Episode 000: An Introduction & a Memento (2000) for the Future

Episode Notes:

Hi everyone! Welcome to the first (zero) episode of the CinemaPsych Podcast. I’m glad you’re here to listen to a labor of love. In this episode, I outline what the show is going to be about, a little about why I made this podcast, a small discussion about the film Memento (2000), and a few calls to action.

Please leave your feedback on this post, the main site (cinemapsychpod.swanpsych.com), on Facebook (@CinPsyPod), or Twitter (@CinPsyPod). I’d love to hear from you!

Legal stuff:
1. All film clips are used under Section 107 of Title 17 U.S.C. (fair use; no copyright infringement is intended).
2. Intro and outro music by Sro (“Self-Driving”). Used under license CC BY-SA 4.0.
3. Film reel sound effect by bone666138. Used under license CC BY 3.0.

Episode transcription:

[electronic music introduction]

Alex Swan: Hey everybody and welcome to the CinemaPsych Podcast! Oh my goodness, I am so happy to be with you. So excited to be doing this show…Episode 000, first episode. Not episode 1–episode 0. I am your host, Dr. Alex Swan and I am ready to get into this. It’s been a long time coming and I’m–like I said really excited to jump into this. In this first episode I want to go ahead and explain how this show is going to work, what the show is all about, explain me a little bit, and then jump into a sort of mini-episode, is what I’ll call it, and briefly talk about Memento, one of my favorite films. And so yeah, we’ll just go ahead with that. 

So what’s this podcast all about? Well it’s where all of psychology meets all of film, really. We’re going to take deep dives into the psychology of various films and all of psychology is up for grabs here. So we’re not going to focus on psychological disorders, mental illness, or anything like that. We will sprinkle that in sometimes here and there but we are going to focus on more… about the cognitive aspects, the social aspects, the developmental aspects, the behavioral aspects of psychology. And each week I’m going to have on a good friend. A fellow psychologist, a fellow educator, who really loves film. And our approach is probably going to be somewhat eclectic. All of these people have different specializations in Psychology than I do and so we’re just going to explore it from where we feel comfortable.

Okay…and the vast majority of our discussions are going to be exploring the concepts that are portrayed in the films, talking about how the trivia relates to those…psychological aspects–those concepts. Uh…and really just explore the themes…the elements, from a scientist point-of-view…you know, describing the accuracy of the portrayal, but then also as, you know, just a general film fan–”oh, do we like this, do we like the actor choice, the director choice.” You know, all of these aspects of the film watching experience and the filmmaking experience, are all going to be aspects of things that we discuss. But of course, the primary focus is on the psychology. So that’s really what the nature of the podcast going to be. Just a couple of film fans… throwing their expertise around… for students, educators, lay audiences, anybody who’s interested in psychology.. and film… and those two things together. So it’s going to be, I think quite a bit of fun, and I’m so excited.

Starting with next episode, we are going to have that special guest host and these people are going to be in rotating… I’m going to have as-as many different voices for the show as I can from episode to episode. We are going to jump from genre to genre. I’ll probably be able to give you a little bit of a tease… each episode on what’s coming next, so you stay tuned, to keep listening. That sort of thing… you know, do those real good social psychological tricks to keep you watching, riveted–watching HA! What am I talking about? Am I making a Youtube video? No, I’m making a podcast–listening, to keep you listening, of course. 

Alright, so who am I? Some of you may not actually even know me. You’re listening, you know… probably the first people that are going to be listening are the people who do know me. But that’s okay if you’re listening to this and you’re like, who the hell are you? Again: Doctor Alex Swan. I am a professor of psychology at Eureka College. I’m based in Central Illinois where Eureka College is. I’m in my third year. I got my doctorate in 2016 from University of California Santa Barbara in cognitive psychology, but I’m more of a generalist these days with kind of college that Eureka is, so I tend to teach a ton of classes. One of those classes is intro psych. An interesting thing about that background is in every single one of my classes you will find a film–a film analysis. You know, we watch it in class or they watch it on their own, my students, and then, you know, write a paper or something like that…analyzing the psychology and the concepts that we talked about in class…as applied to the film, they explore the accuracy, et cetera.

So we’re kinda doing that for this podcast. I’m sort of doing the work for my students if I ever choose a movie–film… that they end up talking about in their classes. Well, you know, I’m not too worried about it. I also got the great opportunity of, I would say, “demoing” a Psych in Film class over the summer, so that was fun. I enjoyed doing that and I hope to do it again. Sort of– this podcast is kind of like the mixing between maybe… get my kicks in talking about psych and film…um, without actually having to teach the class and just sort of, um, banter back and forth with the co-host. It’s a little bit easier than teaching class, I tell you what. 

So… why a podcast about psychology and film? You may have asked yourself that question, maybe you didn’t, but I’m going to go ahead and answer it for you anyways. So you remember this little company called Netflix? It’s a tiny little company… I don’t–I don’t, they don’t really do much these days I don’t think. Uh…well, back in 2004 I became a member. So I’ve been a member of Netflix for 15 years now… ho boy, 15 years next month actually. August 2019, 15 full years. It’d been–It’d only been around for about a year I would say, and… at that time, all they were doing were DVDs, DVDs through the mail. I–I hope you remember that. Maybe you’re not uhh–maybe you’re not old enough to remember Netflix actually doing anything other than streaming. They still do the DVD business, by the way, it’s just like, dvd.com or something like that, I don’t even know. But at the time that’s all they did were DVDs in the mail and at several points in my subscription, I was getting multiple DVDs at a time. I had like, five DVDs out at one time as part of my service. Uh…and I was watching one or two films a day. So it was really…really, sort of, time-consuming in that I was watching a lot of films. I was getting a lot of information thrown at me in this lovely, lovely median [sic] medium.. and at the same time I started college. And so, I was doing classes and movies, classes and movies, classes and movies, classes and movies. And one of the several classes that I was taking were psychology classes [sic]. I didn’t start college as a psych major but I started taking psychology courses and I fell in love with psychology and I think… maybe some, you know, behaviorist can back me up on this one here…I think there was some paired associated [sic] learning going on…. because the two just mind-melded, okay? And they’ve been intertwined ever since. 

I love it. I love talking about film and psychology, and I’ve been wanting to start a podcast for the past couple of years now, with a strong desire starting back in January and I-I sort of got to a point in the-in the summer here where I should-I should-I should buy a boat…No, I should start a podcast. I should just do it. I should read how to do it, cuz [sic] really as an academic, you just read how to do things. So I read how to start a podcast. I talked about it with colleagues and they were super onboard. I was so floored by the, I want to say… response, to my, you know request for advice, suggestions, ideas et cetera…that are on [sic], so you know, that’s what it just snowballed and I started messing around with audio programming, audio editing, and I already knew how to do a little bit of it, and so I sort of just put all of the pieces together I still need some–more to come on that in the while–I still need some…um–yeah–some things to make this a real good endeavor, real solid, excellent production. But you know, I thought, you know, might as well do it. This is-this is going to be a hobby, I’m not going to try to make any money from it, you know, sort of a nonprofit endeavor, honestly. And so, that’s where I-that’s where I was. Psychology: love it. Film: love it. Put them together–do it. Just do it. You know, kind of like the Shia LaBeouf “Just do it!” meme that’s out there. I-er-I listened to him, I said “okay, alright let’s do it.” And there are so many other people like me that have all of these great ideas about psychology in film and maybe they just don’t have the time to put their own podcast together and honestly I have very little time of my own, but, you know what? I really wanted to do it. So might as well let’s do it, and you will meet all of those people… those lovely lovely people is the episodes progress. And I want to go ahead and make this a really exciting to listen to, really interesting, podcast then and so your feedback is going to be really really important as I continue.

So, um… to start, well… to finish sort of the, uh… early podcast details portion of the show, um… a little bit of business. This episode is going out with a GoFundMe campaign. Because this is primarily a hobby endeavor, uh… in order to keep it going, I need a little bit of help. Not a lot. Just a little bit. And most of that support is to keep the show g-growing and moving in a couple of ways. One: podcast hosting. Podcast hosting, um, is essential for keeping a podcast moving– if you are an avid listen-listener to podcasts, you probably have been to several kinds–several different podcasting hosting sites. I can’t use my regular hosting for it. I-it’s not enough–I don’t get enough bandwidth, and, um, you know, I need to keep–I need a place to keep these awesome awesome episode, you know. Uh…that…you know, people on their phones, on the computer anywhere over–the anywhere around the world can access immediately if they have the means to. 

And the second bit of support is equipment. Now this is sort of a, um, end bit of support to the show. Uh, there are a few pieces of equipment that I am missing. You might be able to hear it in the audio. I do need a much much better microphone. Doesn’t have to be fancy, it’s not going to be fancy, but it is going to be an audio microphone. Uh, it doesn’t–so nothing fancy, you know. Uh, but, uh things to make my voice just a little bit neater, a little bit mess–a little bit less messy and reduce the sounds that you might hear that I don’t catch in post-production. That sort of thing. And so if you can support me through that GoFundMe, that initial GoFundMe campaign, I would be so appreciative. A few dollars here and there, it really doesn’t have to be that much, but anything you can do to support this wild and crazy idea, this wild and crazy hobby that I have would be amazing. And, um, later instead of just doing GoFundMe’s because, you know, GoFundMe fundraiser, sort of, single campaign kind of thing and you know, I can’t say that I have cancer or I need medical treatment because that would be currently, a lie. Um, I’m going to go ahead and set up a Patreon account and if you want to, you know, an ongoing donation through that I plan-I plan to set that up for ongoing support. Like I said, I don’t need a lot, I need to keep the lights running. Like I said this is going to be a nonprofit endeavor…um… and-and one of the things that I-I want to do for donors is give them shout outs on the show. So at the end of every show I’m going to go ahead and I’ll give a shout out to those people who put their names on their donations, um, to support the show.

I don’t have any specific donors right now, so I’m going to go ahead and use this moment to think one person. I want to give a shout out to my wife, Astrid, for her support of this crazy idea. She has been amazing. She probably thinks I’m a super weird dork but she married me, so what does that make her? But without her encouragement and emotional support I probably wouldn’t be recording this episode right now. I probably wouldn’t even have thought about it. So, she is the real MVP, and so she gets that first shout out. And I know she’s listening to this because I probably made her… so thank you, Astrid, [kissing sound] you’re the best.

[film reel sound effect] 

Let’s finish this episode with a snippet of a discussion of Memento. Actually, I have a few things that I want to say about it. I’m going to play a couple of clips–not all of them are from Memento, but I do want to make a comparison, if you will, of the main psychological feature of Memento. Now, if you’re not familiar Memento is a film… by Christopher Nolan of you know, the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, uh, and Interstellar. This is one of his earlier films. Um, it’s about a guy named Leonard who has an interesting cognitive deficit. He has… issues remembering things after a certain amount of time, and I’ll explain what that means in just a minute. Leonard is played by Guy Pearce and the film also stars Carrie-Ann Moss and Joe Pantoliano. They aren’t actually very many other actors in the show–a couple of bit actors here and there. I love this film. Top 10 greatest films of all time, in my opinion, and it is a real trip. Like, I-I-I enjoy it immensely… more so for the storytelling and the narrative than for the accuracy of the psychology… so… it’s just a well-done story. And you have to think about it… more… than just watching it for the first time. You have to go back. On the DVD–here’s a bit of trivia–on the DVD, they included as hidden through menus and such, they included a different way of watching the film. It’s quite good… it’s quite good–you can watch the film in chronological order as opposed to how the film has actually set and shown, um theatrically. 

So… what’s the main psychology concept presented in this film? Well, it’s amnesia. Now, Christopher Nolan, I think, does an extremely good job by not using the word amnesia because what’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word amnesia? Well you’re probably thinking, “well, that person doesn’t remember who they are”. We have been totally corrupted in… TV and film that amnesia means “I can’t remember what happened to me in the past”, “I don’t know who I am”. Soap operas, how dare you! And that’s one kind of amnesia. It is one. It is called retrograde amnesia. Any sort of brain trauma can cause a loss of previously learned information… so, that could be as far back as your name and who you are. Now this is definitely played up quite a bit in TV and film, [inaudible] probably, um, not very accurate and most film portrayals of amnesia, as I’ll describe in a few minutes. Um, but this amnesia is different–this amnesia is anterograde amnesia. This amnesia is the inability to encode new information, to learn new information, declaratively. You don’t know after a certain period of time. This period of time may be anywhere from, you know, 20 to 30 seconds, which is the span of time that you can actively work with something in your head. Just think about how much of a phone number you can remember and how long you can remember that phone number without actually replaying the phone number, rehearsing the phone number in your head. And so that’s what the film–that’s the condition in the film that Leonard has. He has anterograde amnesia… he suffered some brain trauma and he ended up with the inability to form new memories.

And the accuracy of it is decent. Uh, I would say on a scale from one to seven, the accuracy is about a 6 on anterograde amnesia. What we know of anterograde amnesia. Um… and, you know, as a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan plays a little fast and loose depending on what the scene requires but honestly, he does a really good job of trying to keep it mostly consistent and whether or not the continuity errors in the internal logic of the movie–that is, you know, the amount of time that Leonard has… in a particular moment… to work with the information that he’s given so, you know, when he is shown a new piece of information and doesn’t focus on it, how how long before it’s completely gone? How long before it decays? Christopher Nolan is pretty consistent with it. Sometimes it’s a little more than a minute as with the end of the film, there’s a lot of stuff going on at the end of the film. There’s a really good scene in the middle without giving it away with Carrie-Anne Moss’s character Natalie and Leonard–Guy Pearce–where it’s kind of tragic in how much, uh, Christopher Nolan tells Guy Pearce to remember in that moment because of the emotion and the-the, uh, bang bang of the scene and, you know, just the anxiety of the situation. It’s really interesting and before I play, um, before I play one of my favorite clips from the movie I want to go ahead and just compare that…uh, portrayal of anterograde amnesia with two sources that you I’m pretty sure you’ll know. First one is Dory. So this is from Finding Nemo, 2003. Came out shortly after Memento, uh, and you can see some similarities. The issue that I have with Dory is how she describes it. Here’s the clip:

Marlin: What are you talking about? You’re showing me which way the boat went.

Dory: A boat? Bey, l’ve seen a boat. It passed by not too long ago. It went, um … This way! It went this way I Follow me!

Marlin: Wait a minute. Wait a minute! What is going on?l You already told me which way the boat was going!

Dory: I did? Oh no. 

Marlin: If this is some kind of practical joke, it’s not funny! And I know funny! I’m a clownfish!

Dory: No, it’s not. I know it’s not funny — I-I’m so sorry. See, I suffer from short-term memory loss.

Marlin: Short term memory loss. I don’t believe this.

Dory: No, it’s true. I forget things almost instantly. It runs in my family–well, I mean, at least I think it does. Uh, hmm…where are they? … Can I help you?

Marlin: Something’s wrong with you.

Alex: [laughter] So, that is, uh, Dory, short term memory loss–not a great description of her anterograde amnesia condition and I’m going to go ahead and just compare it to a real person. Clive Wearing. Uh, so I’m only going to play a-play a few seconds of this clip just to give you an indication of what his disorder is.

[piano playing]

Narrator: Clive wearing has the worst case of amnesia ever known. Twenty years ago, he lost his memory and now his wife Deborah is the only person he recognizes. 

Clive Wearing: [opens door] Ah, hooray! [laughter]

Deborah Wearing: Clive really only has less than 30 seconds memory and sometimes it’s as little as perhaps seven seconds… it’s as little as a sentence. [To Clive] I’m going to see…

Alex: So that’s Clive Wearing and he-as the narrator said he has perhaps the most, uh, significant anterograde amnesia that scientists have seen. And so that’s the-that’s the basis, we’ll say, for Leonard’s condition in the film. And the interesting thing about it is the Leonard character matches more closely to what I would imagine, uh, is the situation for Clive Wearing then Dory’s character, and of course Dory is a cartoon character, a talking fish right, so you know [laughter], you kind of have to have a little leeway there… It’s fine, it works for the story, I suppose. And so that’s what anterograde amnesia sort of does to you… as described by Deborah Wearing in that-in that last clip.

And so what’s the-what’s the brain mechanism associated with this? Well it seems to be centered in a structure called the hippocampus, uh, that’s buried deep within the sides of your brain in the temporal lobe… so in the-in the middle bit of those… it’s called the medial temporal lobes and this… structure–you have a right and the left one–this structure seems to be implicated in forming new memories. How do we know this? Well back in the 1950s, epilepsy was dealt with–epilepsy, the seizure disorder–was dealt with by doing psychosurgery or, uh, brain surgery, by removing brain parts that seem to be overactive during the seizures, and there’s one particular person to give us so much information about it, because he underwent this and got perhaps most of his hippocampi removed… [sic] was Henry Molaison–H.M.–you may be familiar with H.M.–he had the vast majority of his hippocampi removed and suffered what you see the film and what you see-what you see with Clive Wearing. The interesting thing about Clive Wearing is that he had whole brain encephalitis, which damaged hippocampus, among other parts of his brain. And so it’s not essentially the same thing–same effects–different causes and you ended up with you end up with the same the result, which is “I can’t form new memories therefore I exist, uh, at 30 second intervals of my life”.

And the great part of Memento is in some of the cut-scenes–the black and white scenes of the film, which are progressing in a forward fashion as opposed to the color scenes that are progressing in a backward fashion–is the character of Sammy Jankis. Leonard is on the phone with some unknown person–you don’t see who this person is on the phone, although it it seems like it’s Joe Pantoliano’s character of Teddy–uh, he’s describing a character called Sammy Jankis, who’s suffered a traumatic brain injury and ended up with anterograde amnesia and accidentally killed his wife by giving her insulin overdose, because she was diabetic. But they go through some amazing little bits here and there. Sam-Leonard is describing testing that Sammy Jankis went through and this is the kind of testing that H.M. went through. It’s actually really int-it is really cool because you act-you can see the uh-testing in-in-in real life through the film, as opposed to maybe watching a film of a test subject doing it in a laboratory. This obviously more dramatized, but you get to see it in real time and I think that’s amazing for the viewer.

So one of, uh, one of the tests that they show in the film is the shock test… and in real life after, uh, going through this kind of test–uh, it was somebody shaking his hand with a, um, shock buzzer, you know-you know those kiddie-uh-those kid toys where you shake somebody’s hand and you give a little bit of a shock. Eventually H.M. realized something implicitly–so outside of his awareness–that maybe he shouldn’t shake the experimenter’s because… something bad might happen. He got-got some sort of implicit feeling that, um, something occurred and so, you know, he was he was learning on some level, which is interesting, it-it separates declarative, uh, memories of anterograde amnesia and the inability to form those declarative memories, but then also implicit learning and how that is separate from declarative memories… and so, in the film, however, Sammy Jankis continues to touch the-the, um, electrified shapes, um, shapes on a table and he keeps touching the electrified shapes. Showing that he’s not learning. This is a bit of subtlety to this because maybe Sammy is purposefully, uh… choosing the wrong shape, getting shocked every time to make sure that he doesn’t lose his insurance claim because Leonard was an insurance adjuster at the time–that’s why he talks about Sammy Jankis–Sammy Jankis was one of his company’s clients, and so he was investigating the illness and determining whether or not Sammy should get treatment and so Sammy could have been playing it up, could have been lying, as opposed to H.M. who was, you know… just trying to be a good subject and, uh, doing what he thought he should do and what he wanted to do without being tricked or not getting Insurance, what have you. So Sammy may have been faking, we don’t know. That could be a little bit of the, um… little bit of the mystery of the film.

The other the other aspect of the film that I wanted to just briefly chat about was memory of–the portrayal of memory in general and I’ll go ahead and throw up a-uh-a clip of the best line in the movie. Hands down this is the best line in the film. Teddy and Leonard are at a diner eating lunch and they’re talking about the memory of investigators:

Leonard: Have I told you about Sammy Jankis?

Teddy: Mmm. Yeah. I’m sick of hearing about the guy. What about John G? You think he’s still here?

Leonard: Who?

Teddy: Johnny G, the guy you’re looking for. That’s why you haven’t left town, am I right?

Leonard: Maybe.

Teddy: Leonard, you have to be very careful.

Leonard: Why?

Teddy: The other day, you mentioned that maybe somebody was trying to set you up. Get you to kill the wrong guy.

Leonard: Well, I go on facts, not recommendations, but thank you.

Teddy: Lenny, you can’t trust a man’s life to your little notes and pictures.

Leonard: Why not?

Teddy: Because your notes could be unreliable.

Leonard: Memory’s unreliable.

Teddy: Oh, please.

Leonard: No, no, no, really. Memory’s not perfect, it’s not even that good. Ask the police. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The cops don’t catch a killer by sitting around remembering stuff. They collect facts and draw conclusions.

Teddy: That’s not what I’m saying.

Leonard: Facts, not memories. That’s how you investigate. I know, it’s what I used to do. Look, memory can change the shape of a room, it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re an interpretation, they’re not a record. And they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.

Alex: Oh, such a good such a good line and change this color, the shape, all of the aspects of-of anything you’re trying to recollect, and this is what is beautiful about the film that Christopher Nolan gets right is that memory is reconstructed and notes taken in the moment are going to be better than the memory that you’re trying to reconstruct. And it’s almost as if Leonard there is summarizing the great work of Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues on various aspects of the fallibility of memory. Misin-misinformation effect, among-among those. 1970s that this research groundswell to find out whether or not eyewitness testimony should be the gold standard or should we move on to something else. You know, DNA evidence wasn’t a thing just yet in the criminal justice system so, you know, the idea is that our memories get changed as soon as we start to try to recollect things and so what the point Leonard’s trying to make is that “you know what? I may I have this memory condition but as long as I have my facts and my notes, I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter because memory is bad.” And if you are in any cognitive psychology classroom, you will spend some time talking about how bad human memory is. It is extremely… fallible, it’s extremely suggestible, and so, people make mistakes all the time and that’s Leonard point. Memories change the smell, change the shape, change the color, change the taste, what have you. When you try to remember things you might get into trouble. 

So, I-I, even if I don’t use this film in cognitive psych I end up using it–uh, I end up using this clip specifically to talk ab-to-to sum up how fallible memory is. I-i-it’s just a wonderful clip of film and speaks to my use of film in every chance that I could get, uh, when I talk about psychology in my classes. So you know, things, things like that. 

Other things of note that I love about this film. The non-linear storytelling as I said a few minutes ago, like oh my God, the way the film is sliced and diced with one half of the narrative going backwards, one half of the narrative going forwards. Um… it-it throws people for a loop. It really does. And for the most part, it’s taking me several re-watches just to get it all squared away in my head without watching or reading, um, analyses of how the order of the scene should go, without–I’ve never seen the in-order cut on the DVD. I don’t-I don’t have the DVD, I have it as a digital video, or our digital video file I guess. Um… so it-it takes multiple viewings, but each time the viewings are amazing because you pick up little bits here and there, um, like is Leonard actually Sammy Jankis? That’s a question that many of my students have, many people I have shown this film to are like “wait a minute there’s some parallels here and maybe he’s not remembering his past as well as he should and so he made up this character” or he uses the character as a mirror as he suggests at the quote-unquote end of the film. The end of the film was really ambiguous for the kind of person that uh… Leonard is, um, his morals. It’s-it’s really good, it’s really good. He also is an unreliable narrator and so do you trust what he says about his disorder? Or maybe he’s faking it. I don’t-like I said with Sammy Jankis, maybe Sammy Jankis was faking it just to get the insurance. Perhaps Leonard is faking it… I don’t know, maybe. I’m gonna throw that one out there for anyone, um-uh, you know, uh-anyone who wants to debate me on that. 

The little errors throughout the film are intriguing. The biggest glaring error is at the end, uh, Leonard is writing down the license plate for Teddy’s car. He’s going to get it tattooed on him later. Um, you see it tattooed on him earlier in the fi–in the chronological aspect of the film, you know, timestamp. Um, but he writes a 1 down instead of an I. That’s big. Why is he writing a 1 and not an I? Was it a mistake by Guy Pearce that was just le-left in the film or was it on purpose was it on purpose? I will so leave that question out there.

And then, this is sort of coming out of left field here, when you watch the movie, when you watch it you’re like “holy crap, people take so much advantage of him!” Three characters that have lines in this film take advantage of Leonard’s, uh, disorder. They take advantage of the fact that he can’t remember what just happened of their previous conversation if he didn’t write it down, et cetera, et cetera. The ethics of that–people are-can be mean sometimes and take advantage of people. But, oh my God, they do it consistently, and only one character, only one character in the film owns up to taking advantage of Leonard. It’s Burt, um, the hotel-motel manager. He admits to treating him poorly, so I think that’s–the two other characters, well one one gets comeuppance, the other one. manager admits to treating in poorly so I think that’s the two other characters will one apparently gets away scot-free. You don’t really know what happens to the other character out of the three. So you have to wonder: they do fast and loose with the ethics and so if you ever come up–if you ever come across somebody with this disorder, d-d-don’t-don’t take advantage of them. Don’t be-don’t be that way. That would be, that would be not cool. You’d be an unkind person.

[film reel sound] 

Alex: That’s going to be if for this episode. Imagine that kind of discussion about Memento but for much longer and multiple voices. I-I-I tried to do my best on making sure that I-I threw in some of the things that you know you might see, excuse me, hear in an episode, you know, uh… that’s some sort of thing this podcast is about and I hope you enjoyed listening to it. Um, I appreciate you so wholeheartedly listening and hope you continue to listen. Next episode will be in the future format. I’m just getting started. There’s plenty more to come. Have a quite a few things lined up, so I am really excited. Um, please, please do remember when I get the-the site, uh, the-the podcast hosting to subscribe to the podcast. It’ll show up in your, um, your podcast feed–that would be amazing. It will be all-on all of the major podcasting sites: Apple, Spotify, uh, Pandora, um, you know, all of the places. Yeah… Google, Google has has podcasting too. So it’ll be all over that as soon as I get the hosting up for future episodes, um, I will-I will-I will share with you how to subscribe to that. For now the website where posts will go up and shared automatically is cinemapsychpod.swanpsych.com. That’s where you will find this-this show and all of the details about the show anything about the show that’s coming up. Cinemapsychpod.swanpsych.com. So it’s-it’s-it’s part of my-part of my, uh, website, uh, ecosystem if you will.

I would really really love your feedback on this episode and on future episodes–if you are on Twitter–I’m breaking a cardinal sin about, um, about, uh, calls-to-action, CTAs at the end of podcast episodes. So I’m asking you to do a lot and I apologize. Maybe you can do one thing, maybe you can do all the things, maybe you can just do two things. Maybe you just don’t want to do any of them but that’s okay. Um, but my second call to action, with subscrip-subscribing when it’s available, is your feedback. I would love your feedback, and there multiple ways to give me that feedback, um, that I’ve already set up. I have set up a Twitter: @CinPsyPod. That’s the Twitter handle C-I-N not S-I-N. C-I-N-P-S-Y-P-O-D. Cin-Psy-Pod. Or you can find me at @ProfASwan, P-R-O-F-A-S-W-A-N. So you, um-uh, can get me up both of those-those Twitter handles. Uh, you can find the podcast on Facebook. That link is also going out with GoFundMe. That page is live on Facebook, you can leave me some feedback there. Or you can email me: cinemapsychpod@gmail.com–that is a separate email address just for the podcast. Email me some feedback there please, please give me some feedback. I really hope you do. It would be really amazing if you do. If you have any suggestions about films, feel free to drop us a line. Discussions about films that we may have missed, maybe we’ll do revisit episodes because we we missed certain aspects–that would be totally awesome. And, um, if you have any ideas about segments like, to break-up, sort of, the progression of the show. I don’t generally have segments this time–I use the little film reel to break up segments, and so if you have segment ideas please drop us a line too. And if it’s an audio thing, I’m still working on my-my post-production skills, so if it’s an audio thing please also tell me. I’m trying to get-trying to get the audio right–I spent a good portion of the day today reading and, um, implementing some loudness stuff to make sure I don’t blow out your ears I hope, I haven’t blown out your ears listening to this either with the intro or the outro music and, so you know, uh… 

And if–the last call to action is the support as I said earlier in the show. If you can support this hobby endeavor, I would really love it. I love discussing this idea like if I could do this all day everyday as a career I totally would but I know I can’t. Um, please share this GoFundMe… this podcast episode with-with people you know who might be interested in this. Uh, we definitely need that support to gain traction and listeners and subscribers. I really want to keep it ad-free as long as possible, and your support will help make that a reality.

All right, I think I have… somewhat successfully done a first episode. I did it live! Do it live! And so that’s going to do it for this episode, this intro episode, of the CinemaPsych Podcast! I want to thank you so much for listening and we’ll catch you next time, thanks.

[Outro Electronic music]