I’m in my early 30’s now, and first started watching lots of great movies in my teens - half a lifetime ago, as unbelievable as that feels to me. I’ve been realizing lately that there are lots of movies that I know I saw back then, but that my memory of them is now so fuzzy or even non-existent that I really may as well not have seen them at all. Recently some friends were talking about “The Godfather,” which I last watched when I was 17 or so. I probably don’t know much more about that movie today than I could have picked up from cultural osmosis. Ditto “Apocalypse Now” and “Goodfellas,” to name two that come immediately to mind.
Same thing for books. I know I’ve read “Great Expectations” and “Catcher in the Rye,” but damned if I could give you a very good plot synopsis.
Does this happen a lot to other people, or do I just have a particularly poor memory? If it happens to you, what’s the gap in time before you may as well not have seen or read something?
The last episode of QI had a bit where Stephen asked the audience if they’d read 1984. The audience got a forfeit purely on the idea that a large percentage were lying. I have read 1984, but I couldn’t now tell you any more about the plot than I pick up by osmosis. Same with almost any book I read more than about 10 years ago.
Wait until you have kids, and it turns out that one or more of them actually listen to some of your recommendations
I have recommended novels, graphic novels, movies, etc. to my kids - then they come back and want to discuss them - argh. And don’t get me started on stuff I had to read for school assignments - in one eye and out the other.
It hit a bit later for me (I’m thinking early 40s - in my mid-30s I could have probably given a decent review of any book I’d ever read, and any movie I’d ever seen), but yeah, same here. Certainly for the past 15 years (I’m 60), there have been a lot of “I know I’ve read that book/seen that movie, but I can’t tell you much about it” moments.
IMHO, our brains, which are still essentially the same brains as those of our ancestors who hunted mastodons, were designed to hold a certain amount of information in a way that could be easily called up in the memory. But by a certain point in our lives, we get well beyond that, thanks to our being able to access so much more information and stories through books, movies, and now the Web.
Maybe it’s all there somewhere, if it can be called up the right way, but we can’t get to it for the most part. Like the kid in the Far Side cartoon, my brain is full.
I’m not sure if this counts, but I read the first Harry Potter book, then three weeks later, I said to myself I should really read that first HP book. I didn’t remember one single moment of it. Is three weeks some kind of record? Should I be concerned? Is Harry Potter THAT forgettable?
There are a lot of books I HAD to read in high school or college, even books I had to write essays or lengthy papers on, that I forgot almost completely after finishing the course.
At Columbia, I HAD to read the following “great books,” and I regret to admit I barely remember what any of them were about:
Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew
Thucydides’ ***History of the Peloponnesian War ***
Kafka’s The Penal Colony
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (I’m always leery when my fellow conservatives sing the praises of this one- I’m never quite convinced they’ve actually read it!)
The worst is when I recommend a tv show to a friend, like The Wire, that I haven’t seen since it aired. And then they “live-text” me while they watch it and I’m like “WTF are you talking about?”
Ok that was just one friend who went so far as to “live-text” but even when people casually mention scenes in shows they just watched, that I had watched years before, I can’t really follow either.
We read Romeo and Juliet in high school, then we really read Romeo and Juliet in college and discussed all of the rather juvenile humor that was laced through it. The play is a non-stop barrage of penis jokes.
Hah! Canterbury Tales is the same way - full of penis jokes, sex and boobs. I had to read it in high school and it was SO much better in grad school.
I forget most movies shortly after I see them, particularly those that I saw when I was younger. It’s an odd quirk that comes with my seizure disorder. I remember books really, really well, but movies? Give me maybe a few years and they’re gone unless they were really memorable for some reason.
I’m 69, and my advice is to get used to it; it gets worse. There are times when I’ll read a book or watch a movie, and not realize until the end that I’ve read/watched it before . . . even if I enjoyed it the first time. There could be a totally memorable and riveting scene that I swear was entirely new to me, like I must have dozed off the first time.
On the plus side, things I’ve encountered before can be new experiences once again.
Plato’s Republic, for me. I spent many a late, tired night reading it, as a kid. But I can just barely hope some of it soaked in via osmosis, because about the only overt thing I can recall about it was that Thrasymachus was kind of a jerk.
Arrested Development. I watched the DVDs when they first came out, but when my friend watched them years later, I couldn’t remember anything about them.
Now, Plato is one of the people we had to read at Columbia that I DO remember well, and could still carry on intelligent discussions and debates about! That’s how interesting and relevant I found him.
Conversely, about the ONLY thing I remember about Immanuel Kant is that, over a urinal in Hamilton Hall, somebody scribbled:
you can let a decade go by and view or read again.
it might take some effort or strangeness to resist but it helps.
like watch Apocalypse Now and if you want then watch a time or two in the next few months. then don’t watch it again for a decade. it won’t be new, you could remember to overall story, but some parts (scenes, dialog, details) will be new enough again to you.
