It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, a documentary by Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil), offers those who study human memory an excellent examination of what’s called a “reminiscence bump.”
Reminiscence bump is a real thing, and it profoundly structures an autobiographical perspective, the way one sees the landscape of their life as they get older. Oddly enough, you remember your youth more vividly than later periods.
Researcher Gabriel A. Radvansky describes it this way in his book Human Memory: “[We have, as we get older,] a very good memory for life experiences around the age of 20 (between 15 and 25)… [This is] called the reminiscence bump. This is an interesting characteristic of autobiographical memory that is easier to observe as a person ages.”
But why? Evolutionary biology has the answer. The senses are more receptive when you are younger because you are rushing to make sense of a mostly unknown world: How it works, what it’s about, how to make sense of it all. But eventually other biological directives kick in, and the very loud party of receptivity is told to turn down the music.
Buckley never lived long enough to see, receding into the years, the reminiscence bump that defines every song on the only album he released, Grace. He had no idea that it’s much easier to recall your 17th year than your 37th. He died at age 30 in—what Paul Simon describes on “Graceland” as “shining like a national guitar”—the Mississippi Delta. Indeed, the documentary points out that his body, after a drowning accident, appeared on a shore that wasn’t far from Memphis’ Beale Street.
All of this youth, the essence of this documentary, could perhaps best be expressed by Joseph Conrad, when he wrote: “O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it!”
We see Buckley never left the painful shadow of his absent father (practically his twin), the famous folk musician Tim Buckley. We see his ups and downs with girlfriends. His time in Manhattan in the early ’90s. His rise to fame. His last days in a small house in Memphis. We also learn he deeply loved the butterflies at the Memphis Zoo. Some look into a snow globe and see a wintery scene. If you look into this documentary, you see nothing but youth.
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley opens at AMC Pacific Place 11, 600 Pine S, Fri Aug 8, 135 minutes, not rated.
