In Michel Gondry's film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet's characters, Joel and Clementine, underwent treatment to erase memories of their unhappy love affair. In real life, Genevieve Smith-Courtois is taking medicine to “dampen” the memory of a sexual assault she suffered nine years ago. The pill she swallows looks like a beta blocker. Indeed, it is a beta blocker, but one with a side-effect of blocking not just adrenalin but recall. After six weeks, when recollecting the assault under laboratory conditions, her symptoms had decreased by a third to below the post traumatic stress disorder threshold. Horizon (BBC Two) had a question to ask the clinical psychologist who devised Genevieve's brain dampening. What if a pill could be found to wipe out a bad memory altogether? Professor Alain Brunet's reply could have been a synopsis of the argument of Eternal Sunshine... It would not be a good thing. “Our identities are based on our memories and there needs to be continuity in time between who we are and what experiences we have had.” We are our memories.
In the last and best Horizon of the current season, Annabel Gillings took us on a cradle-to-grave tour of memory as identity and what it is like to lose both. Without recourse to the cinematic tricks of the Gondry movie, she produced a haunting and melancholic film that made those advertisements for memory courses look entirely irrelevant. As one shrink said, memorising a shopping list should not impress anybody: shopping lists were invented for a reason. It is the memory of felt experience that counts.
None of us, despite what Freud said, can remember much of what happened to us before we were five. After that, our ability to make connections between brain cells gets better and better, reaching full power at 19, where we retain 200 bits of information per second, far faster than a computer. But from 27, there is decline and fall. After 40, our brain cells die off at a rate of 10,000 a day. One of the experts mentioned a famous effect called the “er, I've forgotten it”. I'd judge him to be in his mid-forties. The scientists are not surprised. Brains get worn out. They are more impressed by how well human beings get by anyhow. Only in very old age does the decline threaten to become tragic. Over 85, half of us have some form of dementia. Reduced blood flow to the brain causes whole patches to die. In the most severe form of dementia, Alzheimer's, toxic proteins build up and silt up the brain.
But the failures of old age were not what made the film poignant, nor even Genevieve's too-vivid recollections. It would be far worse to be John Forbes, whose premature birth meant his memory circuit was never fully formed, preventing him from remembering his past or speculating about his future, since such speculation can only be based on remembered experience. Worse off still was John Stevenson, a former chartered surveyor, who had Alzheimer's diagnosed at 53. John was still physically fit and a devoted runner, but unable even to pour himself a glass of water because by the time he had located the glass he would have forgotten why he wanted it.
Over on More 4, A Small Town Murder was also focusing on human fallibility. One argument in favour of the CCTV cameras that are sprouting like mushrooms across the nation is that, for all their limitations, they are more or less objective witnesses. Human beings, on the other hand, are terrible witnesses, as anybody who has ever been in a courtroom during a criminal case can testify: they forget things, they mix up names, they get events in the wrong order, they make stuff up to sound more plausible or sober, and they construct elaborate fantasies to cover up things that nobody cares about, let alone the things that genuinely matter.
A Small Town Murder was a brilliant but dispiriting lesson in human unreliability. Mosco Boucault's True Stories film followed the work of police detectives in Roubaix in France, up by the Belgian border, a town of terraced houses and alleyways, visibly part of the European north that Jonathan Meades was banging on about a few weeks ago. It started out more or less conventionally, trailing the cops around as they went from house to house asking questions about a series of crimes: somebody had been stabbed in a row with a neighbour, a girl had disappeared, and an empty house had been gutted by arsonists. But about a quarter of an hour in, the film was derailed. A woman, Stephanie, was on the phone asking for protection. She and her friend Annie had been assaulted the previous week, and now someone was breaking a window downstairs, and they were frightened. Next, the camera showed images of an elderly woman lying dead on her bed. Then Stephanie was there in the flesh, explaining to a detective that it was Annie who had murdered the old lady, who was called Micheline, and showing off the swag that Annie had brought back from her house, including cleaning materials and cat food.
This turn of events seemed abrupt and enigmatic. We had met Stephanie and Annie a few minutes earlier in screen time as witnesses in the arson case. They lived opposite and they'd named names, but everyone they'd mentioned had turned up a cast-iron alibi (one was clocked in at work, another was in court in Lille), and the police had heard rumours that Annie and Stephanie were involved. That must have been a few weeks earlier – Annie's hair, which she kept cropped short, had grown out considerably – but the time-scheme remained fuzzy. The hectic pace was accelerated by French police practices. None of your cautions – or indeed your caution – here, and no lawyers, suspects were set down in a room together and encouraged to hector and play the blame game, and police yelled and threatened (but they never retreated into bureaucratic jargon, and always remained human). The contradictions piled up like leaves on Vallombrosa.
Pretty soon, Annie abandoned her denials, and between the two of them, a story came out. They had gone into Micheline's house to steal money, had taken her TV, and had then gone upstairs to search for money. When Micheline woke up, they dosed her with the anti-psychotic medication they found in her cupboard, and when she was unconscious, they strangled her. Which, if either of them, was more guilty, was hard to say. Stephanie seemed to be in charge (because she was beautiful, and because Annie was in love with her), but maybe Annie had been the more reckless. At the police station, they nagged and contradicted, like a couple on the verge of divorce trying to get through an anecdote about their last holiday. Taken to Micheline's house to re-enact the killing, they became kinder, and readier to admit guilt; indeed, Annie couldn't stop admitting guilt, insisting that it wasn't spur of the moment, they'd planned it all, insisting even when Stephanie warned her they were headed for the guillotine.
So there it was: a crime, an investigation, a confession – all the features of a classic TV whodunit. But the skill in Boucault's film lay in the way it resisted the pull of conventional narrative, never allowing you to feel that this was a neat ending, and that anything had really been resolved. The police could stamp this case "Closed", but you could sense the mess of guilt and spoiled lives spreading out beyond the frames of the film.
