Atonement was a novel by Ian McEwan, adapted to film in 2007. Its main character is Briony Tallis, a rather imaginative girl who seems destined to become a writer. But at 13, she does something that she ends up spending her entire life trying to atone for.It all starts when she witnesses her sister, Cecilia, stripping down for the housekeeper's son, Robbie. The truth is that Cecilia was stripping down so she could get something at the bottom of the fountain, but Briony never finds out until later. Later, Briony sees a sexually explicit letter from Robbie that was never meant to be delivered. And then, later, Briony sees Cecilia and Robbie making love, and assumes that Robbie was assaulting her sister. In short, through a series of misunderstandings, Briony is convinced that Robbie is a sex maniac after her sister.
This could easily be sitcom material, but instead there is a tragic turn. In the dark, Briony encounters someone raping her friend, Lola. The rapist runs away, but Briony imagines that she saw Robbie's face. She gives her testimony, putting Robbie in prison. This separates Robbie and Cecilia, who have fallen in love with each other. Briony comes to deeply regret her actions as a 13-year old, thus the title of the novel.
I am not going to review this movie, because I am not what you call a "good" movie critic. Instead, I intend to comment on the false memories in the story. The story of false memories is one of the more dramatic stories in the world of skepticism. There is an idea in psychology that traces back to Sigmund Freud that the cause of many psychological conditions is a traumatic event during childhood. People generally can't remember any such event because such traumatic memories are usually repressed. I don't have an exact timeline, but it became especially fashionable in the
But the skeptics eventually won! Nowadays, psychologists know about false memories. Studies have shown that it is not only possible to implant false memories in people, but it is very easy to do so. The truth was that psychologists everywhere were inadvertently implanting childhood memories of traumatic events in their patients by the power of suggestion. It is no coincidence that the psychologists found exactly what they expected! Certainly, not every single memory of child abuse was false, but most of them were. Anyways, there is little evidence that most psychological conditions are caused by traumatic childhood incidents. And there is little evidence to suppose that memory recovery would actually help a patient. To top it all off, the very existence of "repressed" memory is now disputed (note that temporarily forgetting something is not necessarily a repression of memory).
In short, psychology has sinned, and sinned greatly. I do not personally know anyone who has been affected by all of this, but I feel their pain. Families destroyed... feelings of anger, betrayal, and regret... I truly feel that this is one of the greatest tragedies of science.
In the world of fiction, it's different. Part of it is that many scientific theories tend to linger around much longer among the liberal arts than they do in the sciences (I, for one, am disgusted that Freudian psychoanalysis is still popular in some liberal arts). But I think that it's mainly because the manipulation of memory is simply a very useful plot device. It allows you to switch around the order of what the audience sees. Or it allows for character development, or the development of relationships. And because few conflicts go unresolved in fiction, most characters will recover from their amnesia. For extra suspense, they could recover through a series of dramatic flashbacks! Whatever the reasons, it is disproportionately common for fictional characters to have amnesia or repressed memories, and then recover from these. Some of these stories are plausible, if unlikely, but most are not realistic at all.
Atonement is refreshing in that it treats memory far more realistically. Rather than treating memory as a mere plot device, Atonement has at its center a real phenomenon: false memories. Briony "recalls" seeing Robbie's face on the rapist. Here, there is no psychologist who is inadvertently implanting memories through suggestion, instead Briony is wrongly biased against Robbie. Perhaps, if she had not been convinced that Robbie was a sex maniac, she would not have been so quick to blame him. She is also a very imaginative and impressionable girl. As an aspiring writer, she tends to play back her memories in her mind, each time becoming more dramatic. I don't think all these things are necessary to create a false memory, but they probably help.
The consequences of Briony's false memory tap into many of the same emotions caused by "recovered" memories in the 70s. Cecilia and Robbie are, of course, very angry at Briony. They think she was simply being overly imaginative, or worse, outright lying. Briony herself is at first sure of herself, but this wears out as she gets older. She comes to understand the gravity of her action. She becomes less sure of her memory. She blames herself. And even if she did retract her eyewitness account, who would believe her second account over the first one? And who would accept that as a sufficient apology?
Knowing what I know about false memories, I could not blame Briony for her action. I see it as more of a "girl against nature" sort of conflict. Through a fatal trick of psychology, she was put in a situation that no one deserves to be in. And since no one understood false memories back then, the consequences were dire.
But there was one other aspect of the story I thought was sad. After Briony becomes convinced that her testimony was unreliable, she "recalls" the rapist to be the man who eventually became Lola's fiance. I suppose that canonically, her new memory is the correct one, but I can't help but think it is just as unreliable as her first memory. The situation is pretty much the same as it was before. Briony is still an imaginative and impressionable girl, if a bit older now. Now instead of having mixed feelings about Cecilia's relationship with Robbie, she is having mixed feelings about Lola's upcoming wedding. Really, we have to be suspicious of any memory that is "recalled", for the first time, years after the fact.
As it plays out, Briony can't summon the courage to tell Lola of her new memory. Frankly, I was relieved.
