Mythological Movie Recommendation: Memento
Great stories are about more than the events that transpire around their protagonists. They are about the principles that reflect real-world human development. Those are the types of stories on film I wish to address here, as they have had an uncommonly strong effect on my development. I hope to help introduce these influential stories to people who haven’t seen them and wouldn’t be likely to ever watch them on their own. Though many of these are among the most popular and successful movies ever made, general audiences still often overlook their subtle profundity. Even movies that have already been analyzed to death can still be assessed through a different lens. Great art always leaves more to be revealed and gifts us more to learn from.
Thematic discussion only ahead. No spoilers.
When we watch a movie, we are forced to make countless inferences about what it going on in the world of the story beyond what is directly shown on camera. It’s the only way to tell a complete story in two hours. It’s not as though we are meant to believe the characters and their world suddenly popped into existence at the first frame of the opening scene. We are directly shown a small amount of information that naturally cascades into a far greater amount of assumed information. Our brains fill in what we see as the most obvious missing details to account for what we witness. We do the same thing in real life because there is only a tiny fraction of things we can ever directly witness.
Incidentally, this is the main reason why prequels can be so hard to pull off. The audience has already filled in the missing details that led to the later events in their own minds. Now they are being asked to replace those details with new ones. Memento pulls off a unique and unsettling cinematic trick by making each new scene an unexpected prequel to the one preceding it and challenging everything we thought we knew about what was going on.
The many ways to view and interpret the puzzling narrative of Memento have transfixed me since I was a teenager. I have never seen a movie that so effectively demonstrates how the way we view a story affects our interpretation of the literal events we witness and the invisible overlay of character motivations and justifications we add to those events. It takes the concept of an unreliable narrator to a disturbing meta-level because it forces us to realize that we, too, are silently contributing to the story as narrators merely by viewing and interpreting it in real-time.
Every character in Memento is both a good guy and a bad guy depending on what facts you’re most paying attention to, which is heavily influenced by the order you perceive things happening and the recency of everything just witnessed in your mind. There is no way to consume this story without being heavily biased, and there is no way to reach the end without becoming uncomfortably aware of your biases.
The plot is simple enough on paper. Leonard Shelby, a man with no short-term memory, is seeking his wife’s killer to enact revenge and get justice for her. But since he cannot retain new information for very long before forgetting it, he must collect it in bits and pieces, form deductions from the available evidence, and assess people’s character and motivations in moments upon meeting them each time anew. Then, he must take drastic, permanent actions based on what he hastily determines to be true.
Leonard is a profoundly sympathetic yet unreliable character. The way the story is presented through a narrative gimmick of primarily showing the scenes in reverse chronological order gives us a little window into his memory-impaired world. We only know for sure what is happening right now on screen in front of us. We don’t know what led up to it. We have to infer, just as quickly as Leonard does, why things are happening the way they are and what the most appropriate thing to do in each moment is. And at the center of all this confusing action is just a man who seems to be trying to make things right in the world to the best of his fractured ability.
Memento begs us to reassess how we interpret our own character and motivation. In a sense, we are all doing what Leonard, with his broken memory, does. After all, our memories are broken too. None of us perfectly recalls every relevant bit of information about past events that shape the present. We select and interpret, which makes us all just as biased as he is. When we see how easy it is to change the interpretation of seemingly obvious present events once new information becomes available, we cannot help but wonder how the same applies to every choice we make in our own lives. The heroic and virtuous person must always be questioning if they understand the world and make the best possible choices. They must always remain open to the possibility that there is something crucial they are missing or that their interpretation could be reconfigured for a different valid outcome.
At the end of the day, everyone still has to act on imperfect information and through the filter of cognitive biases, just as Leonard does throughout the film. And we must deal with the consequences of potentially being wrong. And if we are committed to being good, we must live with the memory of our mistakes and try to do better in the future because of it.
To demonstrate how effective the unique narrative device of this movie is, all you have to do is watch the version edited with the scenes in correct chronological order. Even if you’ve seen the backward version many times and know the events of the plot by heart, you’ll still be surprised at just how much your feelings for each character are affected by the order in which you see it all going on.
A man with short-term memory loss attempts to track down his wife's murderer.