Don’t Say Always: On Lisa’s Joy’s Reminiscence | Features

The menace of addiction is symbolized with an evil that’s equal to the rich land barons, flooded streets, and border wars—a drug named baca. Baca is more than just a drug, it’s a product of this civilization that also keeps Nick’s reminiscence machine in business, and it’s a drug that one will always be addicted to, tethered to. We learn throughout Nick’s investigation into her past that Mae is a baca addict from five years back. It becomes a symbol of how she’s still working through past actions, especially when she is forced into doing a con job by a corrupt cop named Boothe (Cliff Curtis), which will square up a past decision she made in stealing baca from a drug dealer named Saint Joe (Daniel Wu). Through glimpses of the memories of her associates, Nick tries to understand Mae’s sudden disappearance, and has the obscurity of a femme fatale, and even worse, someone who did not seem to love him back. But it becomes clearer that this was not the perfect timing that Nick thought it was, or that she wished it could be. Mae wanted to have this love, even as she was working a con demanded by retribution. She speaks of love as a hope that she too desires, (“love is something we climb to … if we could just hold on”) but her past decides how it was not meant to be always for Mae and Nick. 

“Reminiscence” is the story of Nick becoming addicted to his own trade, so messed up by this virtual break-up that his words of wisdom from the opening voiceover are revealed to be a melancholy curse in the end: “Nothing is more addictive than the past.” When he first meets Mae, he says he doesn’t go in the machine—only for Joy to cut to him in the tank, months later, which we learn he’s been doing constantly. The plotting of Joy’s story frames it as part of a winding mystery, but Jackman’s feverish performance presents this as a deep addiction (Watts later calls him a “junkie”) that comes with the brief, fleeting comfort of getting to be with her again, putting reality on pause. Meanwhile, Watts tries to keep him in check with the same frankness of a group chat: “Wherever she is, she has moved on. And you should too.” 

We become addicted to the good memories (or so my therapist says), and Nick’s resistance to the present leads to the film’s bleak and meaningful subversion of happily ever after. In one of Joy’s more bleeding heart narrative flourishes, Nick and Mae are seen again in a flashback, at the top of a tower that matches the peak of their relationship before everything changed. He tells her a story of mythology not too dissimilar from their own, but ends the story in the middle. Nick prefers to end his own story in the middle as well; he does not accept her as a memory, but one that he must confine himself to, one in which she does not technically exist. One of the final shots at the end of the film’s timeline involves seeing Nick as older, grayer, and laying in the tank. A small grin complements the wrinkles on his face, as he forces “always” to exist in his head. It’s no way to live.