Memory Objects: Summer Hours and Warehouse 13

People are interesting. They fight, they fall in love, they laugh, they cry. Objects are boring. What do they even do? Most of the time they just sit there looking pretty. Granted, in this modern age, they sometimes beep, or whir, or dance about, but even that only when we push them, prod them, or at least occasionally change their batteries. What, then, would we say about a film and a TV show that insist on putting objects at their center?

The film, Summer Hours, and the TV show, Warehouse 13, both of which arrived this summer, would seem to have little else in common. One is a sophisticated (and somewhat slow) French film with an ensemble cast of top-caliber actors. The other is a goofy, pulpy show on the Sci-fi Channel (still having difficulty calling it Syfy), by turns jokey and melodramatic, filled with worn-out genre tropes (a male-female detective pair a la Moonlighting, The X-Files, Bones, etc.). At the same time, though, it often manages to be entertaining, inventive, funny, and even touching. What connects Summer Hours and Warehouse 13, though, is that they both think hard about objects and their place in our memories, both personal and public.

Summer Hours follows three siblings whose elderly mother has recently passed away, leaving behind a house full of valuable art objects. Their great uncle was a famous artist. Some of the objects are his work, some works that he acquired. For the mother the art works had sentimental value. She grew up and lived in the house at the time that the works were still being created or purchased. She had memories attached to each of them, and the house itself was filled for her with memories from all periods of her life. For the children, the objects are not directly meaningful. In the end, they decide to sell the house and donate most of the pieces to a museum. What were once objects of personal memory thus enter the provenance of public memory, put on display for all to see in the Musee d’Orsay.

Warehouse 13 is more metaphorically about public memory. The show follows two Secret Service agents who are tasked with collecting the great artifacts of world history and bringing them back to a “safe location” in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota (the idea, I think, is borrowed from Indiana Jones; At the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the military brings the Ark of the Covenant to a similar enormous, anonymous warehouse filled with stuff—this is essentially the premise of Warehouse 13: who collects all this stuff and why is it here?). In the world of the show, these objects have acquired a literal magic all their own: Lewis Carroll’s mirror can trap a person’s soul; Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod can boost the power of electrical devices; Houdini’s wallet lets you communicate with the dead—even the disco ball from Studio 54 is imbued with a malevolent energy. The magical powers with which these objects are imbued is a metaphor for the power of public memory contained in historical artifacts, the ability they have to call to mind a shared conception of our common heritage.

Why is it that both an artistic French film and a pulpy American TV show find it so poignant to consider objects at this moment? Summer Hours and Warehouse 13, I think, represent a nostalgia for a relationship to objects that is no longer current in our society. Put simply, we no longer know how to live gracefully with the objects around us. Objects need us. Without people to use and appreciate them they have no meaning. But there are some objects whose meaning is so persistent and so universal that it makes sense to talk about that meaning as inherent to the objects themselves. They contain memories, personal ones for the individuals who have had meaningful experiences through them, public ones when whole societies have had shared experiences through them. It is possible to take the reverence for the meaning inherent in these objects too far. Collectors of obscure cultural artifacts (baseball cards, action figures still in their packaging) fetishize objects with a weak power of memory. They try to coax to life dying embers, instead of tending an eternal flame.

The danger that seems to be more pressing, though, is not fetishizing objects because of their power of memory, but fetishizing objects with no power of memory. With the digitization of our world, the objects through which we experience our media become less and less important. Who will remember the i-pod on which they read Moby Dick? Your careworn physical copy of the book, however, with its beautiful design, its smell of old paper, the rustling sound of the turning pages, the slightly rough texture of those pages, will bring back memories, both positive and negative, each time you interact with it. This is not to say digitization is bad—nostalgia valorizes an old mode of experience with its specific characteristics over the characteristics of the new mode of experience. Some day the mode of reading a novel on an i-pod may be cherished in just such loving terms as reading a physical book once was, if for entirely different reasons. The problem is not that we find less meaning or sentimental value in our objects and thus no longer fetishize them, but that we fetishize them despite this. We covet i-pods and kindle readers and tablet PCs; we swaddle them in protective cases; and then, when the new object that will replace them arrives, we throw them away. We still have experiences through these objects—experiences of art, music, literature, learning, playing, and communicating—but we no longer surround ourselves with objects infused with the memories of these experiences. This is not merely a phenomenon of personal memory, either—what happens to a digital painting, created on an i-phone, uploaded to the internet, but never hung on a museum wall? There is no longer any object filled with the memory of this shared cultural experience. With the rise of these objects that we no longer love and cherish, but lust for, use up, and discard, we are losing a mode of memory. This mode of memory inherent to the lived relationship with meaningful objects has a contemplative quality that cannot be supplied by files and programs on an ever-changing assortment of screens. Its pleasure is lasting and mellow, rather than fleeting and intense. Summer Hours and Warehouse 13 make one last plea for these objects and their power of memory. Soon, it is possible that they will fall entirely to the collectors, that is, by and large, be forgotten.