Fragmenting Memories in Dirty Computer

     One of the major themes in Dirty Computer has to do with memory. The people working for the New Dawn are shown rewatching and then erasing each of Jane's memories as they "clean" her throughout the emotion picture. These memories take the form of the music videos for the accompanying album "Dirty Computer." At first these memories come off as staged (they're music videos, duh), yet plausible scenes involving Jane and her friends/lovers as they escape attempts by police and authorities to capture them. As these scenes go on, though, more and more "glitches" begin to appear. In the memory for the song "Make Me Feel," Jane and Zen arrive at a club that seems to have a double of Jane lounging in the VIP section. Then, the doppelgangers increase in "I Like That," where dozens of copies sit in the seats of a theatre.  These copies of Jane are accompanied by visual glitches as well, as the figures pop in and out of the frame with breaks in the image. At this point, even one of the memory clearers is confused, stating to the other that these scenes could possibly be memories.


    I believe glitches and duplicates are the fragmented parts of Jane's identity as the continuity of her memory is being destroyed. Before, temporality held her identity together—the scene at the pool was followed by exploring a graffiti-filled building, followed by an earlier trip to the desert in "Pynk," and so on, with Jane and Zen growing increasingly closer over these scenes. However, as the timeline of these events is pulled apart by the cleaning process, Jane is left with more discrete cross-sections of her identity, where one memory could so removed from the others that it might as well seem like different person. With fewer and fewer past memories left, all that's left for Jane to do is dream up interactions between these different parts of her identity, glitching different (or similar) versions of herself into whatever scenes are still left in her memory.
    The specificity of these fragmented parts of her memory is made evident in the song "I Like That," where a bathing version of herself recalls childhood memory when a classmate called her a "6" and not letting it affect how she sees herself. The memories have been so fragmented, in fact, that in "I Like That," an image of her wearing a headpiece with a triangle circumscribed in a circle flashes into the scene, but remains voiceless—separated from the sounds and movement of it's original context.
    Even though the cleaners try to erase her identity, Jane's ability to dream up and remix new visions and scenes with fragmented elements of her memory allows her to keep herself and the ones she loves alive in her mind and ultimately escape the facilities that enforce conformity. 

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