The era of the expert: dementia, remembrance, and jurisprudence in Atom Egoyan’s Remember (2015)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent trials of elderly Holocaust perpetrators have foregrounded an epistemological problem with consequences for future prosecutions: what status do witness testimonies, survivor memoirs, and blurry photographs have as the Holocaust’s final witnesses die off? This article interprets Atom Egoyan’s Remember (2015), a Holocaust revenge fantasy whose geriatric protagonist suffers from dementia. Dementia becomes a metaphor for memory’s unreliability and its challenges for Holocaust jurisprudence. Through plot twists predicated upon viewers’ willingness to misperceive familiar tropes of Holocaust cinema as fact, Remember thematizes the need for a jurisprudence based on expertise, not witness testimony, even in an age skeptical of expertise.