A Look Inside: The Sinner – Season 1
I continually find myself analyzing TV series or films that focus on the aspects of memory and how humans interact or handle their own memories. I guess you can say I am genuinely interested in the topics of cognitive and neuro science at least how they play such a huge role in TV and film. When I first watched The Sinner – Season 1 (2017) I was able to watch the first 5 episodes for free without a subscription to USA but the remaining 3 weren’t available unless you had a cable TV provider. By episode 5 I was thoroughly invested and couldn’t wait to watch the last 3 episodes so what did I do? Something I never do…I went to Amazon and bought the entire season digitally just to watch the last 3 episodes immediately (at 1 AM at night I might add). While I am a traditional cinephile and love my hard copies of series and films, I was very invested in Cora Tanetti’s (Jessica Biel) story and uncovering what the f*ck happened. It left me in constant inner turmoil with questions like ‘can you empathize with a killer?’ The Sinner is a series that is tough to watch but it is a powerful piece of storytelling but if we leave that aside there is so much to analyze on how this series represents the complexity of human memory.
WARNING: Contains Spoilers!
From my very basic understanding on the subject, cognitive and neuroscience research in the past few decades has changed a lot about our understanding of how we form, recall and reconstruct memories. There are a number of TV series and films that highlight this within their character’s story but I personally thought The Sinner did a great job at representing some core aspects of these processes. First, let’s look at the basic surface plot which starts off with Cora killing a man who is considered to be a complete stranger after hearing a song that triggers the memory of a traumatic experience. It can also be interrupted that the actions of Frankie Belmont (Eric Todd) playing around with his girlfriend triggered her as well. As the episodes start to unfold Cora then tells Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) that she dated Frankie, got pregnant and jumped in front of a moving car to provoke a miscarriage. We quickly learn that she seems to be lying about these events and she slowly starts to remember other fragments of her evening that has lead to some traumatic event. Through regressive hypnosis Cora is able to start unrevealing memories of that night and the days that follow with a memory of a basement and a man with a mask injecting her with drugs. The last two episodes start to make sense of everything that happened that night especially with Cora visiting the location in which her life changed drastically.
To really understand the uniqueness of memory and how it plays such an important role in The Sinner let’s look at the basics of memory. The basics are simple – you pay attention to the stimulus, you encode and store a representation in memory and then later you remember it which is the stage called recall (or retrieval). Simple enough, right? Well as we’ve progressed in science and just the world in general we have come to understand that sometimes false memories can occur. So with each repeated recall our memories of the original story become more and more distorted and often times they fall in line with the participant’s initial intuitions or personal views. For me, this all goes back to perspective and with the research on false memories we are now able to really distinguish between reproductive (recalling the input information) and (re)constructive memory which actively modifies the recalled information.
With that in mind when we look at Cora and her story – we can clearly seen signs of PTSD. Many people believe that victims or witnesses that have experienced such a trauma encode a great amount of details as it relates to the memory of the event, however, this isn’t entirely accurate. For most people the factual reality of the traumatic memory is fixed and can’t be modified but the memory and meaning of the experience can be modified. This happens particularly with individuals (like Cora) who struggle to integrate the traumatic memory with existing memories. All of this leads to breaking with this notion that memory is like a video recorder and you can just playback memories when you want to answer questions or identify images, etc. But the reality of memory is that it is a constructive / reconstructive process that is continually susceptible to distortion.
Now with the basics of memory being outline we can start to look at the plot of The Sinner through the lens of this idea of constructive / reconstructive memory. After watching all 8 episodes we learn that the sound of the song on the beach triggers a traumatic memory for Cora which is the death of her sister, Phoebe (Nadia Alexander). This is an event Cora was never able to deal with or even truly mourn for the loss of her sister. Cora’s memory recovery issues are exacerbated by the drug induced memory loss that is experienced later on. When we finally see how everything played out that night we begin to see that the trauma of Phoebe’s death is conflated with memories of Cora’s own pain that she experienced that night. She is missing what they call episodic memory information so she “fills the gaps” with memories about her emotional state at the time which are filled with sexual elements. This misleads both herself and us in believing that the missing memories have something to do with an experience which traumatized her physically (thinking back to the beach scene and Frankie with his girlfriend). As the episodes continue and fragments of her memories start getting activated we start to see connections between unrelated individual memory items to difference people or places. For example, Maddie’s pregnancy termination pops up in Cora’s memory and she erroneously appropriates it as her own memory. Cora also internalizes Phoebe’s emotional attachment to Frankie by imagining she was the one dating him which helps her suppress the more painful memory of her sister’s final emotional experience.
We slowly start to see that Cora is still not ready to face the real trauma which is the guilt over Phoebe’s death, so she starts to reconstruct her memories of the traumatic evening around all elements which don’t include Phoebe. It has been suggested that memory works through spreading activation between different memory units which is why sometimes you might have completely forgotten about a certain situation, but if you encounter a smell, sound or partial reminder of it, you start remembering other things as well. This really explains why Cora received those flashbacks about the school bus as a kid when she was talking about J.D and Maddie. Because the memory of Phoebe and where she was buried could not be accessed directly so she remembered the closest “safe” memory she had: a sanitized version of a working school bus while she was a child (and Phoebe was alive).
Let’s not forget the mixture of trauma, drugs and alcohol during the encoding phase (remember: attention, encoding, storage & recall/retrieval) and the first instances of retrieval made it very hard for Cora to access her original memories of that evening. And the key to activating all details was not the club where the events happened but really the crucial detail that Phoebe was with her all along that evening. That is why Cora had to come back to the lodging house with the basement to really start remembering everything that had happened. This information was the final piece of the puzzle which helped connect all of the events to the broader trauma that she had experienced that night and even the months after. While I’ve never experienced anything like this – I think a lot of us can understand how memory works because we’ve all experienced this recall whether it’s visiting a location, a sound or a smell.
Honestly, the creative ways in which The Sinner got all these subtle details about memory right is quite impressive and something few stories can do so accurately. And not only because it is a rare treat to see such good representations of the memory process, but also because this subplot used a very skillful approach to storytelling. From the start we see Cora as being an unreliable narrator and could be potentially leading us in the wrong direction especially after her initial confession. The real gem in The Sinner lies is the fact that Cora was discovering how unreliable her memories were along with us. This aspect of the series made it hard to uncover the truth because it was constantly tossing and turning on what we had expected to discover. Like I mentioned earlier, some initially thought Cora had a psychotic event that was provoked by sexual trauma (Frankie playing around with his girlfriend) but as it turns out there was a vastly more complex story with a number of built-in layers, relationships and plot twists. The Sinner remains one of those shows that is still hard to watch but so well-done that it justifies another rewatch.
The Fade Out: A Movie Blog 