Memento and cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is not the continued act of holding conflicting beliefs, but rather the state of being aware of it. It is an important state because it is one of discomfort, and that discomfort is the underlying force that drives us to change our minds about anything.

If that sounds dramatic, consider that new information does change reality — at least our perspective of it. Even minor details can nudge or uncomfortably rub against once-unchallenged certainties. Whether the threatened change is trivial, annoying, perplexing, or downright paradigm-shifting, we must process it — and the uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance ensures that we do. As soon as we become aware that two pieces of information don’t quite fit with each other, we are faced with the necessity of doing something about it. However minor the conflict, we must resolve it to go back to feeling comfortable with our reality. Even if it means ignoring the conflict altogether.

If it were as simple as assessing all relevant information and making rational decisions about what to believe, cognitive dissonance would be a lot less interesting. But our primary concern is never reason, logic, temperance, even-handedness, or whatever subjective value we personally believe will lead to processing new information well. The motive is much more primitive: Make the feeling go away. Cognitive dissonance can be so distressing that the mind will strive to relieve itself quickly, vigorously, and sloppily. Truth and reason take a back seat to the more pressing matter of emotional peace.

When people use the label “cognitive dissonance,” it is usually because they have judged a person to have a done a poor job of synthesizing apparently conflicting thoughts. From the outside, they may think they see through the contrivances, the excuses, or even the wilful ignorance — whatever trickery the subject has managed to play on themselves to avoid facing their contradiction.

But even if everyone agrees the subject is irrational, the subject is the one who has the last word on whether it is dissonance — no matter what anyone says they should be feeling. Even if no one else is deceived, successful self-deception results in peace for the deceiver.

Observers often find this deeply uncomfortable. Perhaps it is because it challenges their own perspective of the world, and thus threatens their reality. It may be a reminder of their blind spots. After all, in the matter of self-deception, no one is innocent.

When the peace is threatened

Depending on the coping mechanisms employed to counter dissonance, the resulting peace may be exceptionally fragile. The more a person misaligns themselves from the world that everyone else lives in, the more likely that they will be faced with reminders of it. Their peace will often be disturbed.

To varying degrees, we all experience this. Whether our inner peace is fragile or stalwart; whether it is regularly threatened by basic encounters with daily life, or carefully maintained via cold logic, we are imperfect creatures living in a vastly complicated world. We are constantly assailed by events, pressured by our cultures and peers, forced to contend with new ideas, and endlessly reinforcing or reshaping our identities with what little tools are available to us.

All of us are, at times, faced with reminders of our contradictions, and thus thrust into a disturbed state of dissonance. What do we do then? What happens when a threat to our reality knocks at the door?

If the threat can get past our defensiveness, the next thing we may feel is spite — toward whatever has reminded us of the dissonance. An angry lust to bring retribution upon the bearer of bad news. We all know that feeling. It is the same one that may drive us to curse the chair we just stubbed our toe against because we were not paying attention. More than physically distressing, pain is psychologically unbearable. The mind desperately seeks a return to peace and resents that which has broken it.

People who exist in a state of fragile emotional peace — of easily-induced cognitive dissonance — spend much of their lives feeling angry. And the character of that anger is bitter. Resentful. Spiteful.

I’ve really buried the lead here, but that emotion is a pivotal element of the 2000 film Memento, which is what prompted me to write this. There are many interesting things to analyze about the film, but in my view, it is principally a story about cognitive dissonance.

Shoot the messenger

In Memento, a man named Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia. He gained the condition when he was hit in the head while defending his wife from an attempted rape and murder. He says he remembers everything before the attack, but cannot make any new memories. He lives one fragment of life at a time, driven by a single purpose: To avenge his wife.

The film begins at the end of the story — when Leonard apparently fulfills that purpose by killing a man named Teddy. The film then shows, in reverse order, the recent sequence of events that led to that scene.

Despite his condition, Leonard is confident. He trusts in the “facts” he tattoos on his body and writes on Polaroid photographs. But as the movie progresses backward in time, it becomes clear these facts are distorted, incomplete, and far from the dependable summaries of reality that he interprets them to be. Worse, some are wilfully sabotaged by Leonard himself.

Indeed, after showing us how easy it is for others to manipulate him, the film ends by revealing it was Leonard who had manipulated himself into distrusting, pursuing, and ultimately murdering Teddy — a man he actually knew (however briefly) to be innocent in the crime related to his wife.

Why did he do this? Spite. And why did he feel spite? Because Teddy told him the truth, and in so doing made him feel cognitive dissonance.

Avoiding the unbearable reality

Leonard killed Teddy because Teddy confronted him with the unbearable reality: That Leonard was the one who killed his wife (accidentally) some time after the attack, which she had actually survived. That Leonard tricks and conditions himself into believing his wife had instead been murdered during the attack, and that one of the murderers was still on the loose. That he does this to avoid facing the trauma of having killed her, and to have a sense of purpose.

As Leonard says, without his short-term memories, he is incapable of healing. He has already killed his wife’s escaped attacker over a year before the events of the film, but cannot remember it. If — with notes and tattoos — he gave himself the knowledge of having avenged his wife, he would be left with nothing to drive him forward, and no outlet for the anger he experiences every time he wakes up, feeling as though the attack has just occurred. He is driven by a revenge that reality cannot satiate.

In the face of this and the painful dissonance of his actions, he deliberately sabotaged his future self’s ability to know the truth — including the truth of his own self-deception. He redacted police reports, burned evidence, and wrote misleading notes to himself, knowing he will forget having done so. He thus freed himself to continue pursuing a solved crime and shed his cognitive dissonance, achieving the closest thing to a state of peace that he could have.

After Teddy exposes the sham, Leonard asks himself: “Can I just let myself forget what you’ve told me? Can I just let myself forget what you made me do?” At first, it seems he is referring to Teddy, but the second question in particular is clearly addressed to himself. Leonard recognizes that his past self used his amnesia to manipulate his present self. Then, having ultimately chosen to do it all over again — having decided to wilfully forget — he spitefully makes Teddy his next target for having dared to remind him of the truth (and probably to protect himself from further disturbances to the peace).

To change a mind is to inflict pain

Even for those of us without amnesia, the process of dealing with our own cognitive dissonance is similar. We play whatever trick is necessary to make it go away, then move on to live in our new realities, often with no awareness of having done so at all. To ourselves, our actions do not appear as coping mechanisms, but only as sensible responses to the world around us. To believe anything else would be to invite a self-distrust incompatible with a happy life. Self-deception’s ultimate trick is causing belief in one’s complete honesty.

The role of spite and its violent consequences in Memento are interesting to me because they highlight the difficulty of changing a person’s mind. One of the very first steps in changing any mind about anything is to expose or introduce dissonance, so that a solution can be then be provided. But dissonance is upsetting. Potentially, it can be so distressing that the mind is not even capable of sitting with it long enough to entertain thoughtful solutions — even if, to outside observers, those solutions are so harmonious, logical, and healthy that the changing of the mind must surely be welcomed with open arms!

Nonetheless, the mind may, and often does, violently reject or rebel against the new information — and against its messenger. And why wouldn’t it? By introducing dissonance, which is psychologically painful, attempting to change a mind is the act of inflicting pain. Indeed, the very idea that a person may be willing to ignore this for the mere sake of introducing something as subjective as their “truth” may be perceived as hostile or untrustworthy, as well as a signal of further pain in future interactions with that person. The same kind of pain from which Leonard decides to save himself — not by solving the root problem, but by eliminating any reminder of it, even to the extent of murder.

Spite may be justified

Many are familiar with the tragic yet common consequence of trying to change someone’s mind about something important but difficult, like helping a friend understand they are married to an abusive spouse. Instead of leaving, they cut you out. Exposing people to their dissonances causes them pain, and people in pain usually don’t react very nicely.

In response to these reactions, some people say: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” But this is itself a cope for cognitive dissonance! It acknowledges that new information is painful and at the same time excuses itself from the discomfort of inflicting that pain with the illusion that one had nothing to do with the communication of said “facts.” Those who speak that phrase may even pat themselves on the back for doing the listener a favor, having deftly avoided perceiving the callousness in their action and selfishness in their motivation.

Another similar idiom, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” exists because people really do hate the messenger, sometimes to the point of extreme violence. But especially in close friendships, I think it is important to recognize that the messenger does bear much of the responsibility for the message. How important is it to question your friend’s reality, truly? When you try to change a person’s mind, who are you really helping?

Besides, if you’re not careful, you could end up like Teddy.