The Room of Historical Mementos
There’s this visual which I think has been in every tv show and movie about immortals ever, the room full of old furniture and mementos and junk from the span of the immortal’s lifetime. And it’s a great visual shorthand reminder that the show/movie stars an immortal character (I mean, that’s generally hard to forget, but I don’t think the creators are using it to remind you as if you forgot, but more like Clark Kent wearing red and blue in Smallville. There’s probably some film analysis term for this, but I am not a film analyst. I’m probably not using the right words for film analysis). But I feel like a person who keeps that much stuff of the types we’re shown is generally not very well adapted to immortal life.
In real life, with (I assume) mortals, we have two extremes of keeping things. There are hoarders, who have such difficulty getting rid of things that their homes become stuffed with belongings (at the extreme end of the scale, to the detriment of their health) and they’re unable to find the things that are truly important to them because they’re lost in the mess. At the other end of the scale, there are extreme minimalists and people who try to get rid of bad memories by getting rid of everything that reminds them of the memories, even if that means moving and buying everything anew. Extremes are generally not the best thing for us; all of us have tendencies in both directions, and they’re meant to balance out for the most part, and keep us at a happy medium.
If you apply that to immortals, obviously it’s psychologically healthy for them to keep some mementos of their pasts. And it’s even healthy for them to have more mementos than we mortals do. After all, they live longer than we do; even if they’re accumulating mementos at a slower rate than we do, it’s easy for their collections to surpass ours. So I guess it’s not really the fact that they have these mementos that I take issue with, but more the way they’re displayed.
There’s something very performative about the Room of Historical Mementos visual. I mean, obviously it’s performative, and it’s specifically meant for us in the audience. But if you’re immersed in the world and pretending the audience doesn’t exist, having a Room of Historical Mementos reflects differently on the immortal. Who are they displaying their mementos for? Nobody I know has anything like that for their mementos--the closest they get is photos hanging on the wall, and those are usually not the most “interesting” photos; they’re more likely to hang up the professional photos, or ones where everybody is just smiling, rather than the weird ones with vivid memories attached. And even then, photos are generally spread throughout the house, not clumped together in one room.
The Room of Historical Mementos makes sense if you think the immortal takes a lot of mortals through it to convince them the immortal is, in fact, immortal; however, secrecy and immortality go hand in hand, so that scenario seems unlikely. So the immortal is obviously displaying these mementos to themself, but they’re not doing it in the same way we mortals do, but more to . . . force themself to not let go of the past? The immortal cannot move on. And it’s more than just holding onto the memories, it’s deliberately keeping themself as the person they used to be a few centuries ago. So when an immortal has a Room of Historical Mementos, they’re stagnating. They’re not adapting to the future on more than the most superficial level. They might be able to use a computer, but their thinking is stuck back before the industrial revolution.
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