Trauma, memory and information in American sf film and television,

1980-2010
Aris Mousoutzanis
Science Fiction Film and Television, Volume 6, Issue 3, Autumn 2013,
pp. 327-348 (Article)
Published by Liverpool University Press
For additional information about this article
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Science Fiction Film and Television 6.3 (2013), 327348 ISSN 1754-3770 (print) 1754-3789 (online)
Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/sftv.2013.23
Trauma, memory and information in
American sf flm and television, 19802010
Aris Mousoutzanis
The article explores the ways in which recent American sf flm and television have partic-
ipated in the wider interest in the topics of human memory and psychological trauma. The
engagement with these topics in sf flms and television shows has concentrated on their
status in the midst of the information revolution. The return of traumatic memories has been
represented as an information overload that the human psyche cannot process, whereas
individual memories have been treated as information that can be stored, retrieved and
manipulated. The convergence of memory, trauma and information is seen as part of a
more general trend to theorise and perceive of the human psyche as an information system
during the period of modernity. This, in turn, is discussed as part of an even wider tendency
to conceptualise the human subject as a machine to be analysed, optimised and disciplined,
a tendency integral to what Foucault has termed biopower. The central place of memory,
information and trauma in these popular texts, the article argues, is part of the attempt to
represent the eforts of individuals to negotiate their sense of identity through strategies of
resistance against wider social and institutional structures of power.
Keywords: memory, trauma, information, biopower, fringe, X-Files, Blade Runner, Terminator
During the last thirty years, American sf has been increasingly preoccupied
with the subject of memory, its nature, function and signifcance for individual
identity. In fction, typical examples may be found within the subgenre
of cyberpunk sf, epitomised by the work of William Gibson. A list of
representative flms would incorporate Blade Runner (Scott US 1982), Total
Recall (Verhoeven US 1990), Vanilla Sky (Crowe US 2001) and Minority Report
(Spielberg US 2002), among others. Television shows that have followed this
trend include Te X-Files (US 19932002), Lost (US 200410), Fringe (US
200812), FlashForward (US 200910) and Continuum (Canada 2012). Te
gradual orientation towards this subject is consistent with a wider interest
in memory from psychiatric groups, academics in the humanities and social
sciences, politicians and activist groups, as well as a more general preoccupation
in American culture with memorials, commemorations and anniversaries a
trend that has been recently diagnosed by Erika Doss as a memorial mania.
Memory has of course been a topic of intellectual speculation since as early as
the days of ancient Greece, as classic texts like Platos Phaedrus (370 bc) testify.
Tis recent interest in the topic, however, is distinct from earlier periods in
328 Aris Mousoutzanis
two ways. First, the memorial mania coincided with an increasing interest
in the topic of psychological trauma across diferent disciplines, to the extent
that the concept of memory became entangled with that of trauma. Second,
theoretical discussions and media representations engaging with these two
concepts relied directly on contemporary technological discourses of the
accelerating information revolution. Te return of traumatic memories has
therefore been described by theorists and represented in sf popular texts as
information overload that the human psyche cannot process or integrate.
Individual memories have been perceived as information that can be stored,
accessed, retrieved, manipulated or even implanted in theoretical and fctional
texts alike, and the group of narratives identifed above explores the efects of
this informatisation of memory on individuals and societies.
Te convergence of the three concepts of trauma, memory and information
may be seen as part of a more general trend to theorise and perceive the human
psyche as an information system during the period of modernity. Tis, in turn,
is only part of an even wider tendency to conceptualise the human subject as
a machine to be analysed, optimised and disciplined, a tendency that Michel
Foucault sees as part of the gradual emergence of an internalised form of power
to monitor, sustain and manage the life of individuals and populations what
he terms biopower. From this perspective, the informatisation of memory
and trauma in these discourses and media representations can be seen within
the context of a therapy culture of monitoring and surveillance. Te central
place of memory, information and trauma in these popular texts is part of
their attempt to represent the eforts of individuals to negotiate their sense of
identity through strategies of resistance against wider social and institutional
structures of power.
Te prevalence of these concerns in contemporary sf is not surprising. Te
ontological concerns of the genre regarding the nature of the human render
it an exemplary site for investigating their complex intersections. In fact, the
earliest traces of these intersections may be identifed in the cultural moment
that witnesses the birth of modern sf, the late Victorian period of the fn de
sicle. Te following discussion therefore frst concentrates on the function of
discourses of information within the memorial mania and trauma culture
at the turn of the twenty-frst century by using as an example J.J. Abramss cult
television show Fringe. Te interconnections between memory, information
and trauma in contemporary popular sf are then pursued in two separate
sections: the informatisation of memory as an infuence of cyberpunk sf,
and the entanglement of memory with trauma in relation to a group of texts
that I refer to as trauma sf . Both sections return to the late Victorian period
329 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
in order to examine the germination of the discursive entanglements that are
emphasised in contemporary sf.
Trauma, memory, sf
Since about 1980, Roger Luckhurst argues, Americans have been given a
peculiar injunction: they have been subject to an incitement to remember
(Science-Fictionalization 32). Since then, there has been an unprecedented
national focus on cultural memory and nationally sanctioned remembrance
(Sturken 13), which Marita Sturken has seen as symptomatic of the fallout
of the 1960s and particularly the Vietnam War, and which may be detected
in the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, followed by
the Korean War Memorial, the US Holocaust Museum, the Oklahoma City
National Memorial, the World War II Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial, among
others. But 1980 is also the year when the term post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) was included for the frst time in the American Diagnostic Statistical
Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-III), an event that precipitated a series of
debates among psychiatrists on the nature of traumatic memory, the so-called
Memory Wars. Tese debates were followed by a growing preoccupation by
novelists and academics in the humanities with the question of the represen-
tation of atrocious historical events, such as the Holocaust, a preoccupation that
eventually led to what is now called trauma theory or trauma studies. Tis
turn to trauma took place at the same time as an emerging media culture of
testimony and confession, represented by the increasing popularity of the talk
show, the real-life police show and court television. Tese diverse debates and
discourses constituted the conditions for the emergence of a culture centered
on trauma, in Mark Seltzers words, a culture of the atrocity exhibition, in
which people wear their damage like badges of identity (2).
An obvious reason for this combined interest in memory and trauma would
be that trauma is essentially a pathology of memory. Individuals exposed to a
traumatic incident ofen appear originally unafected, during what Sigmund
Freud described as a period of latency, usually lasting a few weeks. Tey then
start developing post-traumatic symptoms such as recurring nightmares or
hallucinations, anxiety or dissociation, amnesia or hyperamnesia, according
to a temporal logic that Freud termed Nachtrglichkeit, variously translated
as belatedness, aferwardness or deferred action. According to Freud, Ruth
Leys explains, trauma was thus constituted by a dialectic between two events,
neither of which was intrinsically traumatic, and a temporal delay or latency
330 Aris Mousoutzanis
through which the past was available only by a deferred act of understanding
and interpretation (20). It is therefore not the incident itself but its belated
reminiscence, its memory, that has a traumatic impact on the patient. However,
beyond any structural links between the two, a further point of convergence is
the extent to which the contemporaneous concern with memory and trauma
has been seen as symptomatic of the so-called information revolution which
accelerated during the 1980s. Andreas Huyssen, for instance, has seen the
memory boom of the 1990s from this perspective. Memory, for Huyssen,
represents
the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the
synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe
of simulation and fast-speed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring
space in a world of puzzling and ofen threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and
information overload. (7)
Huyssen adopts the terminology and thought of postmodern philosopher
Jean Baudrillard, who argues in Te Illusion of the End (1994) that the
obsessive memorising of everything of our past is a sign that events have had
their day and we have to resort to artifcial memory to face up to the absence
of a future (9). In a similar vein, Allen Meek sees the turn to trauma as a
result of the saturation of everyday life with new new media technologies and
the constant mediation of everyday experience: whereas visual media have
multiplied and extended our means of recording and thereby remembering
events, Meek writes, trauma increasingly serves as a model for deep memory
in a mass mediated culture (9). Trauma, from this perspective, is what disrupts
the hyperreal universe of simulation, what may count as real in a world where
everything turns into a simulacrum of itself. Te contemporaneous emergence
of a memory boom and a trauma culture therefore should not be interpreted
merely as symptomatic of concrete historical events and specifc social issues,
such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, sexual abuse and racial violence.
Equally important are the concepts of the mediation and representation of such
issues and events, concepts that are central to core defnitions of memory and
trauma as well as to the media-saturated late twentieth-century industrialist
societies in the West.
It is within this cultural landscape that a number of popular sf texts explore
the interconnections among memory, trauma and information. One of the
most representative contemporary examples is J.J. Abramss Fringe. In the
shows pilot episode (9 Sep 2008), in a scene reminiscent of Altered States
(Russell US 1980), FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) enters a sensory
deprivation tank in order to be subjected to a synaptic transfer system that
331 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
will enable her to access the memories of her recently deceased colleague
and partner John Scott (Mark Valley) in order to identify a crime suspect.
According to her assistant, Dr Walter Bishop (John Noble), the method works
by synchronising the felds of two distinct minds to allow the sharing of
information across the unconscious state. Afer her experience in the tank,
Olivia starts having visions of John that provide further clues concerning her
cases because part of his consciousness, according to Walter, was crossed over
to hers while she was in the tank. By the ninth episode, Dreamscape (25 Nov
2008), Olivia is overwhelmed by the recurrent visions of her dead partner, and
Walter recommends using a form of repressed memory therapy by entering
the tank so that they might bring the memories to the surface and purge them
from [her] unconscious. Olivia manages to remove Johns memories by the
episode Te Transformation (3 Feb 2008), in which she enters the tank once
again to bid farewell to John.
Tis early subplot is indicative of the ways in which the show intertwined
the theme of memory with those of trauma and information. Olivias visions
of John may be seen as traumatic memories that return to haunt her until she
manages to cope with the loss of her partner. In this respect, this subplot is
indicative of a generic feature of sf, the groundingin the material rather
than the supernatural (Roberts 5) and the use of (pseudo)scientifc theories or
technological formations to represent abstract ideas in concrete, literal terms.
Tis is hardly the only instance of the shows representations of traumatic
incidents: in the frst few episodes of the second season, Olivia sufers from
symptoms of post-traumatic stress, such as amnesia, insomnia and intrusive
fashbacks, afer returning from a parallel universe in which she was trapped at
the end of season one. Olivias return to her own universe, in A New Day in the
Old Town (17 Sep 2009), occurs immediately afer a car accident in downtown
Manhattan, which is only one instance of the shows persistent staging of
technological accidents the exemplary scene of trauma par excellence
(Caruth 6). Te episode White Tulip (15 Apr 2010) is exemplary of the ways
in which the show employs sf tropes to engage with narratives of trauma. Te
episode is a time-loop narrative where an astrophysics professor turns his body
into a time machine in his attempt to reunite with his fance, who was killed
in a car accident. Te episode shows three loops back in time, during each of
which the major characters have only a vague sense of dj vu of the previous
loop. Each loop reaches closer to the incident, until the scientist fnally arrives
at the accident and admits his love to his fance, before both are killed. Te
time travel motif literalises in this context the post-traumatic symptom of
repetition compulsion, whereby traumatised subjects constantly return to the
332 Aris Mousoutzanis
traumatic incident in nightmares or hallucinations. Traumatic temporality is
non-linear and repetitive, which is why Allan Young has described the psycho-
pathology as a disease of time (7).
Fringe concluded with a fnal season that relied on a recurring motif in
time-travel narratives that may be read from this theoretical perspective:
time-travel narratives ofen revolve around a major event which structures
their narrative pattern, as may be seen in flms such as Twelve Monkeys
(Gillam US 1995), Dj Vu (Scott US 2006) or Te Butterfy Efect (Bress and
Gruber US 2006). Even H.G. Wellss Time Machine (1895) may be read as a
fragmented, disjointed narrative whereby the Time Traveller struggles to
narrate his experience: Tis room and you and the atmosphere of every day
is too much for my memory (68; my emphasis). Fringe followed this tradition
with a fnal season set twenty years afer the end of the previous season, in a
dystopian Earth occupied by the Observers, the shows enigmatic characters
that were eventually revealed to be its villains. Te entire season is structured
around the moment of the Observers invasion, almost compulsively restaging
a scene where Peter (Joshua Jackson), Olivia and their daughter Etta (Abagayle
Hardwick) have a picnic in the park as the Observers arrive and Etta disappears.
Peter and Olivias work to defeat the Observes is driven by their desire to
rewrite that scene and avert an invasion that both enslaves humanity and
separates them from their daughter.
Conversely, in its treatment of the theme of memory, Fringe established
a contrast between (internal, personal, subjective) memory and (external,
impersonal, objective) information, whereby the former is a malleable process
that stands as a marker of ones authentic identity, whereas the latter is a
quantifable entity that can be accessed, processed, transferred and implanted.
Apart from serving as a means to cope with the loss of Olivias partner, Scotts
memories are also treated as evidence, proof or information that help
her and her team with their investigations. Te synaptic transfer system,
Walter admits in the shows pilot, had already been used in the past to extract
information from a corpse, whereas in the fnal scene of the third episode, Te
Ghost Network (23 Sep 2008), we see that Johns body has been retrieved by
the corporation Massive Dynamic: his brain is wired to electrodes and a screen
next to his bed displays the data transfer of his memories. During the second
season, it is revealed that Walters memories of his discovery of a portal to a
parallel universe were extracted by the head of Massive Dynamic, William Bell
(Leonard Nimoy), by having three pieces of brain tissue removed from Walters
hippocampus and stored in the brains of three of his patients. Te theme of
memory implantation is central to the beginning of season three, when Olivia
333 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
was held captive in the parallel universe while her counterpart from over
there, referred to by fans and characters as Faulivia, assumes her place in our
universe. In the beginning, Olivia tries to escape and return to her own world,
until she has Faulivias memories implanted in her ,which makes her become
Faulivia, until repressed memories resurface in the form of visions of Peter that
make her realise what has happened. Tese are only a few instances of the ways
in which Fringe relies upon the contrast between memory and information
in its exploration of the fate of personal memories of loss and trauma when
processed by representatives of medical, legal and corporate institutions.
Tis specifc way of engaging with the theme of memory may be attributed
to the infuence of two diferent branches of sf that emerged during the 1980s.
Te view of memory as information that can be stored, commodifed, retrieved
and implanted may be seen as indebted to cyberpunk sf, while the preoccu-
pation with traumatic memory, on the other hand, can be linked to a tradition
that might be termed trauma sf television shows, epitomised by Chris Carters
Te X-Files.
Cyberpunk, memory and information
Te category cyberpunk is applied to a group of flms including Blade Runner,
RoboCop (Verhoeven US 1987), Johnny Mnemonic (Longo US 1995), Hackers
(Sofley US 1995), Te Matrix (Wachowski US 1999) and Cypher (Natali US
2002), and originated to describe the fction of sf writers such as William
Gibson. Te infuence of the literary genre on later flm and television shows
warrants a brief discussion. While early criticism of Gibsons work concen-
trated on its relation to postmodernism and its evocation of Fredric Jamesons
inverted millenarianism, its combination of high-tech and street life and
its envisioning of corporate power and hacker resistance, the signifcance of
memory and trauma in his work was given relatively limited critical attention.
And yet, Gibsons texts are populated by characters whose encounter with
technology is registered in terms not only of empowerment and transcendence
but also of dismemberment and trauma. Te ex-military ofcer Armitage in
Neuromancer (1984), the freelance corporate mercenary Turner and the hacker
Bobby Newman in Count Zero (1986), all have their bodies amputated and
reconstructed by surgery in order to be assigned to a mission. Neuromancers
protagonist, Case, and Slick Henry in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) have been
both punished for committing burglary: Case has been banned from accessing
cyberspace and, because he is addicted to jacking in, is suicidal and sufers
334 Aris Mousoutzanis
from withdrawal symptoms and recurring nightmares. Slick, on the other
hand, has been given Korsakovs Syndrome, a disease whose symptoms
are blackouts and short-term memory loss, and ever since he compulsively
constructs robots as a cathartic response to chemo-penal trauma (294) in
a narrative gesture that associates compulsive repetition with mechanical,
robotic repetition. For all the early critical perceptions of the trilogy as a
very masculinist form of writing, Gibsons texts were constantly staging the
amputation and reconstruction of the male body by new technologies at the
services of corporate capital.
One of Mona Lisa Overdrives main characters, Angie Mitchell, has the ability
to access cyberspace without using a console due to brain surgery conducted
by her father when she was a child. Using this ability to access other peoples
memories transmitted through cyberspace, she learns of heroes and villains
whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have long
since been woven through the global culture (2923). Angies storyline involves
her eforts to cope with the others memories washing in, flling her, then
draining away to levels she couldnt reach, leaving these aferimages (106). Tis
subplot is indicative of the place of memory in Gibsons universe:
Memories have become interchangeable, detachable from the individual who originally
possessed them and able to be passed along to others. In the world of cyberpunk, as the
science of genetics has already suggested to us, humans are but machines directed by
coded messages unknowable to consciousness, and another persons memory tapes can
be played by anyones machine. (Sponsler 634)
Gibsons infuence on cyberpunk cinema may be traced via a short story that
was made into a flm, Johnny Mnemonic (1981), whose main character has
undergone surgery in order to have a data storage system in his brain that
allows him to transfer large amounts of information on behalf of corporations
or wealthy individuals, information to which he has no direct access: one day
Ill have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and Ill live with my
own memories and nobody elses, the way other people do (36). Johnny is the
most representative of Gibsons typical characters who, according to Kathryn
V. Lindberg, process information that means more to their bosses and to us
readers than it does to themselves (48).
Gibson thus established a concern for the status of human identity within
the informatisation and commodifcation of memory that becomes recurring
and thematic in later flms and television series. Te infuence on flm in
particular coincided with an increasing interest in Hollywood in the work
of Philip K. Dick, a novelist whose writings ofen seen as a precursor of
cyberpunk persistently return to questions regarding human memory in the
335 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
face of new technologies. Film adaptations such as Blade Runner, Total Recall
and Minority Report were, for Roger Luckhurst, symptomatic of Huyssens
memory boom, as they rewrite Dicks tales from the 1950s in order to refect
on the technological transformations of identity (Science Fiction 221). Tese
flms, together with the critically and commercially unsuccessful flm
version of Gibsons short story form cyberpunk cinema and are concerned,
according to Sidney Eve Matrix, with the links between technology, memory
and identity (61). Memory is central to one of the earliest flms of the genre,
Ridley Scotts Blade Runner. As a part of its exploration of the boundaries
between the human and the artifcial, the flm establishes a contrast between
static, externalised and constructed memory and transient, internalised and
authentic memory. Te photographs the flms replicants cling to as evidence
of a past represent the frst type. When Rachael (Sean Young), previously
unaware of the fact that she is a replicant, realises the truth about herself,
she visits the blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). Showing him a
photograph of herself with her mother when she was a child, she learns that her
memories belong to Tyrrells niece. In the world dominated by multinational
corporations that Blade Runner envisions, memory has become a mental space
colonised by various technologies of reproduction (McNamara 309). However,
the flms engagement with the theme of memory may also be seen as one more
means by which it deconstructs the diferences between human and replicant.
Human memory itself was theorised by Freud as malleable, subject to revision,
and reconstructed retrospectively:
It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood;
memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories
show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at later periods when the
memories were aroused. (Screen 322)
From this perspective, Blade Runner projects a world in which technologies
of image and memory production render human experience and memory
ultimately indistinguishable from the experience of, and the memories created
for, the replicants (McNamara 423). Te second type of memory suggested
in the flm is transient, embodied, genuine and an afrmation of humanity:
shortly before he dies, the replicant Roy (Rutger Hauer) recalls seeing ships
on fre of the shoulder of Orion and C-beams [that] glitter in the darkness at
Tannhuser Gate. According to Vernon Shetley and Alissa Ferguson, this is
what makes Roy human, for in Blade Runner humanity is defned by transience,
and the shared recognition that acknowledging that transience produces (73).
As they elaborate, Leon and Rachael cling to their photographs, as if the
stability and permanence of a snapshot could provide a stable grounding
336 Aris Mousoutzanis
for identity. But as Roy comes to realise, it is memory, with all its poignant
transience, that defnes humanness (74).
Tis distinction between embodied memory and implanted memory is
maintained in later flms whose narratives are triggered by an eruption of the
former into the latter, ofen due to a technological breakdown or accident.
One example would be Total Recall, which starts with Douglas Quaid (Arnold
Schwarzenegger) having recurring nightmares about Mars before he visits the
virtual travel agency Rekall Incorporated, which ofers alternative identities
and destinations constructed from other individuals memory tapes. When
he purchases a set of memories, Quaid apparently sufers a schizoid embolism
during implantation and realises that his memory had already been wiped.
During the flm, he discovers that his original name is Hauser and that he works
for Mars administrator Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), for whom he agreed
to assume a new identity in order to infltrate rebel forces on Mars. Quaid,
however, chooses to side with the resistance and eventually defeats Cohaagan
and his real self, Hauser, in a narrative manoeuvre that foregrounds the
constructed nature of memory even further than does Blade Runner: In Total
Recall, as in Blade Runner, authenticity is no longer considered a necessary
element of memory. Where memories come from matters less than how they
enable a person to live in the present (Landsberg 42). Whether this present
is indeed authentic is something that the flm leaves open to question, as it
ends without making clear whether the events portrayed are real or implanted
memories.
Another example is Vanilla Sky, in which David Aames (Tom Cruise) leads
his life in a virtual environment called a lucid dream state engineered by the
Life Extension Corporation, while his real body is held in cryogenic suspension
afer a near-fatal drug overdose. David has forgotten about the contract he
signed with Life Extension and believes lucid dream to be the real world until
he starts experiencing fashbacks, such as brief visions of his disfgured face
afer the car accident that killed his girlfriend Julie (Cameron Diaz). Davids
powerful buried memories of pain, abandonment and guilt thus threaten to
crash the Lucid Dream program (Matrix 64) and Vanilla Skys enquiry into
prosthetic memory technologies demonstrates the difculty (if not the near
impossibility) of deleting, overwriting or otherwise controlling the data of
organic, embodied memories (Matrix 66).
If it is true that the cyberpunk genre in flm and literaturerefects fn
de sicle apprehension about the ramifcation of computer technology on
the human condition (Matrix 612), the origins of the themes, issues and
concerns explored in these popular fctions lie in the original fn de sicle, the
337 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
late Victorian period, a signifcant cultural moment in the genealogy of the
discursive entanglement of trauma, memory and information. On the one
hand, it is the period of the frst ofcial theorisations on traumatic neurosis,
which emerged in response to the malfunction of contemporary technologies,
specifcally the proliferation of industrial and railway accidents whose survivors
would exhibit symptoms that are now recognised as post-traumatic. On the
other, it is the moment to witness the emergence of what Ian Hacking calls the
sciences of memory, referring specifcally to three nascent scientifc disciplines
investigating memory: neurological studies on the localisation of diferent
types of memory in specifc parts of the brain, represented by the studies on
aphasia by Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke in the 1860s and 1870s; experimental
studies of recall, represented by the work of Herman Ebbinghaus in the 1880s,
which constitutes the frst sustained use of statistical analysis in psychology
(Hacking 204); and the psychodynamics of memory, represented by the work
of Todule Ribot in the 1880s, which provided new knowledge, scientifc
knowledge about memory (208). Before this period, and since as early as
ancient Greece, there was no talk of a science, only an art of memory. Te
emergence of these sciences, for Hacking, should be seen as participating in the
crystallisation of modern biopower, constituting surrogate sciences of the soul:
positive sciences that would provide new kinds of knowledge in terms of which
to cure, help, and control the one aspect of human beings that had hitherto
been outside science (209). Te establishment of these disciplines occurred
within the feld defned by the two poles of development that determined the
emergence of modern biopolitics according to Foucault: the anatomo-politics
of the human body that centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the
optimisation of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase
of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efcient and
economic controls (Foucault 138); and the bio-politics of the population which
focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life
and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and
mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity (138). Accordingly,
Brocas work on the localisation of brain functions represents, for Hacking,
a late appearance at the anatomo-pole, whereas Ebbinghauss studies were
part of the generalised bio-pole, thus rendering experimental psychology a
statistical science that no longer concerned itself with individual events or
beings but with averages and deviations (215). Te transmutation of soul
into memory that Hacking pursues therefore took place within the defning
parameters of modern biopower and should be seen as analogous to the
338 Aris Mousoutzanis
transformation of memory into information developed across a range of sf
flm and television texts.
Even as experimental psychology was further orienting itself to the interpre-
tation of statistical information for its investigation of memory, Sigmund
Freud was developing the feld of psychodynamics through his theorisations
on memory that, again, abound in references to contemporary technological
discourses and formations. Despite his notoriously ambivalent attitude
to technology, Freuds work is saturated with technological terms such as
resistance, excitation, discharge, cathexis and induction. Tomas Elsaesser
has focused on the abundance of these terms in Freuds writings in order
to describe him as a media theorist who thought of the body/mind as
a storage and recording medium as well as an input/output device (102).
Freud formulated his theory of memory within his dual model of the psyche,
which consisted of the levels of consciousness/perception and unconscious/
memory, two levels that were mutually exclusive. Consciousness, for Freud,
was, in Elsaessers words, a feedback system which must not retain any data,
otherwise it could not respond to the environment and be self-regulating (114).
Any memories, according to this model, are stored in the unconscious, which
is a system capable of retaining unlimited quantities of data. Tis structural
asymmetry between the quantity of data capture and the relatively restricted
repertoire of data processing points, according to Elsaesser, towards a view of
Freuds theories of memory as a problem of data management (107).
Te presence of this technological subtext in Freuds work may be interpreted
with regard to the third way in which this period is important for the themes
pursued in this article. Tis is the time of the Second Industrial Revolution,
roughly from 1870 to 1914, that witnessed the invention of the frst modern
media, such as the cinema, the telephone, the typewriter, wireless telegraphy,
the gramophone, the radio and more. Te earliest use of the term information
may be traced to this period. Te tremendous advance in technological
discovery, together with the increasing proliferation of new theories in many
established and emerging scientifc disciplines throughout the century, placed
the late Victorians in the midst of the frst knowledge explosion, according to
Tomas Richards:
If today we call this the information explosion, it was because by the centurys end many
people had stopped using the word knowledge, which always had something about it of
a prospective unity emerging, and started using the word information, with its contem-
porary overtones of scattered disjunct fragments of fact. (5)
Within this context, Freuds work, according to Friedrich Kittler, reasoned
only as far as the information machines of his era no more, no less
339 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
(Symbolic 134). Kittler has paid attention to Freuds choice to describe the
human psyche not as a soul but as a psychic apparatus, suggesting a model
of the human psyche as a machine that, in Kittlers words, implemented all
available transmission and storage media, in other words, an apparatus just
short of the technical medium of universal-calculation, or the computer
(Symbolic 134). It is hardly surprising, then, that in the midst of the computer
revolution, popular narratives such as the ones discussed above suggest a
model of memory based on the information paradigm. Television shows such
as Fringe and FlashForward or flms like Total Recall and Vanilla Sky present in
concrete, literal terms what earlier theories of memory were already suggesting
at a discursive level.
A similar approach may be detected also in Freuds understanding and
theorisations of trauma. When the human subject is experiencing a traumatic
incident, the psychic apparatus fnds itself in a state of information overload.
Trauma was, for Freud an experience which within a short period of time
presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with
or worked of in the normal way (Fixation 275), a state in which, in the words
of Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, the infux of excitations is excessive in
relation to the tolerance of the psychical apparatus (466). Te discursive links
between technology and trauma are pursued in the following section.
Trauma sf, memory and technology
From a post-apocalyptic future where a war is being waged between humans
and machines, the leader of the human resistance, John Connor (Tomas
Dekker), sends back to the present a female cyborg named Cameron (Summer
Glau) to protect his younger self from any cyborgs sent to kill him before he
becomes the hero to lead the war. While expanding the mythology of the
original Terminator flms, Te Sarah Connor Chronicles (20089) dedicated an
entire episode, Alison from Palmdale (29 Sep 2008), to Camerons background
story. Te episode switches between scenes that take place in the present, which
follow Cameron, who disappears afer she forgets that she is a machine due to a
chip malfunction, and fash-forward scenes that show how, in the future, she
is kidnapped and turned into a cyborg by the machines. Tere is one sequence
in which scenes of the amnesiac Cameron receiving therapy from a counsellor
are intercut with scenes from the future where, still a human named Alison,
she is interrogated by one of the cyborgs. Te same questions about her past are
asked by both the counsellor and the cyborg, in a mise en scne that suggests
340 Aris Mousoutzanis
an analogy between Camerons memory dysfunction in the present and
Alisons amnesia in the future. In both cases, her amnesia is either presented or
interpreted as a post-traumatic symptom in the future, she is kidnapped afer
her family is killed by the machines. Te counsellor directly refers to popular
ideas of traumatic amnesia: sometimes when people forget, its because they
need to forget, because something painful has happened. Im wondering if
something has happened to you. Tis scene was not the frst time that the show
used trauma to represent cyborg identity: in other episodes, the lack of emotional
afect that both Cameron and liquid Terminator T101 Catherine Weaver
(Shirley Manson) demonstrate is interpreted as post-traumatic dissociation by
counsellors and other characters. Neither are the shows references to trauma
restricted to these two characters: individual episodes are dedicated to the
post-traumatic symptoms sufered by both Sarah (Lena Headey) and John
Connor afer committing murder; his uncle Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green)
is shown to have blocked memories of the long tortures inficted on him by
cyborgs in the future; and FBI agent James Ellison (Richard T. Jones) struggles
to cope with his sense of guilt for surviving a massacre inficted by one of
the evil Terminators. Tis particular scene, however, directly shows Allisons
interrogation by the cyborg as doubling Camerons counselling session,
indicative of the interconnections among memory, trauma and technology
explored in a number of American sf television shows of the last two decades
that may be brought together under the label trauma sf .
A list of representative shows in this tradition would include Lost, Battlestar
Galactica (US 20049), Te 4400 (US 20047), Invasion (US 20056), Te
Sarah Connor Chronicles, FlashForward and Te Event (US 201011). Te main
storylines deal with loss and trauma counselling session scenes are a recurring
leitmotif and in some cases they demonstrate a non-linear narrative that
makes use of fashback sequences that ofen revolve around a major incident,
in accordance with the non-linear, repetitive temporality of trauma. Tis trend
may be traced back to the days of David Lynchs Twin Peaks (US 19901), but
the sf show that frmly established this trend in American television would
be Chris Carters Te X-Files. Its overarching storyline was driven by FBI
Agent Fox Mulders (David Duchovny) quest to discover what happened to
his sister Samantha, who was allegedly abducted by extraterrestrials when she
was a child, an event that led Mulder to the investigation of the paranormal
and conspiracy theories. I have lived, Mulders voiceover opens the episode
Colony (10 Feb 1995), with a fragile faith built on the ether of vague memories
from an experience that I can neither prove nor explain. Tis belief sustained
me, fuelling a quest for truths as elusive as the memory itself . Troughout the
341 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
nine seasons of the show, the scene of Samanthas abduction was replayed
several times in traumatic fashback scenes shot with diferent directing styles
and from diferent perspectives, each time revealing new details or removing
others, in accordance with the malleable nature of memory. Te penultimate
episode of the shows fourth season, Demons (11 May 1997), is typical in
this respect: Mulder agrees to be treated by Dr Goldstein (Mike Nussbaum),
who is using an aggressive method to access buried or repressed memories
that stimulates electrical impulses in the brain by the use of light, sound and
hallucinogenic drugs. Afer being treated, Mulder sufers from seizures during
which he experiences fashbacks of Samanthas abduction in which we can see
that Mulders arch-enemy, the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis),
was present at the night of her abduction. Whatever treatment Ive received,
Mulder tells Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson), is allowing me to go back into
my unconscious. Te truth is in there, recorded, and Ive gotten access to it.
Agent Scully warns him, however, that these memories may not be genuine
but induced by suggestion. Hypnosis, Scully says in Jos Chungs From Outer
Space (12 Apr 1996), has its therapeutic value, but it has never been proven to
enhance memory. In fact, it actually worsens it since people in that state are
prone to confabulation.
Scullys statement is emblematic of the shows exploration of questions
regarding the authenticity or falsity of recovered memories, which directly
engaged with major debates during the contemporaneous Memory Wars that
took place between proponents of the Recovered Memory Terapy (RMT) and
those of the False Memory Syndrome movements (FMS). RMT was a popular
therapeutic technique during the 1980s and early 1990s that was based on
the assumption that it could bring back repressed memories of past trauma
through therapy and regressive hypnosis. Te technique was largely discredited
by advocates of FMS, who demonstrated that many of those memories were
not genuine but fabricated, constructed retrospectively by suggestion through
hypnosis. Hypnosis, however, was already the focus of fringe communities
investigating UFO sightings during the same period, as ufologists shifed
their interest away from medical and scientifc discourses and the use of
radars for observing the skies and started relying on psychotherapy, hypnosis
and self-help. Te publication of Budd Hopkinss Missing Time in 1981 may be
seen as a turning point in this transition. Focusing not on alleged sightings
of unidentifed objects but on symptoms of amnesia and temporal gaps in the
abductees, Hopkins described regressive hypnosis as the most efcient method
of unlocking the forgotten period of time and considered psychiatrists and
psychologists who practice hypnosis to be most helpful allies to ufology (19).
342 Aris Mousoutzanis
By the time of the Memory Wars, the term abduction syndrome had come
to the fore, as more Americans claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and
members of UFO subcultures engaged in dialogue with psychiatrists on the
nature of these memories. Arguments in the psychology community over
abduction memories seemed to Jodi Dean but a variation of the debates
surrounding false-memory syndrome (52). Debates regarding the plausibility
of alien abductions thus coincided and combined with contemporary disputes
on the relations between memory and trauma and abductions were seen as
displaced accounts of past trauma, what Luckhurst describes as a science-
fctionalisation of trauma. Tat Te X-Files responded to and fed back upon
these debates is evident in the episode that supposedly gave answers to the
storyline of Samanthas abduction, Closure (13 Feb 2000). Afer having been
asked by Agent Scully to research Samanthas abduction, FBI Agent Schoniger
(Stanley Anderson) shows her a video recording of Mulder as a teenager in a
state of hypnosis recounting his memories of Samanthas abduction during a
therapy session. He then explains that Mulders recovered childhood memories
are just garden-variety compensatory abduction fantasy for his guilt, his
feareverything thats preventing Agent Mulder from remembering the truth
about what really happened that night. When Scully asks him, why alien
abduction?, Schoniger replies, Close Encounters, E.T., who knows? Mulder was
frst subjected to regressive hypnosis 16 years afer his sisters abduction. But
there was probably a lot of imagery collecting in his head in those 16 years. By
the end of the scene, Schoniger advises Scully, Let it be. You know, theres some
wounds that are just too painful ever to be reopened. Well, says Scully, this
particular wound has never healed.
A distinctive feature that unites discussions of recovered memory, false
memory and abduction syndrome is the references to technology. According
to one of the most well-known representatives of RMT, Rene Fredrickson,
repressed memories were lost fles that were recorded and stored in the
fling system in [the] brain and could be retrieved by accessing the memory
bank (88). Followers of FMS, on the other hand, would suggest that the lost
fles were corrupted by the virus of RMT and its data manipulation. In
discussions on the function of regressive hypnosis in particular, psychiatrist
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has argued that
it is difcult to avoid comparison with modern technology: patients are switched like
television channels; elements of trauma are decomposed and recomposed as easily as
processing words on a computer; and the patients past is brought back as easily as
rewinding a video cassette (in fact, certain therapists speak of rewinding the patient.
(52)
343 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
Abduction scenarios, on the other hand, are ofen fantasies of technological
breakdown: a typical abduction scenario involves electrical failures of cars,
power surges that scramble televisions, radios, telephones, clocks stop working
and so on. From this perspective, they may be seen as fantasies conditioned by
postwar technoculture. Erik Davis has described UFOs as a visionary projectile
hurtling from the unconscious depths of the information age (229): the UFO,
for Davis, is the ultimate superscientifc machine, while the emergence of
the phenomenon of UFO sightings and alien abductions directly engages the
question of technology (226). Furthermore, according to the generic abduction
scenario, abductees are subjected to medical tests and implanted with an
electronic microchip that controls their bodily and mental functions. When
Scully discovers such a chip at the back of her neck, in 731 (1 Dec 1995), she has
it extracted and taken to FBI Agent Pendrell (Brendan Beiser) for analysis: the
chip, Pendrell fnds out, is replicating the memory process in the brain. Tis
kind of neural network could not only be collecting information, but artif-
cially replicating a persons mental processes. In this narrative detail, trauma
sf converges with cyberpunk sf. Abductees literally embody, in Luckhursts
words, the postmodernist rhetoric on the implanting of the machine into
the human, and they transport the wetwiring imaginaries of cyberpunk out
into the quotidian itself (Science-Fictionalization 389). As such, abduction
accounts may be seen as perfect examples of science-fctional narratives that
negotiate the traumatic encounter of subjectivity and technology (Luckhurst
Science Fiction 233).
Te representation of cyborg identity in these texts therefore hardly alludes
to the subversive subjectivity associated with the cyborg by Donna Haraway
in her Manifesto for Cyborgs and reiterated by several critics. Instead, these
popular representations of the encounter between the human and the techno-
logical seem to conform more to what Seltzer has termed the double logic of
prosthesis: on the one side, the violent disarticulation of natural bodies, an
emptying out of human agency, and, on the other, the extension of human agency
through the forms of technology that supplement it (213). Seltzer identifes a
range of popular sf flm that tests out the double-logic of technology as
prosthesis (284), such as Terminator 2 (Cameron US 1991), Virtuosity (Leonard
US 1995), Strange Days (Bigelow US 1995) and Copycat (Amiel US 1995), some
of which belong to cyberpunk cinema and enact an equation of prosthesis
and trauma, virtuality and violence (285). Te origins of this equation may
be located in the very earliest ofcial theorisations of trauma in Victorian
Britain during the 1860s, found in theoretical discussions about the efects of
the mechanised motion of the train on the human organism and of railway
344 Aris Mousoutzanis
accidents on their survivors. Te moment in Te Time Machine when the Time
Traveller loses control of the Time Machine has been read by Kirby Farrell as
a metaphor for the railway accidents that contributed to the formulation of
traumatic neurosis in the 1880s (105). According to a Lancet pamphlet on the
subject published in 1862, the mechanical shocks of mechanised travel were
bringing about a state of fatigue in the traveller who was overwhelmed by the
rapid, short vibrations and oscillations of the train (Anonymous 401). Tese
early discussions focused on a pathological explanation of post-traumatic
symptoms, which were attributed to a stimulation of the spinal cord by
the mechanical shock, termed railway spine an exclusively psychological
orientation would be established only later by Freud. In earlier texts by
physicians such as Tomas Buzzard, Herbert W. Page and John Eric Erichsen,
Laura Marcus informs us, the human organism is both analogised as an
engine or locomotive, and is held to be threatened by the machinery of the
modern age, which depletes its energies and produces nervous exhaustion,
or neurasthenia (177). Te very term railway spine, for Luckhurst, denoted
a conjuncture of body and machine, the violent collision of technological
modernity and human agency (Trauma 24).
In a similar vein, Alison Landsberg associates prosthetic memory with
trauma in her theoretical elaboration of the term. For her, prosthetic memories
are memories derived through an engagement with mediated representations
that may have a powerful emotional efect even if they are not connected
directly to ones lived experience. Tese memories are like an artifcial limb
in two senses: frst, they are actually worn on the body and produced by
an experience of mass-mediated representations; second, they ofen mark a
trauma (20). Indeed, many of the flms mentioned in the previous section,
some of which are discussed in Landsbergs analysis, are narratives organised
around trauma. Films such as Total Recall, Cypher, Te Matrix, Vanilla Sky
and Minority Report follow a similar narrative pattern according to which
the everyday life of the main character is torn apart when confronted with an
entirely new set of memories. Tis shared narrative pattern invites a reading
from the perspective of Jacques Lacans theorisations of trauma, which he
associated with the register of the Real. Te Real should not be mistaken for
everyday reality: it is a real that has nothing to do with what traditional
knowledge has served as a basis for, which is not what the latter believes it to
be namely, reality but rather fantasy (Lacan Seminar XX 131). According to
psychoanalysis, therefore, as Lacan underlined, everything we are allowed to
approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy (Seminar II 95). Fantasy
emerges afer the human subjects acquisition of language, the entrance into the
345 Trauma, memory and information in American sf flm and television
Symbolic register of language, signifcation and mediation. As such, everyday
reality is a fragile, symbolic cobweb, which, however, can at any moment be
torn aside by an intrusion of the real (iek Looking 17). Te Real refers to
the overwhelming, the unrepresentable, whatever cannot be integrated in the
Symbolic and yet always emerges in the form of that which is unassimilable
in it in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing
on it an apparently accidental origin (Lacan Four 55). Te narrative drive of
many of the flms mentioned above is propelled by the eruption of the Real
within Symbolic reality in the form of a major incident, ofen an accident
around which the entire plot circulates. Such a reading is strengthened by the
fact that these texts envision everyday reality to be an illusion, a fantasy, ofen
a virtual reality, since cyberspace, as iek has underlined, foregrounds the
fact that reality is always a construct of fantasy. Virtual reality, according to
iek, shows us that (symbolic) reality always-already was virtual, that is to
say: every access to (social) reality has to be supported by an implicit phantasmic
hypertext (iek Plague 143). Te Real, on the other hand, is associated by
Lacan with the noise that exists in any exchange of information. Te Real is
a noise in which everything can be heard (qtd Bowie 95), an impossibility, as
Kittler has elaborated, that only signal processors (and psychoanalysts of the
future) can bring under their control (Gramophone 168). It is quite telling that
one of ieks favourite examples to illustrate the Lacanian theory of trauma
comes from one of the most well-known examples of cyberpunk cinema: the
scene from Te Matrix where Neo (Keanu Reeves) is transferred by Morpheus
(Laurence Fishburne) to a devastated landscape, announcing welcome to the
desert of the Real.
Conclusion
Tis article has explored what might be considered a feedback loop whereby
popular sf texts engage with wider social and clinical concerns with memory
and trauma, even as theorists and scholars writing on these topics adopt and
appropriate terms from technological discourses that have been an infuence
on sf fctions, such as cybernetics and information theory. Tese convergences
between theory and fction, popular culture and intellectual inquiry, reveal a
series of links between cyberculture and trauma culture and refect the extent
to which contemporary technologies provide a discursive framework within
which individuals and communities experience and understand their own
memories and experiences. Popular sf fctions may thus be seen as articulating
346 Aris Mousoutzanis
anxieties about the integrity of individual and group identity within a techno-
logically saturated cultural landscape. Tey do that by exploring the ways
in which individuals relate to their experiences when these experiences are
mediated by contemporary technologies, even as they investigate the ramif-
cations for individual identity when memory is transcoded into information.
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