Uploaded 16 April 1999

In this essay I would like to consider some of the ramifications of a widely accepted yet undertheorized idea: that the preeminence of the moving image in contemporary culture has reshaped our collective imaginary relation to history. This widely circulated observation has been the subject of much anguished commentary from the widest possible range of critics. Concern about the cinema’s ostensible distortion of historical reality or of the culture’s willingness to substitute glossy images for historical understanding and insight emanate from left, right, and center. Although I disagree with many of these arguments, which tend to ignore the complex and sophisticated theories of history underpinning many historical films, the real issue driving these critiques is a fundamental one: films that take history as their subject are so controversial, I believe, mainly because of the extraordinary social power and influence that seems to have accrued to what has been called the cinematic rewriting of history. Although academic and even mainstream critics tend to focus on questions concerning the limits of fact and fiction and the erosion of the presumed boundary between realist and imaginative discourse that these films bring into relief, these questions are, I think, secondary to this more central concern with the seemingly unbounded social power wielded by the cinema in its representation of the past.

Now to some extent, the impression of overwhelming cinematic influence over the historical imagination is exaggerated. Films that take history as their subject are bounded by the public sphere in which they participate. Usually, a cascade of reviews, editorial commentary, academic criticism, rejoinders, defenses, conference presentations, web sites, and even, in the case of Oliver Stone’s  JFK (1991), town meetings, serve to keep these films “in check.” [1] Nevertheless, the ferocity of the controversies over films such as JFK, Schindler’s List (1993), Malcolm X  (1992), Nixon (1995), Jefferson in Paris (1995), and Forrest Gump, to name a few, point to the idea that film has somehow claimed the mantle of authenticity and meaningfulness with relation to the past – not necessarily of accuracy or fidelity to the record, but of meaningfulness, understood in terms of emotional and affective truth. Film, in effect, appears to invoke the emotional certitude we associate with memory. Like memory, film is associated with the body; it engages the viewer at the somatic level, immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem to be “burned in.” [2]

In this essay, I would like to develop the notion of film as an apparatus of cultural memory, and to compare it with the recent fascination with other popular forms of engagement with the past, such as experiential museums, historical reenactments and historical theme parks, and the burgeoning popularity of historical pageants, such as the Dream Cruise in Detroit, in which tens of thousands of classic car collectors parade down Woodward Avenue over the course of a summer weekend.

I will begin by summarizing an important argument that has been made by Alison Landsberg, who has coined the striking term “prosthetic memory” to describe the way mass cultural technologies of memory enable individuals to experience, as if they were memories, events through which they themselves did not live. [3]  She cites the growing popularity of experiential museums, such as the Holocaust Museum, historical reenactments, including the recent D-Day celebrations, and historical films such as Schindler’s List as evidence of a widespread cultural desire to reexperience the past in a sensuous form, and stresses the power of what she calls experiential mass cultural forms to make historical or political events meaningful in a personal, local way. The new modes of experience, sensation, and history that are made available in American mass culture, she writes, “have profoundly altered the individual’s relationship to both their own memories and to the archive of collective cultural memories.” Defining the concept of prosthetic memory as “memories that circulate publicly, that are not organically based, but that are nonetheless experienced with one’s own body – by means of a wide range of cultural technologies,” Landsberg argues that prosthetic memories, especially those afforded by the cinema, “become part of one’s personal archive of experience.” Citing psychological investigations from the 1930’s on “emotional possession” as well as works by Seigfreid Kracauer and Steven Shaviro on the relation between film and somatic response, Landsberg maintains that “the experience within the movie theater and the memories that the cinema affords – despite the fact that the spectator did not live through them – might be as significant in constructing, or deconstructing, the spectator’s identity as any experience that s/he actually lived through.” The artificial but real experiences afforded by the cinema “might actually install in individuals ‘symptoms’ through which they didn’t actually live, but to which they subsequently have a kind of experiential relationship.” Although the production and dissemination of memories that are defined not by organic, individual experience but by simulation and reenactment are potentially dangerous, posing the threat of alienation and revisionism, prosthetic memories also enable a sensuous engagement with past lives and past experiences that, Landsberg argues, can serve as “the basis for mediated collective identification.” [4]

These arguments appear to have a particular salience for understanding the popularity and the larger cultural significance of a film such as Forrest Gump. In many ways, the film appears to literalize the concept of prosthetic memory. It explicitly takes on the role of offering an experiential relationship to history, inserting the main character, and by extension, the viewer, into what appears to be a physical, literal relationship to actual historical figures, splicing the character Gump into fictionalized interactions with archival film images of JFK, LBJ, George Wallace, Nixon, and John Lennon. What Landsberg calls the “widespread desire on the part of Americans to experience and to live history,” the desire to experience history in a “personal, bodily way,” is exemplified in Forrest Gump. The most spectacular and provocative aspect of the film’s seizure of memory – its use of digital technology to “master” the past by “remastering” archival material in order to graft the figure of the main character into historical film and television footage – clearly is meant to solicit a mnemonic and mimetic response on the part of the viewer, suturing the viewer into a past they had not led, enabling the viewer to inhabit, through identification with the main character, an actual historical scene; the cinema in Forrest Gump is thus revealed, in the most emphatic way, to be an instrument that allows individuals to “experience a bodily, mimetic encounter with a collective past they never actually led.” [5] This suturing of the spectator, through identification with the character Forrest Gump, into an actual historical scene collapses the distinction between the personal and the historical and foregrounds the multiple and complicated relations between individual and collective memory and history in the age of cinema and media culture.

Memory, in the traditional sense, describes an individual relation to the past, a bodily, physical relation to an actual experience that is significant enough to inform and color the subjectivity of the rememberer. History, on the other hand, is traditionally conceived as impersonal, the realm of public events that have occurred outside the archive of personal experience. But in contemporary media culture, the most significant “historical” events are often transformed into “experiences” that shape and inform the subjectivity of the individual viewer: with the media continually and effortlessly re-presenting the past, history, once thought of as an impersonal phenomenon, has been replaced by “experiential” collective memory. Landsberg sees this as a positive development, arguing that the mimetic, bodily experience of the historical past afforded by the mass media can make particular histories or pasts available to people across existing stratifications of race, class, gender, and generation. History, she argues in effect, must become like memory in order to inform subjectivity, in order to change and alter consciousness, which is the basis for any kind of political alliance or action. The mass media can give people an experience of history that is felt at the deepest emotional and somatic level, felt as memory is felt, giving rise to identification and empathy across existing social divisions.

I find these ideas compelling, and I feel they go a long way toward explaining the desire, the cultural appetite for experiences that go beyond our own temporal framework, a desire realized and reinforced in the burgeoning popularity of official and vernacular forms of public rememoration. The fascination with memory and history in contemporary society can be seen, from the perspective opened up by the concept of prosthetic memory, as a salutary development: prosthetic memories can become the grounds for political alliances and for new collective frameworks that cut across existing social divisions. Insofar as prosthetic memories are not intrinsic to any individual, not limited to the organic experience of any one person or group, they are equally available to everyone, and thus have democratizing potential. As Landsberg concludes, “prosthetic memories have the potential to generate something like public spheres of memory.” [6]

However, there is another, less optimistic way of viewing the rising importance and influence of social memory and its interconnection with the mass media. The physical, experiential relation to the historical event and the historical past that mass technology affords may inhibit the narrative closure that storytelling, and narrative history, allow. Rather than generating historical amnesia, as is so often claimed, film and media may generate its opposite, an inability to stop obsessing about an event. As Thomas Elsaesser has written:

(W)hat of the memory of events which live in the culture because of the images they have left, etched on our retinas, too painful to recall, too disturbing not to remember? ‘Do you remember the day Kennedy was shot?’ really means ‘Do you remember the day you watched Kennedy being shot all day on television?’ No longer is storytelling the culture’s meaning-making response; an activity closer to therapeutic practice has taken over, with acts of re-telling, remembering, and repeating all pointing in the direction of obsession, fantasy, trauma. [7]

In Elsaesser’s formulation, the mass media create cultural memories that resist the kind of narrative closure associated with story-telling, with narrative history. He asks what obscure urge is satisfied by the compulsion to repeat that seems to drive the mass media in its continuous presenting and re-presenting of historical trauma. Hayden White has described twentieth century historical events as “modernist;” the lack of closure, the fragmentation and dissociation of one event from another, the inability of historians and the public at large to “master” and contain events in narrative form, may be a consequence, he writes, of the unprecedented scale and compound contexts of “modernist” historical events, such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, or the assassination of JFK. [8] Taking White’s hypothesis one step further, Elsaesser suggests that the lack of closure in modernist historical events may be a property of the mass media itself and its take on history, which tends to create in the spectator symptoms of obsession and trauma. In the optimistic account of prosthetic memory provided by Landsberg, the somatic powers of mass technology to produce something like symptoms in the spectator create the potential for empathic identification, for new collective frameworks, for public spheres based on memory. In Elsaesser’s less sanguine perspective, the burning in of memories via the media – burned in to the point that they create symptoms in the spectator – speak not to empathy and new social alliances but rather to cultural obsession, fantasy, and trauma.

In the film Forrest Gump, we can find both aspects of the contemporary historical imagination at work. The public reception the film received gives credence to the notion of a public sphere based on memory – a sphere of social discourse and contestation around history. But from another perspective, the response to the film betrays a good deal of cultural obsession, fantasy, and trauma. The film itself dwells on the subject of memory and its relation to history; it illustrates at the formal, narrative, and thematic levels the current preeminence of memory in the construction of concepts of the historical past and particularly, in the construction of concepts of nation and national belonging. Memory is thematized here as the connective tissue that binds the characters to the narrative of nation, as the webwork that supplies the forms and sites of identification that are essential to the emotions of national belonging. The film places in relief the power of memory and narratives of memory to create subjective connections to the national past, to call forth the sense of “I” and “We” that makes the national narrative compelling and meaningful: in this respect, it appears to illustrate the positive potential of mediated memory to create an interface with “past lives, past experiences, past bodies,” so as to ground individual subjectivities “in a world of experience larger than one’s own modal subjectivity.” [9]

In foregrounding memory as the connective tissue of nation, however, Forrest Gump reveals itself to be a film that functions, more deliberately than most, as an ideological force seeking to redefine national identity. In evoking memory as the register of national belonging, the film can effectively construct an image of nation that can exist apart from, or float free of, the historical traumas of the sixties and seventies. The guileless hero Gump, who comes across as a kind of national saint, narrates his own story in a way that emphasizes certain zones of social and cultural coherence within the deeply fractious social reality of the period, reordering the past in such a way that the political and social ruptures of the sixties can be reclaimed as sites of national identification. The film can thus be seen, from this angle, as an apparatus that functions precisely like a prosthesis, supplementing or even replacing organic memory, which in the context of the sixties might be defined as dysfunctional, cultural memories that in their organic form cannot be integrated into the larger projects of nation, that have been exceptionally difficult to assimilate, such as the Vietnam War. Social memory in Forrest Gump is in effect refunctioned in a way that allows it to be integrated into the traditional narrative of nation, producing an image of social consensus built around memory.

In using the concept of prosthetic memory in this fashion, I depart from Landsberg’s approach by emphasizing its relation to another apparatus of memory, that of the national narrative. Forrest Gump, I feel, revises the contested and multiple memories of the sixties in such a way that they become prosthetically enhanced – functional for the purposes of a traditional, ultra-conservative narrative of nation. The film sets forth a narrative of memory whose transparent purpose seems to be that of “managing” the national traumas, the crises in national identity, that defined the sixties and seventies and that continue to trouble the nation’s self-image. The diverse and contested cultural memories of the sixties are refunctioned and redefined in Forrest Gump so as to produce an improved image of nation, at once potent, coherent, and “of the people” – a virtual nation in which the positive elements of national identification are segregated from the historical actions undertaken in its name. As Tom Conley aptly puts it, the project of national recalmation undertaken by Forrest Gump depends on the film’s “wiping the slate clean of female presence,” and on erasing the national canvas of social, and particularly, racial antagonism. [10]

The role of film and video as an apparatus of memory, a technology that burns in memories so as to create a form of bodily relation to events that one has not organically experienced, is emphatically on display in Forrest Gump. Its powerful appeal to a form of ethnic nostalgia, or to what Michael Kammen more positively calls the “emotional discovery of America,” is an exemplary instance of the widespread cultural desire to connect to the past and to embrace experiential forms of knowledge. [11]  But the film also displays a particular kind of postmodern hubris, the faith that the cinema can “redeem the past, rescue the real, and even rescue that which was never real.” [12]  In trying to rescue that which was never real, the film discloses the profoundly unstable ground that memory, unaccompanied by history, unannotated by fact, provides as a source of experiential knowledge and collective identification.

Footnotes:
[1] See Thomas Elsaesser, “Subject positions, speaking positions: from Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler’s List,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1995), 167.
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 61: “[i]f something is to stay in memory, it must be burned in.”
[3] See Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic memory: the logics and politics of memory in modern American culture” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996). See also Landsberg’s “Prosthetic memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, eds. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage, 1995), 175-89; and “America, the Holocaust, and the mass culture of memory: toward a radical politics of empathy,” New German Critique 71 (Summer 1997): 63-86.
[4] Landsberg, 1996, 4.
[5] Landsberg, 1996, 21. Arthur Lindley, the editor of this issue, has pointed out that for him, this identification is significantly ironized, not least by our awareness of the technical trick that grafts him in. Also, he writes that he responds to Gump not as his representative but as an allegorical figure of the American capacity to remain innocent of history even while participating in it. This is a good point, which I think illustrates differences between what Stuart Hall calls negotiated and dominant reception. The dominant reading of the film is powerfully expressed by the political appropriation of Gump by the right wing in the USA, and the “ecstatic” tone of the majority of reviews. These readings appear to belie the more sophisticated, negotiated reading that Lindley provides, in which he finds an ironic quality in the film. The dominant reception of the film indicates that many people identified with Gump in an intensive way, without ironic distancing.
[6] Landsberg, 1996, 25.
[7]  Elsaesser, 146.
[8] Hayden White, “”The fact of modernism: the fading of the historical event,” in Sobchack, 17-38.
[9] Landsberg, 1996, 30.
[10] Tom Conley, letter to author, 15 October 1995.
[11] Michael Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 299.
[12] Elsaesser, 166.