Memento Review

Deaths are the only thigns we can be certain are true in the movie.

Memento, a highly rated Christopher Nolan movie, is a murder thriller full of surprises, not only in plot line but also in the way it’s presented. It upends the traditional linear or parallelized paradigms of storytelling and starts with what we quickly learn is the finale - the murder of Teddy (Joe Pentoliano) by the protagonist Leonard (Guy Pearce). Leonard suffers from a rare condition where he cannot make new memories after an incident that left his wife dead. As the movie unfolds we learn about the absurd set of events that keep the audience on their toes trying to identify the heroes from the villains. Even after having watched some of Nolan’s later movies, Memento seems refreshingly different and t has a strong connection to any Posthuman discussion in the questions it raises about daily assumptions regarding time, memory and human motivation.The opening news shows a hand (Leonard’s) shaking repeatedly his polaroid photo of a bloodied murder. Thus, in the start itself Nolan makes his audience wonder about memory (why would someone take a photo of a murder?), time (there is a hint of daylight but the room is dark) and motivation (both of the murder and that of the direction, as in why he would start a movie with a murder). This complexity is ever present throughout the movie, as we go back scene-by-scene. At first it feels strange, to see Leonard speaking with Teddy who we know he is later going to kill. However, the movie reinforces the story repeatedly by always going back a scene to end right where the previous scene (which is chronologically next)

ended. This inversion of timeline is highly purposeful and impactful at two levels: it forces us to feel the discomfort of a distortion of time linearity, and makes us ask the situation as Leonard - how the hell did we get here?Memory is a major theme throughout the movie. When Teddy asks Leonard about the meaning of murdering his wife’s killer when he wouldn’t even remember the act - the vengeance that he’s dedicated himself to - Leonard replies that “just because there are things I don't remember doesn't make my actions meaningless.” This initial statement makes the viewer think, again, on two levels: is there a possibility he has already killed the murderer, and should we perhaps rely less on his memories as the source of truth to this movie? It is easy for users to forget the latter as we come to share his belief in his “system” - using "facts, not memories” to investigate. Besides Leonard explicitly talking about unreliability of memory with Teddy and in his monologues, the sub-plot of Sammy Jenkins provides a glimpse into someone with similar condition as Leonard. It’s suspicious that Leonard know someone who had a similarly rare incident, and there are hints at it being an imagination (for instance, scenes with Sammy are almost always black-and-white, a common device used to indicate both a distant memory as well as an fabricated story).The movie also gives the viewers plenty to wonder about human motivation. Every single character in the movie, from the innocuous motel owner, the beautiful and similarly hurt Natalie to Teddy seem to have a perverse side, using Leonard’s mental situation to their advantage - making him overpay, endanger himself or flat out murder other people. The one twist that I did not see coming however, was Leonard using his situation for

himself. It is ultimately revealed in the very end that he leaves himself false clues so that when we restarts his memory cycle, he would “find” clues that lead to another John G. - this time Lenny - the scene where the movie had begun. While until the end the we have come to believe that Lenny is one of the prime suspects of the murder, the ending makes it seem like he may have just been a corrupt policeman who was telling the truth about him having murdered the original John G. already. It is impossible to know who to believe, and what Leonard wrote about Lenny as a “fact” - “don’t believe his lies” - seems to apply to everyone in the movie.In a way, the movie leaves the viewer more confused, whether they got the timeline right, whether they remember a scene correctly, or if they even understand any of the characters. And in that, Christopher Nolan succeeded in creating a thought-provoking movie.