This brings me to the second objection. Smuts, referring to Wartenberg and others, claims that the most popular argument for film as philosophy is that “some films can function as” thought experiments.61 He uses The Matrix to show what is wrong with this approach: “The problem with the thought experiment argument for film as philosophy is that it does not show how films could do philosophy, much less innovative philosophy, only how we could do philosophy with a film.”62
The idea seems to be that while one watches Neo penetrate through the illusion to the reality in the film, it is the viewer who must take the step to pose a question along the lines of how do I know I am not living in a matrix myself? The Matrix does not thus invite one to imagine that the real world is illusory, only to imagine that Neo’s world is illusory, and if one extrapolates from the work to the world, then one is doing the philosophy, performing the thought experiment, oneself. The objection to my position is that if Memento constitutes a thought experiment, then it is the audience rather than the film which is doing the philosophy.
There are two problems with this objection. First, I employed thought experiments—the two discussed by Gendleras an analogy in order to show that the difference between confirmation and affirmation was dependent upon the knowledge of the observer. My argument for Memento contributing to philosophy by means of experiential affirmation is not therefore reliant upon Memento constituting a thought experiment. Second, while Smuts is correct about The Matrix requiring the viewer to perform the experiment, this is not true of Memento. In Memento, the complexity of the narration demonstrates that the viewer’s memory is unreliable and that the viewer’s memory is essential to understanding. One knows that Leonard’s memory is unreliable due to his retrograde amnesia, and one perceives the effects that this unreliability has on his understanding. But the experiential affirmation which operates in the film goes beyond the viewer’s experience of perceiving Leonard’s unreliable memory: the complex narration shows how unreliable one’s own memory is, and one understands the partial confusion of the first viewing of the film as a result of this failure
of memory; that is, one realizes that memorizing the correct chronology is essential to understand- ing the narrative. This is why I rejected the sec- ond of Gaut’s claims in Section II, that memory is partly determined by one’s aims, because while that is certainly true of Leonard, it is not true of the viewer.
One can now see why The Matrix and Memento are not equivalent: Memento plays with the viewer’s memory in a way that The Matrix could not possibly play with our perception of reality. When I watch The Matrix, I can imagine that the cinema theater and film are just illusions in a man- ner similar to which I imaginatively engage with the film, but I am not compelled to do so. If the film inspires me to perform Descartes’ thought experiment, then Smuts is quite correct, and it is I, rather than The Matrix, who does the philosophy. When I watch Memento, however, there is no choice: if I engage with the film, I have an experience which affirms the unreliability of my memory and the consequences of that unreliability. If experiential affirmation was under- stood in terms of thought experiments, Smuts’s objection to the thought experiment argument for cinematic philosophy would thus still fail against Memento.
v. conclusion
My thesis is that Memento does philosophy by meeting both the results and means conditions of Livingston’s bold thesis. I have identified experiential affirmation as the manner in which Memento does philosophy and proposed that experiential affirmation is paradigmatic ally cinematic, as it is a function of the (potential for) perceptual realism of cinematic depiction. Even if my explanation of the cause of experiential affirmation is flawed, Memento nonetheless meets the two conditions and remains an example of a film which does philosophy. I have furthermore shown that my thesis does not collapse into Wartenberg’s moderate pro cinematic philosophy position and that it is not susceptible to Smuts’s argument against film doing philosophy by means of thought experiments. In Section III, I explained the experiential affirmation in Memento as a function of cinematic depiction and raised the question of whether other works of cinematic art—works which are also characterized by cinematic depiction—do philosophy by the same means. I was dismissive of The Matrix as a candidate, but I do not wish to imply that Memento is the only film which makes a contribution to philosophical knowledge by means of experiential affirmation or the only film which meets both conditions for the bold thesis. I think, for example, that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) might do philosophy in a similar manner, and Alessandro Giovannelli has advanced a convincing argument for the operation of experiential identification in the film.63 Like Gaut, Giovannelli does not enter the cinematic philosophy debate, but—again, like Gaut—his argument could easily be extrapolated in that direction.
My claim is, however, deliberately restricted to Memento. Gaut notes an identical restriction on his claims about narrative properties; that is, he does not rule out that other works of film may have the same properties but is wary of generalizing.64
For Gaut, this means both that critical attention to the detail of a particular film can disclose its philosophical significance and that one should be wary of inductive arguments from the properties of a particular film to the properties of cinematic art in general. The focus on criticism and particular ism is echoed by Wartenberg in his discussion of the relationship between film and thought experiments: