scenes followed. Perhaps, I thought, I had slept through the final hour as well?
Eventually, a more credible explanation emerged. I had never seen the entire film.
What I remembered was a single scene shown to me around 1991 by the film theorist Laura Mulvey, who visited UC Davis in 1991 to give a lecture attended by about twenty graduate students and me. She was a friend with my professor Sandra Gilbert, herself also a feminist critic.
Mulvey was already famous for her work on visual pleasure and the male gaze. She used the scene from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to examine gender roles and the way movies teach audiences to look at men and women. Liberty Valance, played by Oscar-winner Lee Marvin, humiliates Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) by calling him “the new waitress,” turning the apron into an object of ridicule and questioning Stoddard’s masculinity. Yet only Stoddard could de-escalate the violent confrontation between Valance and Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne.
For thirty-five years, Mulvey’s discussion of that single scene remained vivid enough to expand inside my mind. At some point, my memory converted a classroom excerpt into an entire viewing experience. I had retained the scene, the interpretation, and the intellectual excitement of the lecture. My mind had supplied the rest.
The episode revealed something more encouraging than simple forgetfulness. I had confused the film with the experience of being taught the film. Laura Mulvey’s interpretation had adhered to the scene so completely that I could no longer separate the work from the teacher who had shown me how to see it.
This happens often.
We think we remember a poem, a novel, a film, or an ancient story. Often, we are also remembering the person who first made the work vivid to us. The teacher enters the memory along with the material. Years later, the voice explaining the story may endure as strongly as the story itself.
This realization carries particular significance for me because I am now assembling a memoir about my teaching experiences. Much of that memoir begins with scenes I have remembered for decades. A student enters a classroom. Someone asks an unexpected question. A discussion takes a surprising turn. A remark made in passing becomes the part of the class that survives.
I discovered that I have as many memories of encountering students outside the classroom, sometimes unexpectedly, as I do of teaching them familiar lessons.
With regard to my memoir project, I see my early teaching experiences through the eyes of someone who has now taught for more than thirty-five years. Experience helps me interpret those moments, but it can also revise them. The teacher I am today looks back at the graduate student instructor I was in the early 1990s and imposes patterns and insights that may have become visible only later.
My former students also carry their own versions of those encounters. They may remember a class discussion that vanished from my memory. They may interpret an exchange in a way that would surprise me. A moment I regarded as incidental may have shaped a decision they made years later. A lesson I considered central may have disappeared before the end of the week.
In about 1992, my student Chris wrote me a note that my scratchy voice made it difficult for him to follow the lecture, and had I considered bringing water or lozenges to class? As someone who has worked in radio for more than 25 years, I think often of that remark while preparing my voice for broadcast. Many of the faculty I have met with while giving mid-quarter evaluations of their teaching have told me that they remember the encouraging assessments for minutes and the negative comments for decades. As the African proverb says, “The tree remembers what the axe forgets.”
One chapter of my recorded memoir tells the story of a student who would hurry into the classroom, duffel bag over one shoulder, the hard plastic of her rugby gear clacking softly with every step. She always had a practice or a scrimmage shortly before our class met. The image has stayed with me for three decades.
I remember that her name was Dianna. I also remember roughly when I taught her. The difficulty is that I taught more than one Dianna during that period, and the class rosters from the 1990s contain no photographs.
Was I remembering the right Dianna when I recorded the story?
The uncertainty does not erase the student entering the classroom in rugby equipment. I can still see her entering my writing classroom as many others had before and since. They arrive from laboratories, rehearsals, jobs, athletic fields, family responsibilities, and private struggles that we faculty will never fully understand.
Yet memoir asks for greater care than a good image alone can provide. The scene may be accurate while the name attached to it is wrong. The emotional meaning may have endured while the surrounding details shifted.
Writers of narrative nonfiction have long faced this problem. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, one of the foundational works of literary journalism, includes scenes and details that raise serious questions about how Capote could have known them. How could Capote have known details about the Clutter family conversations on that tragic day in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959?
Capote also believed he could reconstruct scenes with a certainty that later critics questioned. New Yorker essayist and author David Sedaris has described being questioned closely about the factual basis of essays he submitted there. For example, Sedaris once wrote that he bought “a gross of condoms” at Costco. The checker objected because Costco did not sell condoms in quantities of 144, so Sedaris changed “a gross” to “a mess.”
No fact-checker at The New Yorker is waiting to determine which Dianna played rugby before attending my writing and science class in the 1990s. Still, I owe my students and readers an honest account of what I know, what I can verify, and what memory alone supplies.
Brackets, qualifications, and corrections may become part of the memoir’s method. I can say that I remember a student named Dianna while acknowledging uncertainty about her full identity. I can distinguish the vividness of the scene from the unreliability of every detail surrounding it.
The most responsible memoir may allow readers to see this process. Memory offers evidence, emotion, and meaning. Records supply dates, names, and sequence. Other people contribute versions that may reinforce or challenge our own. The memoirist seeks to place these sources in conversation.
Teachers face a related mystery. We rarely know which parts of our teaching will remain with students.
This past Sunday, I attended a talk about The Odyssey. During the discussion, I found myself remembering two episodes from the Greek myths and history that had first been made vivid to me by Jack Petrash, my Waldorf teacher. After my parents, Jack played the largest role in guiding my education from first through eighth grade. One episode involved Odysseus feigning insanity by plowing a field and sowing it with salt. Whenever I encounter that story, I think of Jack.
The other involved Argos, the old dog who recognizes Odysseus after twenty years of absence. As an undergraduate, I studied that episode with Carolyn Williams, an award-winning distinguished professor who now teaches at Rutgers. Yet it was Jack’s telling of the story that first fixed it in my imagination.
Jack knew the names of our dogs.
That fact may explain why his version stayed with me. He understood that the death of Argos would reach children through their own experience of loving animals. He connected an ancient epic to the dogs waiting for us at home.
Laura Mulvey and Jack Petrash taught in different settings. Mulvey addressed graduate students through the language of film theory. Jack told ancient stories to children. Both knew how to choose the best scene and give it lasting force.
Mulvey left me with an apron, a serving tray, and a new way to examine masculinity in a Western. Jack left me with a salted field and an old dog recognizing his master one last time.
I did not retain every word of either lesson. I retained the scenes they taught me to notice.
As I record stories about my former students, I am also recording traces of my own teachers. Their methods appear in the questions I ask, the stories I emphasize, and the details I hope my students will remember. My teaching life contains Laura Mulvey’s close attention to images, Jack Petrash’s ability to connect epic stories to a child’s daily life, Carolyn Williams’s scholarly guidance, and my father’s lifelong devotion to film.
The people who taught us become part of the way we encounter the world. We look through lenses they helped to shape. We hear their voices when an old story returns. Sometimes we even remember seeing a film because a teacher once showed us a few unforgettable minutes of it.
This week Truman and I will see The Odyssey in IMAX. I will arrive with memories formed by Homer, Jack Petrash, Carolyn Williams, and the many later interpreters who have returned me to the story.
Even if I pay close attention, years from now, I may forget portions of the film. I may confuse one viewing with another conversation, lecture, or book. Yet a few scenes will remain.
Perhaps our most durable memories of art are shared creations. The artist gives us the work. A teacher shows us where to look.
I look forward to seeing you tonight with our more pleasant weather. Join us on the patio if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on leaders.
In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: Academy Awards, acting careers, adventures, affordability, albums, anagrams, animation, Apple, Arizona, athletics, bicycles, birds, birthplaces, books, Britain, Britain, California, campuses, chart hits, children’s entertainment, Civil War, classics, clothing, comedy, conservation, countries, counting, crime, directors, education, emotions, England, entrepreneurs, epics, Europe, film, flight, geography, geography, Grammy winners, Greek mythology, habits, health, history, history, Hollywood, India, independence, islands, lakes, Latin music, leadership, liquids, logos, literature, long-term trends, loyalty, marriages, manufacturing, memorable characters, movies, movies, mythology, networks, Nobel Prizes, novelists, Olympians, peripherals, playwrights, politics, politics, politics, politics, politics, pop music, presidents, psychology, quotations, recent history, records, recurring themes, research, Rome, saloons, scavengers, Scotland, seventeenth century, singers, soccer, South Asia, sports, statistics, television, television, track, transformations, universities, vegetables, verbs, vocabulary, westerns, women, youth current events, and Shakespeare.
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Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.
We are now past 100 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Cathy, Christine, Bobby, Esther, James, Damian, Jim, and Meebles! Thanks also to new subscribers Prescott, Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Hello to Bill and to Jude’s dad. Thanks in particular to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Elaine, Michael, Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion, especially this week
Best,
Dr. Andy
Three questions from last week:
- Books and Authors. The author of The Goldfinch and The Secret History shares a last name with what kind of delicacy?
- Film. What title character of a 1986 film teaches us that “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”?
- Countries of the World. China and Russia lead the world in combat tanks, with the United States coming in 4th. What country has the third largest number of combat tanks?