Pre Class: Baudrillard & Zizek

Jean Baudrillard's essay "The Precession of Simulacra" greatly relates to Christopher Nolan's film Memento. One quote in particular stuck out to me in Baudrillard's essay after watching Memento: "if a symptom can be 'produced,' and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat 'real' illnesses according to their objective causes" (Baudrillard 454). This quote relates perfectly to the plot within Memento in which Sammy Jenkin's wife asks Leonard whether he believes that Sammy is faking his illness or not. In fact, her belief that Sammy's illness if fake leads her to his ultimate test: administering her insulin over and over again seeing if he will remember that he had done it just moments before, ultimately leading to her death. Leonard's insurance company was unable to properly diagnose Sammy's condition because they were unsure of whether it was a true illness. According to prior tests on prior subjects, Sammy should have been able to construct new memories. Considering that he was unable to create new memories, the insurance company assumed that he was faking his illness, that the glimmer of recognition in his eyes was real, but Leonard soon learned that you fake that look of recognition if you feel like you are supposed to recognize someone. The entire movie is based around questioning what is real and whose motives are true. Within the story line "It is always a question of providing the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal..." (Baudrillard 465).