The African Queen

About sixty years separated my two viewings of The African Queen. I first saw it within a year of its release in 1951, when I was about twenty. The second time was on a recent Saturday night, when I watched it with my wife at home on a digitally restored DVD. I expected to remember the main outlines of the plot as well as many individual scenes, because I liked the film so much the first time around. It turned out, however, that I remembered practically nothing. I knew, of course, that Humphrey Bogart plays a riverboat captain in Africa, that Katherine Hepburn plays a strait-laced English spinster, and that Robert Morley plays her missionary brother. I also remembered that after her brother dies, the captain helps the spinster leave the mission by traveling down a river in his ramshackle vessel.

But that was all. I had forgotten, for example, that the action takes place at the beginning of the First World War, that the mission was in German East Africa, and, most crucially, that the spinster persuades the captain to use his vessel as a torpedo to destroy the German gunboat that patrols a strategically important lake. From the lush greenery and screeches of parrots in the opening credits, to the ending, when Bogart and Hepburn swim across the lake to safety in the Belgian Congo, I might as well have been watching a different film from the one I saw when I was twenty.

I had remembered one scene, however, and I treasured it over the years. It was just before the missionary is about to be killed. We see the trembling of his multiple chins in profile, an eloquent and funny scene that I looked forward to seeing again. So I was dumbfounded to find that the scene doesn’t exist, at least not in that film, and that the missionary isn’t killed. Instead, he dies from fever. For decades I had been cherishing a false memory.

I don’t have to wait for dementia. Some of my memories have already vanished and others have been altered, phenomena which are probably common to all who reach my age. We are formed in part by our experience and by our memories of those experiences, but if our memories change or vanish, what does this imply about the constancy of our identities? Are we the same people now that we were in the past or do our evolving memories suggest that our identities keep changing along with them? If you replace the handle of an axe, will you hold the same axe as before? And if you then replace the head, so that neither of the original parts is present, can you chop wood with the same axe?

Whatever the answer to that conundrum, my second viewing of The African Queen suggests that our memories are as treacherous as the river down which the riverboat captain and the spinster travel. As we grow older, our perceptions change along with our experience. I’m no longer the person I was at twenty. What I saw in The African Queen when I was twenty is not what I saw sixty years later.