‘Station Eleven’ and what memory looks like on screen
How art is used as a conduit for memory-sharing
You remember damage. A hard hand on your face. A loved one’s hateful tongue. But what do these memories look like to someone who has not experienced them? How can you faithfully portray memory when they themselves may not be accurate to reality?
The 2021 miniseries adaptation Station Eleven answers this not by putting on a black and white filter or cranking up the bloom and nostalgia effect, but rather by showing cuts of clips that the audience has seen previously, a Kuleshov effect across time. Here, flashbacks aren’t a narrative short-cut to remind the audience of important plot-related information, but rather are used to inform the audience of each character’s state of mind, and what little things they are presently recalling. Thus these literal flashes of the past shine a new light on previous events, and put into context the intertwining relationship between past and present, into an ever-evolving patchwork of cause and effect.
Real-life flashbacks usually don’t consist of slow-motion reels of you and your now-dead wife under white sheets, in the golden hour, with perfect makeup — like in 90% of traditional revenge movies. Interrupting moments of recall often contain the unassuming little things: someone turning around, a hand on your arm — they’re short one-second images that overlay daily life. In a story about an apocalypse which is split into different characters’ narratives and two distinct timelines: pre and post-pandemic, these flashbacks are perfectly split into two types as well — one for the audience and one for the characters. While one is a longer form and more conventionally episodic sequence of events, the other is short bursts of emotion, snapshots of retroactively defining moments.
You read a line from a comic book caption that resonates with you. An image of an emotionally similar event from your past comes to the forefront. You recite one of Shakespeare’s poems. The words and metaphors call to mind moments you’ve shared with someone significant. They linger for less than a second, but the feeling stays dormant for a lifetime, ready to resurface. What triggers flashbacks then, perhaps more than anything else, is the creation or consumption of art. Art is an emotion immortalized. A break-up rendered in chiaroscuro. Bearing a child in eight stanzas. Art is intense fleeting feelings poured into stories, whether through freezing a defining moment in a painting or reducing heartbreak to a rhyming chorus. These abstract adaptations of actual events remind other people of their own similar experiences. Because of this, art unites people, ignores divisions, and communicates solidarity. Whoever you are and wherever you’re from, the art you absorb or repurpose tells others that you understand damage, in whatever shape or form it takes for you. In the face of art, everyone is a kindred spirit.
Setting the story in a post-apocalypse, art is given a chance to be seen as the only remaining link to the civilizations of old, the artifact that persists, that children and adults alike are always in awe of. It bridges generational gaps between those born after the new world and those who survived the apocalypse. Even before the catastrophe, the main characters meet because of a King Lear stage play. They all live under the shadow of art and art is the light that brings them all together. Usually, in a setting where rules are no more, unchained by primal instincts, people are depicted as barbaric and become untrusting animals. But this show paints a pretty optimistic picture of what civilization may look like in the aftermath of society’s collapse. Perhaps the more primal instinct for humans is that we gather around campfires to warm ourselves with stories, we draw on cave walls, and we look to the stars, always. Perhaps that instinct defeats selfishness and savagery, the instinct for meaning beats survival. This show strays from the norm and gives a uniquely positive take on human nature. Despite everything, all the chaos and crumbling of social order, art still persists. Communities still gather with one another around a fire, to hear tales that inspire, and be moved.
Art is a vehicle for memory, a gateway to it. In the show, there are two main art mediums that play a big role in the plot: a graphic novel and Shakespeare’s plays. The graphic novel holds the title of the show, Station Eleven, and is the thematic crux of the whole story. It is revered like a bible, raised to a cult-like status, with children taking the words as gospel. In a world without structure, fiction points them in a tangible direction, giving meaning to their every action. The plays, on the other hand, entrance the adults, making some devote their entire new life as a traveling theater troupe, giving survivors all around the world something to look forward to each year. The adults produce reenactments of Shakespeare, perhaps to comfort them, and remind them of the old world, that something yet remains of yesterday. While the adults born before cling to the familiar, the kids born after, imagine something new. They see the graphic novel as showing the truth behind the shadows on the wall, while the adults aim to recreate the shadows, believing in them again.
At its best, that’s what art does, it recontextualizes collective memory. One piece of art can mean different things to different people, but the best ones always mean something. Acting them out or reading them opens up ways for flashbacks and remembering. They let old wounds breathe and tears flow. Art is a platform for emotional outlet. Trauma points to a previous trauma, and a fictional character’s visible emotional pain points to our own. Created from the artist’s own memory, filtered through the lens of fiction, art lends the audience unique flashbacks from their own life, but emotionally identical to the creator’s. One’s pain becomes another’s salvation.
Here in Station Eleven (and hopefully in real life), memory is something that is experienced privately, but performed publicly through the medium of art, either by making or reenacting someone else’s shared memory. Here, memory always concerns something social, either about losing someone, meeting them, or everything in between. Here, we are voyeurs of everyone else's inner reminisces. As the audience of plays and readers of graphic novels, as viewers of a miniseries, and as readers of this article, we too remember a joyful or tragic past. Flashbacks are just everyday events that are made extraordinary through context and juxtaposition. The details may differ, memories of a different time or place, but the feeling is all too familiar, the first or last time we met someone. We all have experienced countless hellos and goodbyes.
We remember damage. And whatever it looks like for each of us, art provides the inkblot for all of us.
