Memory vs. Emotion in Storytelling: What Mickey 17 and Bullet Train Teach Us About Callbacks

The elements of a really good story are highly subjective. Some people like action. Some people like horror. And some people just want to forget about their country’s potential descent into fascism. I’d argue that, whatever your preferences, a “really good story” boils down to immersion.

When you feel so sucked into a plot that you burn the one-pan pasta recipe you had on the stove, you know it’s a winner. You will, however, resort to takeout for dinner in financial defeat. But one cannot have everything.

Reading will always be my first love, but movies can be really fun too. I think film is a fascinating medium.

Good stories have the power to take us away. Bad stories have us fidgeting in our seats, planning our Uber Eats order, and potentially rehashing the details of a recent breakup. Not that I would know.  Typically, the feeling of getting lost in a story is created through memory or emotion. At least, that’s my theory. The setting, dialogue, and plot structure must all serve to reinforce the reader’s memory or evoke a strong emotion. Otherwise, the story lacks immersion.

And crucially, writers often develop memory or emotion through a callback: referencing information that seemed unimportant in a new context later on, which shows why it's significant.

The audience loves a story that makes them think, “Oh! I remember when they brought that up earlier!” That’s the memory approach, a Chekov’s Gun strategy, if you will. Memory in stories is important because it makes us want to pay attention to every plot point. When a story shows that it’s going to bring details from the first half of the narrative into the second half, we trust that we’re being shown things for a reason. 

Plus, it makes the world feel real: actions have consequences. A character puts a pan of pasta on the stove and goes to read a book in the first act. In the second act, we see that the pasta has burned. Obviously, things aren’t going to happen randomly and for no reason, earning our trust and attention.

The other way to pull off immersion is through emotion. This one’s pretty self-explanatory. If you’ve ever cried over a piece of media (strangely, Godzilla Minus One), you'll recall how real the characters felt. For a few hours, their wants are your wants, and their needs your own. That makes you care about the story. You might even relate to them, creating an even stronger sense of immersion (I’ll admit I can’t relate to having my Japanese hometown menaced by a floating lizard. It was still really sad though.) 

Quick Godzilla Minus One advertisement. Highly recommend.

Memory and emotion are both proven ways to make your story good. But is one better than the other? Obviously, a good story will have both, but if someone held Chekov’s Gun to my head and made me choose… I’d say emotion all the way. Interestingly, I think we have a pretty good case study between Mickey 17 (Dir. Bong Joon Ho) and Bullet Train (Dir. David Leitch).

Mickey 17 follows an “expendable” on a futuristic space voyage. His job is to take on lethal missions to make the planet safe for other explorers, but it’s fine cuz they just reprint his body and redownload his memories every time he dies. At the start of the film, we’re on the 17th version of Mickey, hence the name.

Human printers canonically use food waste and corpses to print people. Both frugal and fun.

Bullet Train is about a colorful cast of hitmen who are all travelling for different reasons, including but not limited to: recovering a briefcase, rescuing the son of a mob boss, and killing people. Lots of people. Their motivations start to collide as they realize, inexplicably, everyone’s goals are overlapping. What starts as a few simple, solo missions turns into a tangled conspiracy, set in the slick seats of a high-speed Japanese train.

Neither film works without callbacks. Some stories include callbacks as a bonus, but aren’t 100% reliant on them: Lord of the Rings, for example, is a fantasy adventure mostly held up by compelling characters and interesting worldbuilding. It contains callbacks, but still entertains if you don’t remember everybody’s names and details. Mickey 17 and Bullet Train fall apart without callbacks.

Mickey 17 takes the memory approach to immersion. It erroneously assumes that because third act scenes refer to first and second act scenes, the viewer is automatically entertained and plot significance is achieved. It’s because of Mickey 17 that I feel confident saying emotion is more important than memory. 

Spaceship leader reacts calmly to workers' concerns.

There are so many plot threads that connect in Mickey 17: the characters are in space to escape an inescapable debtor. Act three, the debtor manages to send a threatening letter even on the spaceship. Similarly, a character deals a drug called “oxy”. The protagonist’s love interest gets high on oxy at one point, oxy is used to bargain for freedom from a jail cell, and a flamethrower is picked up because it runs on oxy. 

So Mickey 17 has a lot of really detailed, long-con callbacks. But here’s the thing: none of them are really plot-relevant. The whole thread with dealing drugs and oxy has no emotional significance, and doesn’t even factor into the main plotline and resolution. It’s just there. Evidently, it’s there with intention, given the number of times I am reminded about what oxy is and which characters are involved with it. 

But what’s the point of that? A callback with no emotional payoff is a wasted callback. When oxy doesn’t come up at all in the final conflict, I felt cheated. It’s not even commentary on substance abuse or a cornerstone of a character’s development arc. If I had to guess, I would say the oxy plotline served to make life in space feel more real or futuristic to the audience, but on the whole, it seemed unnecessary. 

Now for Bullet Train. For an action-comedy starring Brad Pitt, I did not expect to be so invested, yet here we are. Bullet Train is also rife with callbacks; the main character is referred to as “Ladybug”, which turns out to have an inspirational meaning in Japanese in the third act. One character’s special interest is Thomas the Tank Engine, which comes up again and again as shorthand to show who his allies and enemies are. There are at least four or five callbacks to Thomas. A TV in the first fifteen minutes of the film reports the disappearance of a poisonous snake. We see said snake in a cage on the train. Then someone dies from this particular snake’s venom. 

Also, the cinematography and colors of Bullet Train are just fantastic.

Again, detailed callbacks show information moves from the first few scenes through the whole story and into the finale. But what makes Bullet Train different is that every single one of these callbacks carries emotional weight. Yes, even the Thomas the Tank Engine thing—that was actually my favorite part, and the most emotional moment of the movie, but I will magnanimously refrain from spoiling it for you. 

The snake venom: there’s one character who is introduced just to support the snake plotline. In a short but dramatic flashback, we see that the absolute love of his life was killed by this snake’s venom. He boards the train to find the killer. The outcome of his fight with the killer strongly impacts the interactions of other characters. 

So we see the snake thing wasn’t just a throwaway. It meant EVERYTHING to this one character. And on top of the emotional payoff, this interaction is highly plot significant. The story breaks without this guy. And the finale isn’t the same if you don’t have the snake venom subplot. That’s how you do a good callback.

The danger noodle.

In Bullet Train, everything has personal significance to at least one character and directly impacts the finale. Removing any one callback sequence from Bullet Train derails the whole plot (see what I did there). In Mickey 17, information appears and reappears, but with no real consequences for anyone. While both narratives employ callbacks with reckless abandon, Bullet Train creates something cohesive, something immersive, while Mickey 17 creates… something. 

Personally, I think the ability of Bullet Train to create immersion shows that emotion is a more important element in stories than memory. You can have your Chekov’s Gun, but if I don’t care who it’s pointing at, it’s Chekov’s Boring Object. You need a Chekov’s Tearful Victim to make me care about the gun. I tire of this metaphor. On to better things.

In any case, I think they’re both good films. Mickey 17 was an absurdist, entertaining film worth watching if you like satire and silliness. Bullet Train was better, with witty dialogue, a complex plan afoot, and surprisingly wholesome moments. Given their nearly identical approach to storytelling, I consider the existence of the two films as conclusive evidence that emotion trumps memory with respect to narrative structures and immersion. 

I wonder if this side character with very few lines will be able to kill Brad Pitt, the protagonist.

Mickey 17 feels incredibly disjointed. Okay, I see this information, and how different plot points connect, but why am I being shown this? What’s the point? That ruins my immersion in the story and makes me doubt Mickey’s world instead. Bullet Train feels fully fleshed out. I see something, and very quickly, I see why it matters. It feels real. It makes sense. I can trust that this world is populated by intelligent characters worth watching, and that every throwaway line is there for a reason.

I encourage you to watch both! And also Godzilla Minus One. Let me do a quick pitch for that one: kamikaze pilot wracked with self-hatred returns to a defeated homeland, where he is unwanted and shamed. A single mother and an irradiated lizard give him a second chance to prove himself. Hmm, not a sentence I ever imagined writing.