You cannot live without the difficulties in life. Be happy with your traumas, is the lesson we learn in Homecoming.
fiction·@keysa·
0.000 HBDYou cannot live without the difficulties in life. Be happy with your traumas, is the lesson we learn in Homecoming.
 **What if you could take a pill to clear all the nasty memories, even traumas, from your memory? Happiness seems guaranteed. But the new series Homecoming (via Amazon Prime), shows the opposite: you cannot live without the horror of the past.** *This piece contains a few spoilers, but they do not give away the clue of the story.* In the series, three image formats constantly alternate: extremely wide, wide and extra narrow. The latter looks like if you would make a video with your phone. These formats illustrate what is going on with the memory of the characters. Sometimes they cannot see the world clearly, then they have a little bit more information and finally they see the whole picture. The smallest image - a narrow, upright rectangle - reflects man without complete knowledge of his past, without the bad memories; the opposite format shows the characters with all that knowledge. It shows human beings at the moment that the scales have fallen from their eyes. They are fully informed about what exactly happened.  **Homecoming confronts us with two questions** Firstly, how we can safeguard our identity and humanity in an era in which manipulation of facts from the present and the past puts these two things in jeopardy. Secondly: the desirability of a 'life of truth': would an existence in blissful ignorance about the truth of things not be desirable? In times of social media, in which your news feed only gives you a limited view of reality, in which political campaigns are flooded with fake news, I find this a very interesting point of view. According to the English philosopher John Locke, identity consists of consciousness, and thus of memories. If that is the case, then identity depends on knowledge about your own past. **When the latter is manipulated, the question of who we are is open to interpretation**, as is apparent from *Homecoming*. https://youtu.be/9WJSdpE-sJQ  Heidi Bergman (Julia Roberts) works as a psychologist at Homecoming, a home for war veterans run by a shadowy company that deals in medicines. Heidi mainly treats Walter, a returned young soldier who is heavily traumatized because of an incident in the war. Little by little she finds out what he has experienced exactly. In flash-forwards, told in scenes recorded in the narrow format of the telephone camera, we see another Heidi. She works as a waitress and has no recollection of her time as a psychologist at Homecoming. Then a researcher from the Ministry of Defense arrives, with Walter's file under his arm. Slowly Heidi learns that she has lost her past. As she solves this mystery, it turns out that exactly the same thing happened to her patient, Walter. In flashbacks we see how Walter does not remember anything of what happened during his war years. Heidi is shocked: how can she treat him for his trauma if it isn't there anymore?  *What happened to Walter?* The answer inevitably comes at the end when we trace Walter after many years. He now lives with his mother. He does not know anything about the war anymore. He laughs, he is happy. Yet Heidi sees that Walter is not actually herself, even though the mother continues to believe that her son has become better. With the help of the defense official Heidi manages to regain her memory and discovers the truth about herself. She now knows exactly what happened at the home, also with patients like Walter. But this knowledge doesn't make much. The fact that the truth, even reality in the form of human memories, is so bendable in the hands of puppeteers behind the scenes is the core of her trauma. And with it that of us, the viewers.  This is how Homecoming hits a nerve: sometimes we would love to change the past, make different decisions, act differently. This story shows that the past can indeed be a malleable domain: think of fake news or the phenomenon of the newly found memories in the field of trauma counseling. But the consequences cannot be overlooked. What happens to Heidi and Walter illustrates that **the veracity or truthfulness of self is at stake at the moment we no longer know what we have experienced in life**. Be happy with your traumas, is the lesson we learn in Homecoming.  
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