Enter the Minds of a Pathological Liar and an Alzehiemer's Patient

Wow. Last Year at Marienbad, what a trip-tastic mind-bender of a film you are. From floaty camera shots to the hauntingly gorgeous landscapes within the crawl out of your skin creepfest of a hotel we all were forced to visit, not to mention the stalker-esque manner in which our protagonist(??) hung about the apple of his eye like a vulture to a dead carcass, all these elements grab a hold of you with their ghostly little hands and yank you right into the midst of this other dimension. Never before have I been witness to all these things at once, and never before have I ever been left feeling so unnerved after watching a movie. From the opening scene, feeding the audience a looped monologue and shot after shot of endless, empty hallways, I felt trapped; a denizen to a haunted old motel, stuck in purgatory for infinity.

And indeed, our purpose as an audience seems to be just that. We are destined to enter the psychological hell of of our main man, X, lost within the labyrinth of his own mind in the attempt to distinguish between the truth of events and his own fabrications. Is he nothing more than a pathological liar, clinging to his obsession of his supposed mistress, A, taking his fantasy to the extremes and back? Or is this man merely trying to reaffirm his own reality through this woman by making sure the events that happened between them a year ago were not merely a trick of the mind, doubting the world outside the confines of his own mental state?

From one viewpoint, his tale is one of an anti-social personality type, slinking after his prey like a deranged and disturbed psych ward patient. In nearly every scene, X is trying to convince this woman of their scandalous affair sprawling across the hotel and garden, romanticizing about statues and old photographs, seemingly making up every word as he goes along. Several times he recalls events that he does not like, immediately altering them to become more form fitting to image of how he himself wanted the summer fling to play out. Merely a lunatic out to hold dominion over a sexual conquest this man may appear to be, and with good reason.

However, I absolutely love the idea of a man struggling to determine some form of undeniable evidence of a consistent outside world, not only because it results in a far less disturbing outlook on the film, but also because of the philosophical questions such a stance would attempt to tackle.

"I think, therefore I am." The famous words rung out by Rene Descartes from within the pitch black of an oven, have forever given us proof of our own existence yet leave us amiss when it comes to distinguishing what is real outside ourselves. X may have the memories of a sizzling love affair between the gorgeous A from his vacation in that freaky little hotel one year ago, but how can he be sure that the people, places and things from those events were real? How can he be sure that the woman he shared a bed with was indeed his lover and not a dream in which we all are convinced are real night after night?

Thoughts of the movie, Memento, continually flash into my mind. A man with a past but lacking the ability to make new memories photographs the key events in his life, tattooing the clues of his own mystery to his body, making them true. He ends the movie by saying he needs to make a world outside of his own mind, not to be merely trapped within it. Is this not what X is trying to do? By barraging A with an interrogation of countless recollections, the man is trying to hear from a mind outside of his own an agreement on what happened within the outside world. Or at least that's the position I'd like to take. Far less creepy and way, way more intriguing.