5. In the world of Gamer, memory is so flattened and reduced as to be drained of all emotional resonance. It only exists as so much computer data, accessible more easily by security forces and large corporations than it is by ourselves. This condition is literalized at one point in the film, when the rebel hackers hook up Kable to a computer, so that his blocked traumatic memories can be played back to onlookers in the form of a surveillance video. Is there any better figuration for the ways in which the obsessive storing and cataloging of personal memories — through computer archives of photos and videos, lifeblogs, and other such prosthetic devices — is inseparable from a certain commodification (or “alienation,” in the strict Marxist sense rather than the looser existential one) of the past, and of our “mental privacy” itself?
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