“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different.”
When someone experiences an overwhelming trauma it can lead to a fragmented state of mind. The people force themselves to create an alternative reality to help conceal the hurt and sense of guilt. Three films come to mind on this subject matter. Those films being Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
Before I go into the plot of Memento. Let me bring up the Personal Identity theory the philosopher David Hume focused on. “He was entirely forgot the incidents of these days, that the present self is not the same person with the self of that time and by that means overturn all the most established notions of personal identity? In this view, therefore, memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions. Memory produces entirely our personal identity, to give reason why we this extend our identity beyond our memory.” He went on to say that identity itself was an illusion. “We are a collection of fleeting impressions. What are we, since we are not?”
After an attack, which his wife was murdered, Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia. He wants revenge so he starts an investigation to hunt down his wife’s killer. He has a methodical system of notes, tattoos, and Polaroid photographs. Helping him search for the killer is a cop named Teddy. He takes his case mainly out of pity. The real challenge for Leonard is to unscramble his memory and mend it with the missing piece of his identity.
Memento is based off the classic film noir narrative patterns yet has a distorted storyline. The storyline is presented in reverse-chronological order, while smaller tidbits of the film are told chronologically. Christopher Nolan lets us as the viewer go inside the mind of the protagonist. Taking us on a backward journey through an unreliable deceptive memory where all the cast of characters appear from a haze. We too are just as lost as Leonard. Do we trust the people he intermingles with? Soon we are even asking if our narrator, Leonard himself, can be trusted. He is rather unreliable.
He focuses everything on his last memory he had. There are a series of scenes that leads us to question Leonard’s pre-injury memory. When he thinks back to his last memory, he is lying on the bathroom floor across from his wife who wrapped up in a shower curtain. He states that this last memory of his was of his wife dying. Yet upon a close-up on the face of his wife she blinks signifying that she is in fact still alive in his last memory. She was dying, yes; although, he has no recollection of her death, funeral, or her even surviving. The only other reference to her potential post-attack was an altered flashback where Leonard experiences two alternatives to the same situation.
(SPOILERS…)
The one thing that gets me is when Memento intentionally uses a subliminal image. Leonard is telling a story about Sammy Jenkins, who was a semi-retired accountant that got into a car accident, which caused permanent short-term memory loss. His wife wanted to test him by making him inject insulin into her, a lot of shots within an hour, in hopes he’d realize that he was giving her an overdose. He didn’t remember and his wife fell into a coma and died. Sammy couldn’t explain or understand what happened so he was committed into a hospital. When Sammy is sitting in a chair at the hospital, for 1/10 of a second you see Leonard in the chair instead of Sammy. Sammy Jenkins and Leonard Shelby are one of the same. Then there’s the scene where Teddy explains to Leonard that Sammy didn’t have a wife. That it was really Leonard who killed his wife by overdosing her with insulin. There are two alternatives to this scene. The first being Leonard giving his wife an insulin shot while she’s sitting on their bed. The other alternative being Leonard teasingly pinching her thigh.
So were Leonard’s memories all fake? The memory of his wife’s attack was just a story that Teddy came up with so Leonard would murder people he wants dead or the attack really did happen, but she survived. Leonard/Sammy accidentally killed his wife and his amnesia won’t let him remember. Everything that happens in the black and white sections are true while the color sections are when people lie or manipulate both the audience and Leonard. The significance of Leonard seeming to appear as Sammy is because it's showing he is Sammy. As David Hume once wrote, “Even though my perceptions are fleeting and I am a bundle of different perceptions, I nevertheless have some idea of personal identity, and that must be accounted for.”
The thing that makes the story strong is that Memento distinguishes that we all lie to ourselves. Christopher Nolan simply found a way to make the lie a major star of the film. Leonard’s not lying to himself about how handsome or rich he is. Leonard is lying to himself about his very identity and his anterograde amnesia allows him to continue this lie infinitely. He’s in an endless loop.
Memento is a modern classic. It was Christopher Nolan’s second film and first major American release. The cast is great. Guy Pierce stole the show as Leonard. Both fresh off the Matrix film Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss offer great supporting characters that may or may not be using Leonard’s condition for their own twisted agenda. Back in 2017 the US Library of Congress added this film to the National Film Registry. Memento is for anyone passionate about film noir and cinema in general. Memento is a must-see masterpiece.
4.8 out of 5
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