MEMENTO (2000)

Blood seeps back into a corpse. An emptied cartridge soars through the air and returns to the pistol chamber. A photograph fades before our eyes, a reality that becomes increasingly opaque with each passing moment. We’re placed in the shoes of the man standing over the dead body: uncertain of the time, location, or cause of the current situation. When you live a life without memory, it makes no difference if time moves backwards or forwards.

After sustaining a serious head injury, Leonard (Guy Pearce) suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition rendering him incapable of forming new memories. He lives at a dingy motel, his base of operations as he tries, with difficulty, to complete his mission: find and kill the man who raped and murdered his wife. However, even aside from his condition, numerous other obstacles present themselves—because everyone can use a man without memory.

Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), a suspicious ally with questionable intentions, claims he wants to help Leonard. Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), the waitress at the local bar, also asserts she wants to aid him in his task, yet we suspect she’s concocting plans of her own. With each character in this narrative harbouring nebulous, mysterious desires, Leonard learns he can’t trust anyone—perhaps not even himself.

A film that startles in both its simplicity and complexity, Memento has solidified its status as perhaps the greatest modern murder mystery since its release 25 years ago. That’s because it’s a story from this genre that asks a unique set of questions. It’s not simply a matter of: who killed my wife? A multitude of other unanswerable inquiries abound. If vengeance won’t fix a broken heart, will it at least mend a broken memory? Can you trust people claiming to be your friends when you can’t recognise their faces? And most importantly: will I even remember murdering the man who ruined my life?

As Memento begins, it features all the genetic coding of your typical neo-noir. There’s a dirty, grimy aesthetic. Our protagonist is dishevelled, sporting old cuts on his cheek and donning a worn suit. He drives a dusty car through a city that feels claustrophobic with iniquity. However, it soon becomes clear that our story is anything but typical. Even as our film borrows the black-and-white footage and morose voiceover, we can sense that something is slightly off-kilter.

Perhaps it’s because the enigma that finds itself at the centre of Memento doesn’t diminish with time, but grows. The dramatic resolution to the story occurs in the first seconds of the film, yet we become more perplexed as the plot proceeds. We’re flung into scenarios without explanation, forced to grasp at straws and embrace the entropy of a perennially unrecognisable world, the same world that Leonard must encounter in day-to-day life.

Ideas such as free will, identity, epistemology, and phenomenology are excavated with expert aplomb in Nolan’s career-defining masterpiece. Leonard’s aberrant cognition reveals how we come to know things, how we experience the world around us, and how the knowledge we accrue becomes misshapen, obsolete, inconvenient. How much autonomy can a man truly claim to possess when his life is dictated by a series of notes? Does a man have free will if he’d kill someone based on the information he read off the back of a coaster?

Leonard is such a man, and he’s spent longer than he knows trying to connect the dots. But information can be easily distorted, whether by accident or through malicious intent. And so the dots bleed into each other. The dots separate, taking on new, confusing shapes that don’t fit the rest of the puzzle. Yet Leonard is determined to solve it, and so the puzzle is forced to bend to his will: it transmogrifies, transmutes, becomes something foreign and unrecognisable.

The result is an existential thriller with a palpable mood; we engage with the world only through our protagonist’s perspective, and it induces in us an uncommon feeling of vulnerability. When a phone rings in a dark room, we don’t know who’s speaking on the other end of the phone. That’s because Leonard doesn’t know who’s speaking on the other end of the phone. But then, we don’t really know Leonard, either. For that matter, Leonard doesn’t really know Leonard. He’s emblematic of the unknowable self, a personality that simultaneously shrinks and expands the more closely it’s examined. When Natalie kisses Leonard, she does so with her eyes open, gazing deep into his pupils to see if even a hint of recognition can be detected. But there’s nothing there—not so much as a glimmer. They are each phantoms to the other.

When Leonard looks into the mirror, he possesses a similarly quizzical expression. He often becomes conscious in rooms that are strange to him, in places he can’t remember visiting. Still, he can eventually decipher these riddles; it just requires a retracing of his steps, and even if his is a life spent between confused backtracking and aggressive forward momentum, it’s at least vaguely comprehensible to him.

However, when Leonard stares into his own reflection, it’s like he’s looking at a ghost. “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are,” he assures himself. “I’m no different.” Yet the image cast back at him appears only to confuse, and he looks on as though he were trying to place his face on an alien, foreign body: a tapestry of instructions that proliferate almost daily and so remain forever new, lists of trivia and factoids that direct, perplex, inspire, demand.

This is the method by which Leonard believes he can obtain serenity: once justice is done, then he’ll know peace, and his broken life might heal, even if only in some perverse, unpredictable way. But it will at least be peace of a sort, and only a rigid system can achieve it. Our protagonist extols the virtues of rational thinking, of the discipline required to undertake such a heroic task with his condition: “You need a system.” Copious notes won’t suffice. The system requires an elegant simplicity, or it will fail. Tattoos of fundamental information are etched all over his arms, his legs, his torso. Polaroids of new faces and their defining characteristics are kept in his jacket pocket.

In covering himself with clues from the past, Leonard becomes a physical manifestation of the memory that eternally evades him. He’s the embodiment of faulty recall, a fallacy writ large: he dedicates his existence to the mistaken belief that all puzzles have answers, and in doing so he transforms into the mission that gives his shattered life renewed purpose. Yet Leonard realises that he can’t even tell how long he’s been on this quest, nor how long ago his wife was taken from him. “I don’t even know how long she’s been gone. It’s like I’ve woken up in bed, and she’s not here. […] I lie here not knowing how long I’ve been alone. So how… how can I heal? How am I supposed to heal if I can’t… feel time?”

In this, the structure of Memento possesses the true meaning of the story: we’re stripped of our ability to narrativise, to form linearity through cause and effect. By eradicating chronology, by warping and inverting causality, our natural sense of temporality is eroded. We can’t quite feel the processes of time. We’re cast adrift in the same boundless quest as Leonard, without any certainty of its beginning or end. Instead, we find ourselves stuck permanently in the middle, a life spent in medias res, trapped in a purgatory of our own making.

In Batman Begins (2005), another of Christopher Nolan’s investigations into the moral quandaries surrounding identity formation, one of the principal characters sagely advises that all our good intentions and righteous motivations are quite irrelevant when juxtaposed against our actions themselves: “It’s what you do that defines you.” Five years before the Nolan brothers dissected the ethics of the Caped Crusader, they were analysing the moral rationale of a man floundering through an almost mythic quest for revenge: “I’m not a killer. I’m just someone who wanted to make things right.”

Yet he must admit to himself, if only for a moment, that the mission is more important to him than its resolution, that meaning has and always will supersede truth. And so Leonard knowingly distorts the picture for himself, destroying the evidence that clarifies, keeping the information that obfuscates. His entire system is voided with only one sentence written on the back of a photograph: “Don’t believe his lies.” A whole new mystery unravelling out of one lie, a credible deception a man told to himself, a fabrication he couldn’t forget though forgetting the world around him.

Memento is reminiscent of one of the choruses from T.S Eliot’s The Rock: “They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. / But the man that is will shadow / The man that pretends to be.” There’s no system so perfect that we cannot be good within it… and Leonard is not a moral man. He may pretend to be a moral agent guided by the divine hand of vigilante justice, but he’s truthfully a mere weapon without memory, a cause without definition, a violent force wielded by amorphous, changing desires. No matter how hard he presents himself (to himself) as someone who wants to make things right, the shadow of the man he truly is looms large over him, following him wherever he goes.

Like Oedipus blinding himself after understanding the extent of his crimes, he annihilates his past with the brush of a pen, and so provides himself with another future. Now he’s ready for another hopeless mission, because even a life lived in pursuit of the wrong cause is better than to live with no cause at all, and an existence bent towards fabricated meaning is preferable than to exist with hollow truths. In his blind grief and cold, callous rage, he has not just become dangerous, but devoid of any external identity. Perhaps this is why he seems so perplexed when he looks in the mirror: he has become his vengeance, a vengeance that changes on a whim, the victim of which will alter from one week to the next.

All memories are questionable. Each system is corruptible. And some men would rather kill than be divested of their purpose. As Leonard drives away, off to solve a mystery we’ve already seen resolved, the ever-widening gulf between his inner life and the outer world presents itself before him with startling clarity. “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.” But it’s an epiphany that disintegrates just as it comes into existence, like the smouldering embers of a scorched Polaroid, and it will not return to him. The potential good that may have arisen from this moment has slipped away, evanescing into the blank oblivion of his mind.

The facts disappear forever. Leonard’s ceaseless, questing present lumbers under the burden of both the anxieties of the future and the events of the past, even though he can never plan for the former, nor remember the latter. It’s as though he lives on the threshold of a mirror, precariously positioned in between reflections of himself, reflections he can no longer recognise.

The man that is, or the man that pretends to be? He is both. Neither. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. The sum of an arcane personal history routinely expunged. The perennial victim whose indelible memories are quietly effaced.

USA | 2000 | 113 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR • BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Christopher Nolan.
writer: Christopher Nolan (based on a short story by Jonathan Nolan).
starring: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, Mark Boone Junior, Russ Fega, Jorja Fox, Stephen Tobolowsky & Harriet Sansom Harris.