Wendy Chun points out that as computers increasingly structure society, their ways of operating also influence how we think about the world. This is in part a contemporary phenomenon resulting from a bit of modern neuroscience ( consolidation is the technical term for how the brain processes memory) and the infiltration of computers into everyday life. In this model, fixing the past is also about consolidation, a hardening of the ephemeral into a solid, locatable object. During a heated correspondence with a lover returned suddenly to her life, Eloisa (now a nun) prays to the heavens for the power to forget her forbidden lover: “Oh come! Oh teach me nature to subdue/Renounce my love, my life, myself-and you.” 1 So much easier to bear is a life unburdened by regret and desire and shame.Ĭontemporary representations of willed forgetfulness more frequently invoke science rather than God, often in the form of devices that understand our brains as databases with physical locations for storing information, such as the mapping and zapping gadget of Eternal Sunshine’s Lacuna Inc.
#EVE BEANCOUNTER RESEARCH MATERIAL SERIES#
Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard,” from which the classic memory manipulation film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind gets its title, was written in the eighteenth century and was itself a retelling of an actual twelfth-century series of letters. Erasing unpleasant memories is a very old desire. And with them, the lingering pain and regret and (so the fantasy goes) responsibility and consequence. Our mistakes, our losses, our acts of violence, our traumas-gone. The fantasy of memory editing shows our yearning for a future in which we can fix the past. Through close readings of Assassin’s Creed, Portal II, and Remember Me, I explore how multiracial memory manipulation in video games exposes contemporary anxieties about racial difference like colonial erasure, scientific experimentation, and anti-Blackness, but ultimately returns to a status quo facilitated by the multiracial body’s historical function as a figure for reconciliation. This process mirrors contemporary approaches to race in popular media, specifically within gaming culture, in which the trouble of difference is so often blamed on an inability to leave the past behind. Here, fixing the past operates not only as presumed racial reconciliation but also as solidification, closing off the past from further discussion. Multiraciality is often metaphorically positioned close to scenes of racial violence across different forms of media, but video games fix and distribute memories onto playable spaces and objects in such a way that multiracial avatars are often literally placed within scenes of past racial trauma to explore and amend them. In this article, I argue that the multiracial avatars in memory manipulation games turn the multiracial body into a conduit that offers white players an easy way out of substantive reconciliation by fixing past instances of racial injustice via the mechanic of memory tourism.
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