Memento

Explain Memento Movie a Deep Dive into Nolan’s Psychological Thriller

I want you to hit me as hard as you can. Christopher Nolan’s Memento was released in 2000 long before the days of his tentpole blockbusters and larger-than-life cinematic offerings. A seemingly simple tale of a man living with anterograde amnesia seeking to avenge the murder of his wife, Leonard, played by Guy Pearce, was attacked at home one night where his wife was raped and murdered. He killed one of the attackers, but the second threw him into a mirror, giving him the amnesia. He still retains all of the memories of his life prior to the incident, but with anterograde amnesia, he is unable to create new memories. Every 15 minutes or so, sometimes less in stressful circumstances, Leonard starts all over again.

In an effort to find the second attacker and avenge his wife’s murder, Leonard has covered his body in tattoos, all of them clues to help him remember everything he is picking up about the second man, who he knows is called John G. He also keeps Polaroid photos to give him hints on his progress and the people he has met along the way.

Interesting premise, right? Well, that’s just the basic story. How that story is told is what makes Memento really interesting and unique. Based on the short story written by his brother Jonathan, Christopher Nolan presents Memento in two different timelines, both distinct in their visual style one in color, the other in black and white. The color timeline is intercut throughout the entire film in reverse chronological order. The black and white timeline is presented in normal chronological order, taking place before the color sequences, and the story begins to unravel in a very unconventional manner.

The film begins with the only literal reverse sequence in the movie, with Leonard watching a Polaroid of a man he just shot dead undeveloped. The man is Teddy, a cop who has sympathized with Leonard and tried to help him find his wife’s killer. The black and white scenes depict Leonard in a motel, narrating in a very film noir-inspired style.

A key figure in the film’s story is Sammy Jenkins. Leonard used to be an insurance investigator, and throughout the black-and-white timeline, he recalls the story of Sammy Jenkins, a man with anterograde amnesia just like Leonard. It was Leonard’s job to assess whether this condition was a physical or mental defect. Sammy Jenkins was put through many tests, but ultimately, his diabetic wife, who required assistance with her insulin shots, decided to test her husband herself. She kept asking Sammy to administer her shots, hoping he would remember that he had already given her one. But he didn’t, and she died.

Partly, it’s a cruel twist of fate that a tragic story wrapped up in a condition that Leonard didn’t fully believe in is exactly where Leonard finds himself trapped now with his wife dead and unable to create new memories. But also, it might be another clue, of which there are many in the film, as we reach the end.

As the movie progresses, the apparent truth comes out. Leonard is sent to kill his wife’s murderer by Teddy, who has tracked him down. Leonard strangles him, takes a Polaroid of the body, and the black and white slowly dissolves into color as the two timelines coalesce. Yet, Leonard is disconcerted when the killer whispers “Sammy” and wonders how he knew about it.

Here, Teddy tells Leonard the truth the man he killed, Jimmy, wasn’t his wife’s killer. Teddy helped Leonard track down the real killer a year ago and even has the pictures to prove it. Since then, he’s been manipulating Leonard into killing other potential John G’s, feeding him clues and keeping his own hands clean.

At this point, Teddy’s truth really can’t be taken literally. After all, Leonard’s memory before the incident is still intact. But maybe there are partial truths, which is all you’re really going to get from Memento. Christopher Nolan himself has said that if you watch the film closely, the details are all there, but certain elements just don’t completely match up. But that’s what memory is it’s imperfect. And in the mind of a man who has gone through such horrific trauma, that grip on reality is going to become so much more unhinged and unreliable.

One of the staples of the genre of film noir is the unreliable narrator a character who tells their story but has very clearly recalled it in their own bias. Leonard could be seen as an unreliable narrator, as well as Teddy, who we eventually decode as quite the crooked cop. After learning this revelation, Leonard decides to leave Teddy. He notes down Teddy’s license plate and marks it down for his next tattoo, effectively marking Teddy for death as the next in a seemingly unending line of John G’s.

And this is how the film concludes:

I have to believe in the 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 is still here. Do I believe the world is still out there? Yeah, we all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different.

Now, there are other elements to the story that could play a key part in the bigger picture, namely the character of Natalie and how she manipulates Leonard. But the real key is Leonard’s past. One of the more subtle clues is when Leonard is recalling the Sammy Jenkins story, where after his wife’s death from the insulin injections, he ends up in an institution. For a brief moment, Leonard is in the same chair as Sammy.

Now, is it possible that Leonard was actually committed and escaped? I think so. But with the very nature of the fragmented memories presented from Leonard’s point of view, which we are shown can be easily and quickly manipulated by others, I think Memento is one of the greatest unreliable narrator films.

There’s a million ways you can break down this movie and strip it down piece by piece, but nothing can reconcile the fact that we cannot truly trust Leonard’s mind. When he confronts Jimmy at the end of the film, just before the black and white gives way to the color, he sees flashes of his wife. She was apparently murdered by asphyxiation, and as he chokes Jimmy to death, we see flashes of his wife’s face wrapped in plastic.

This is before Teddy tells Leonard that Sammy’s story is his story. So perhaps Leonard really did kill his own wife. At the very end of the film, we see a flash of her lying on his chest with a tattoo that reads “I’ve done it” a tattoo we never see at any other point in the film.

If his wife truly is still alive, perhaps when he killed Teddy at the end of the story and the beginning of the movie, he broke the chain of his condition and returned to a prototypical happy ending. But far more likely than that is the bitter, more realistic route that he is imagining a fantasy in which he does escape his eternal murderous purgatory. One that he ultimately decides to stay in by marking Teddy as the next John G anyway.

Ignorance is bliss. He wants to find that happy ending, but he knows that it’s impossible. So he continues on, regardless of the truth, stuck in an everlasting sense of rage and vengeance, bound to be driven to avenge his wife’s death forever whichever version of the truth you believe.

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