Lusia Tianyao Wang

We have probably all wished to have the ability - the choice - to erase painful and hateful memories from our mind after a relationship ends on bad terms. We wish we never met them in the first place and therefore we wouldn’t need to carry the emotional baggage for the rest of our lives. The movie enables this seemingly ideal inclination with the perfect technology. However, you will soon realize having that choice creates other inherent problems. In the process of erasing those memories, you are finally reminded of the incredible initial encounter and all the beauty you once saw in them that sparked the relationship. Now you suddenly don’t want to let go of these good memories anymore. Blinded by the overpowering discontent and impatience, we often fail to remember even the slightest happiness the relationship once brought. The other, and bigger, problem is that you’re going to be attracted to the same person, inevitably fall in love with them and enter this happiness and pain cycle over and over again. With the memory, you would learn to avoid, but without the memory, you will always end up together happily and eventually painfully. If you knew these would happen, would you have still chosen to have the person erased from your memories? What’s really pathetic though is that having the choice to erase a person also creates a second chance for them, but there’s no second chance in real life. Thanks to the procedures and the idealistic recounter, the characters in the movie finally learned to cherish what they have now because they reconciled with each other and, more importantly, with themselves and agreed to accept the worst of it all. However in real life, there is no going back once we rip the relationship apart. We rarely forgive or forget. We will never know if we just missed the destined-to-be.

It was expected for the film to expose sexual abuse among teenagers, same or opposite sex, intentional or coerced. It was also expected to attribute the action of the abuse to once being a victim of it by adults. However, it was not expected to discuss the contradictory emotions long-term victims might develop - initially hatred that is expected and perhaps eventually morbid attachment and fondness entirely against social expectations, and how that destroys a person, not to mention a teenager. The toxic combination of those emotions induces confusion, disappointment and ultimately rejection of oneself. The disgust they once feel towards the attacker spills over onto themselves. Even though the victims pass on the act of abuse to prove they are no longer victims, but they perpetually remain victims of their very own self disgust and self rejection.