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Also, how can I get a copy of La Notte?
I will look into that this weekend, I remember I watched it on the internet quite a few times, but I speak Italian so I didn't need subs.
But don't worry, I will look for a version with English subs.
Posting my thoughts on Memento later as well, though much has been said already. Great conversations to follow, fellas!
Alright so: I wouldnt personally classify it as a remake because its almost completely differant. The only things "Ghajini" and Memento have in common, is that that main character has some sort of memory condition and is out for revenge. That is the only thing that remains the same. In memento, the story is structured kinda funny and he remembers everything before the accident and nothing new and his memory reverts every 15 minutes. This indian one is about a guy who remembers nothing, only everything within 15 minutes. And it starts with him at present day then flashesback to half his life before the incident then comes back to the present then falshes back to the second half of his life before the incident, then ends at present day so not quite structured the same way. The story is diffferant too. Ghajini is about a rich buissnessman who falls in love with a good person and her "good nature" gets her killed by gangsters who also clock our main character in the head causing him to lose the ability of memory. All he remembers is that a guy named ghajini hit him. So he lives his life with pictures and tattoos and essentially goes after this guy.
Quite differant from memento.
Now for my review of the film.
Now I havent seen many indian films. Only two other ones to be exact so I dont know how qualified I am to judge it....
Pros:
Engaging story
Good characters
Entertaining
Well acted( only by the protagonist)
Cons:
Its edited weirdly
Signing/dancing
Its filmed weirdly
Its tonaly a bit strange
Some of the non main actors cant act
Some plot inconsistencies
Overall: I thought it was a fun and entertaining film and it had me compelled even at the end of the film which is rare for me. It was three hours long but I didnt really get bored, I thought the scenes were engaging. However on a production level its kind of pathetic and the singing is purposeless so all in all- I strangely recommend it just to watch for fun. Its not a bad film contrary to what I thought going in
And Ghajini 2, what do you know about that?
Being put in Leonard’s shoes in the way we are is very interesting and unusual, and basically the big selling point of the film. I may have been lazy while watching it, but I kind of forgot all about the characters underway. So much effort went into the whole puzzle and the unusual narrative structure, that the characters themselves were kind of secondary. I found myself just trying to figure out how they’d fit into the story, and little beyond that – in lack of a better way to write it.
Don’t know if that was intentional, but I didn’t mind it. Watching Memento made me feel that this was some sort of experiment in narrative structure anyway, and an entertaining one at that.
This isn’t a top 20 film for me, but I enjoyed watching a small-scale Nolan film for a change. Solid 7/10, which isn’t bad for a first viewing!
Ghajini 2?- I watched Ghajini(2008) I am unaware of any sequel.
Neither me. Subtitles of coarse
That is a fan made trailer
Anyway...
Memento (2000)| An Analysis
The word memento is defined as “an object kept as a reminder or souvenir of a person or event.” This statement attributes a lot of sunny notions to the mementos we hoard and the concept of memory formation in general, where we preserve parts of our pasts in a form that can endure all of time. What makes Christopher Nolan’s Memento most interesting is how it offers a viable and logical refutation of the value we place in our memories and landmark tokens of the past; the pictures of warm days on the beach, happy birthdays and the albums that are time capsules of our youth and rise to maturation. As humans we place great stake in our minds and often think it impossible that our recollection of the events that have impacted our own lives could ever be faulty, and that is one of the biggest mistakes our species can make.
Like the Polaroids that become one of the main focal points of Memento’s visual library, photographs of our past can have many meanings and contexts to them that fool us as we look back at them. When we gaze at a baby photo of us ramming two toy cars together we see the moment, but nothing more; the context of our mood, of who is taking the photo and anything that happened before or after the picture was taken are lost to us, like that moment was the only one we ever experienced. Leonard’s own set of Polaroids, like the photos we carry, underscore the danger of these images. They capture a moment, but they don’t explain it.
Because of this, it becomes very easy to look at an old album or sit back and reminisce with the assurance that what we remember and what we see so vividly is the truth of what really happened. But of course, that isn’t the truth of the matter and like Leonard, we are caught in an active dash to avoid the fact that our memories, and our very perceptions of them, can be easily manipulated and repurposed to give us comfort, free us of guilt, and allow us to relish in the delusion of remembering to forget what is unsavory about ourselves and our pasts.
Memento: How Effect/Cause Structure and Context Play with Perception
The nature of delusion, human error and the power and deceit of images are the cornerstone puzzle pieces that make up Memento, because one of the film’s greatest achievements is how it plays with the viewer’s perceptions moment to moment. Nolan purposefully structures the film such that we are as lost as Leonard is while the action charges backward. As the movie plays in reverse in full-color and we receive brief flashes in the objective black and white mode, we meet the mysterious and morally ambiguous cast of characters in the same fashion that Leonard meets them, no matter how familiar they are with him. Has he met them before? What are their values? What do they know and how did they learn it?
This effect/cause structure is jarring, but a fascinating experience nonetheless as we are treated to the effect an unknown sequence of events spawned before we view the cause of that last moment of impact following a brief intermission. More generally, it was quite a ballsy move for Nolan to begin his movie with what could be misconstrued as the “big reveal” of the piece with the death of Teddy, or so we think. As the camera is fixated on the bloody image before us, of a murder committed, we are instantly tasked with wondering how the action got to this place and what it all means. It’s only by going in reverse that it all becomes clear, and the mysteries are strategically peeled back directly after the Polaroid picture of Teddy rewinds itself and erases the capture like Leonard’s own mind makes the clear foggy, a beautiful visual metaphor for the nature of his memory and the ultimate act of repression that he employs to avoid the truth.
The effect/cause structure of Memento is purposefully designed to make the viewer’s plight that of Leonard’s: he has no idea about the motives of those who surround him and he can never be sure when he’s being toyed with or being aided. Our perceptions of these characters are continually being changed as new information becomes clear, which is Nolan’s statement on not only the danger of Leonard’s condition but a great commentary on the different sides of us all with motives that move with the wind. As the plot moves forward (or backward, in this case), we are challenged to wonder if what Leonard is being told fits any model of truth, or if the information he receives fits the motivation of the person giving it to him. Because of this, the line between truth and fallacy is blurred, where characters we thought we knew are revealed to be something else entirely, or more sinister than we first imagined.
Burt, the operator of Leonard’s temporary residence at the inn, is first presented as a good natured and understanding man who is willing to understand the man’s condition with great patience, despite having to hear the same speech frequently. As the film backtracks, however, this warm and compassionate character is revealed to be greedy and opportunistic, manipulating Leonard’s condition to double bill him in another room. The moments we saw earlier with Burt weren’t the genuine signs of kindness from a man dealing with a disabled customer, but all part of his own game to test Leonard’s memory to ensure that his swindle paid off.
Natalie is another character initially presented to us in a manipulatively positive and sympathetic way. She is addressed as a woman that can understand Leonard’s pain regarding his dead wife, and when we first meet her she is just as understanding and inviting to Leonard as the inn operator was, connecting to him and his struggles for how they approached her own. As the layers of the film are continually peeled back, however, we are also met with the cruel and opportunistic side of Natalie, who manipulates Leonard’s condition to make him get rid of Dodd, an act that only endangers him and satisfies her own selfish needs. In this moment, the sympathetic nature of the woman and the pain she feels in reaction to Jimmy’s absence in her life clashes with the part of her that makes her the femme fatale of this neo-noir, with a poisonous and conniving side.
Perhaps the most interesting manipulation in the film, outside of how we perceive Leonard, surrounds the character of Teddy. Actor Joe Pantoliano fills the role and at the time of the film’s release his part was fascinating for viewers to experience because the actor was often typecast for villainous characters. By selecting Pantoliano to play Teddy, Nolan and his team were already setting up the perfect trick to challenge the perceptions of viewers and what their instincts said of a character that the movie would go a long way towards explaining
When Memento begins, Teddy is strategically built up to be the villain of the piece. The movie opens with his death, placing the suggestion in our heads that he must have done something bad to drive Leonard to act as he did, but we’ve yet to be taught how even the protagonist isn’t who we thought he was. One of the first Polaroids we see labels in fat bold letters that Teddy is a man who can’t be trusted, and Nolan is again toying with us as we foolishly side with Leonard’s perception of the man. As the film goes on Pantoliano’s performance is perfectly ambiguous, with Teddy easily blurring the lines of morality and immorality. But by design, the scenes we are shown of him and the peeks we get at Leonard’s own impressions of him that we grow to trust create the suggestion that he is high on the suspect list for John G.
Teddy’s honesty doesn’t end there, however, as we can see even after the death of Jimmy that he is still attempting to reach Leonard through his condition when he barrels his way into Natalie. “When she offers to help, it’ll be for her own reasons,” Teddy prophetically warns. “I’m not lying. Take my pen, write this down. Do not trust her.” And sure enough, trouble comes knocking for Leonard even after he was warned to stay clear of Natalie, all because he’d already written a note to himself not to trust Teddy, the only one willing to be earnestly honest with him in the film.
Although Teddy plays a part in manipulating Leonard and his condition like Natalie and Burt to make him aid his own selfish police work, he ultimately becomes the only character around Leonard who takes steps to actually help him deal with his pain. Burt laughs over Leonard’s condition like it’s an amusing anecdote and Natalie learns much about mourning from Leonard without giving anything back beyond the license plate that will only drive him to kill again, but Teddy tries to make the effort to get through to Leonard, to dispel his warped view of the world and put him on the path to existing again outside his delusions. It becomes Leonard’s own failure that the search for John G. never ends, and in a cruel twist of fate, Teddy writes his own death certificate. In his desperate need for self-satisfaction and meaning, and to get even, Leonard creates the ultimate villain out of the only person who actually tried to help him so that his ultimate (and delusional) heroic vision of himself has someone to contrast off of.
In this way, Nolan presents a great flip of the script, where the vile and untrustworthy man we’d come to despise through Leonard’s word can be perceived as much softer, and the vigilante hero avenging his wife is made out to be just as selfish as those he lets abuse him.
Memento & the Taboo of Mental Health
Memento receives a lot of well-earned plaudits for its brilliant structure and use of dialogue, motifs and themes to constantly warp the perceptions of viewers, but from a narrative perspective it also represents a beautiful and honest picture of mental health that comes from a place of compassion and sympathy as Nolan presents characters at odds with their station in life and the blind faith they place in a corruptible and fragile mind.
Regardless of how one may view Leonard at the conclusion of the film, part of his journey and battle with his mental condition is extremely touching and garners easy sympathy from me. At the start of the film we find Leonard battling to function and understand in a never-ending present, because his memory doesn’t allow him to have a true sense of the past or future. We are strategically kept in the blue about just how long he’s been on this mission of his before we ever argue his justification of it, and we often see him struggling with the choices he’s made when he ponders the time he’s lost, whether it’s been ten weeks or ten years. Because of his situation, notions of yesterday and tomorrow become lost in Leonard’s battle to understand the perpetually refreshing state he exists in, where he almost occupies a zero time space. When time and the passage of it is unknown to someone, and they can’t tell how much time has passed or what the recent past even was, can they truly be said to live in the present when the context that feeds the idea of living in the moment is extinct?
Leonard’s memory malfunction often crossroads with his pain over the death of his wife as he recalls it, and the absence of an ability to recognize the passage of time makes these emotions and fractured parts of his heart just as perpetual as the pounding of the reset button in his brain. While all of us face the loss of people we love and other general tragedies or changes that bring on uncomfortable or strong emotions and pain, we are able to endure and, because our brains give us the ability to live moment to moment and move into a future away from that melancholic past, those wounds heal as more time passes. Leonard is impaired in this way and has no ability to mentally move on from the event of his wife’s “murder” because his ability to create new memories died with her. Each time his brain resets, the feeling of her loss and the experience of mourning that drives him on is as fresh as ever, as is the pain in his heart and the rage he feels to kill those who (he believes) robbed her from him.
The only thing worse than Leonard’s experience of his mental dysfunction is how he’s constantly victimized by those who want to use his lapses for their own needs, adding another layer of sympathy to him. In this way, Leonard’s constant repetition that he isn’t easily understood carries a tragic note because the sympathy of his struggle is lost on those who only see opportunity when he confesses his vulnerable mind. The selfish acts of literally all the characters surrounding Leonard, from the unseen police officers to Teddy, Natalie and Burt, come from a very dark and disturbed place, as he is made a pawn in games he never asked to compete in.
It’s odd that the details Leonard fails to note in ink are all the people he tells his Sammy story to, as his lack of recall on this front leads him to being set up as a pawn for others’ schemes in this way. The person speaking with him on the phone in the black and white scenes of the film could likely be someone from the police department affiliated with Teddy who was testing to see if Leonard’s condition was serious enough that he could be tricked into doing their bidding, just like Natalie uses Leonard’s memory lapse to her own selfish advantage and Burt cashes in by booking him a double room. Each and every time, Leonard’s desire to be understood endangers his mission to remain protected and free from opposition or manipulation. Symbolically, while Leonard recalls a Mrs. Jankis in his mind who he eventually sees as a woman acting from a place of love to understand her impaired husband, Leonard’s mind and his own lapses are only used and tested through cruel means for even crueler ends by those who swarm him. By crafting the story in this way, as manipulations of Leonard’s mind are weaved together, Nolan connects his protagonist’s struggle to be understood through the story of Sammy Jankis to how others use that narrative to toy with him.
Although the story about Sammy Jankis that Leonard holds on to is ultimately revealed to be a projection of his own situation, from this fabricated anecdote Memento continues to showcase the taboo of mental health that exists even outside the lives of those who manipulate Leonard. Most tragic of all is that, in the end, not even Leonard’s wife Catherine could understand the gravity of what he was suffering with inside. Just like Leonard himself during his investigation of Sammy Jankis (who we are told is real), she was passionately married to his idea that the man was faking his condition and that the mind was strong enough to make new memories, despite Leonard’s own internal logic being flawed.
Catherine would’ve no doubt been aware of Leonard’s job and his position regarding Sammy if he were a real man, such that when fate/karma dealt Leonard a condition where he genuinely had no lasting memory his wife was immediately manipulated into thinking that he had to be faking and that his mind could go back to normal, just like Sammy’s condition was all thought to be an act. Quite symbolically, even in the past Leonard is the architect of his own future misery as the confidence he had in his ability to call out bluffs made his wife unable to think for herself when he was being genuine in his ailment. And in the end, Leonard’s biggest bluffs don’t come from his transparent interactions with those around him, they come in how he both consciously and unconsciously plays himself and tricks his mind into delusions, along with anyone foolish enough to trust him.
What Catherine was ultimately disconnected from was the nature of mental damage and the effect it can have, a viewpoint that perfectly fits the taboo about mental disorders that continues to remain in our society to this day. We view physical injuries as serious and worthy of consideration for care and (for insurance companies) compensation, because the wounds are visible to us and impossible to hide. But when we hear concepts like Alzheimer’s, depression or Leonard’s form of amnesia, we are puzzled because what is causing the individual to suffer isn’t apparent on the surface. How can someone truly be harmed by something that isn’t physical? Why can’t a person with Alzheimer’s or amnesia just remember already? Why can’t a depressed person snap out of it and smile?
Catherine Shelby shares these misinformed impressions on mental health and doesn’t understand how they can be just as debilitating as any physical injury, something even Leonard seemed to have been skeptical about before his accident. If Sammy is the man he is projecting his own suffering onto, one could argue that Leonard wouldn’t believe his own plight or mental condition if he were on the outside looking in. If we can take his cries of fraudulence regarding Sammy, who takes his place in his distorted memories, as genuine, Leonard would inherently be a skeptic in the same way his wife was, unwilling to place serious scientific weight on the idea that the human mind can’t bounce back from trauma.
If Leonard was once a devout skeptic of the mentally distraught, then it was only the experience of walking in the shoes of a person suffering from a mental condition that finally revealed to him a truth that he could ironically never forget. As he tells the new faces he meets, “You don’t believe someone with this condition,” the very words that are the karma he has received through his accident. Because of this change, Leonard represents one extreme of empathy in the film, where a man who propagated a misconception about a condition he didn’t understand could only confront how wrong he was to misperceive it by facing a tragedy that gave him a similar plight.
Running parallel to the extreme experience of Leonard’s discovery is the equally tragic extreme that Catherine faces to understand her husband’s condition. She shares what could’ve been Leonard’s past misconception about mental health and can’t for the life of her understand why he can’t just remember again and go back to who she fell in love with, a whole man with a working mind. Through Leonard’s projection on Sammy to de-personalize his past frustration and guilt, we see how he became exasperated and sorrowful when Catherine got frustrated with his inability to remember even when she had him hide his food and not even hunger made the memory of the nutrients’ locations come back into his head.
The extreme that Catherine ultimately chooses to pursue to understand her suffering husband is the injection of insulin. If Leonard is faking the condition like a real or imagined Sammy, he’ll realize that he is giving her enough injections to overdose her and stop, finally coming clean and allowing their relationship to go back to normal. Catherine is biased towards this viewpoint, as she doesn’t believe that the Leonard she knew is lost forever. If Leonard isn’t faking his amnesia and his memory truly is broken, however, Catherine will die from the numerous injections, a result she may have wanted in the end. She could’ve felt guilt from what she put Leonard through and for how she didn’t trust in the reality of his condition, thinking he was lying to her, and sought a permanent punishment for herself. But beyond that, if Leonard’s condition wasn’t a performance it meant that he would never be the same and that feeling of grief and loss for the man she loved might have made Catherine decide that she didn’t want to be alive anymore. Either way, Catherine’s motivations and the action she takes in risking a form of suicide, is the extreme that she takes parallel to Leonard’s own extreme of compassion. Neither of them could understand the truth about amnesia and the long-lasting consequences of mental health until they were both brought in direct contact with it in its purest form; Leonard needed to walk in those shoes and it took his wife going to her death to understand it.
The mental health subtext of Memento and the story of Sammy inevitably converge with Leonard’s crippling guilt, where it becomes clear that he has projected his own life onto that of a real Mr. Jankis, but like most of the information in this film, we can never be sure what is true and what isn’t. Leonard constantly makes the case to those around him that, like his imagined Sammy, “You don’t believe someone with this condition,” though he is referring to his blind belief in his delusion and not the disbelief of his wife, because he has brainwashed himself into believing she died the night he lost his memory to save himself the pain of grief and guilt while also trying to understand and reconcile his condition like how Catherine tried to do in her last, fatal moments.
There’s an uncovered irony in this Sammy Jankis story because Leonard is learning to deal with his condition and the pressures of not remembering from a lie he’s made up that is really a reflection of his own life. A mirror, to borrow an image. Because Leonard has no other way to explain himself to those he meets, he’s left repeating the Sammy story, digging himself deeper into believing the delusion through conditioning. The one time skeptic becomes the sufferer, assisting his skeptic wife in unknowing suicide.
Catherine just wanted her old Leonard back, and with no physical straits torturing him she became distraught that his head couldn’t just fix itself. Her act of suicide could have been a symbolic goodbye, where she felt such love for her husband that she no longer wished to live without who he used to be, in addition to the guilt she felt for treating him like a scam artist after the near murder and rape she suffered that caused the entire debacle. In the end, Nolan presents two couples as one couple, depicting them struggling with the unique experience of overcoming and understanding mental health.
The Revelation of Leonard Shelby and Unreliable Narrators
The greatest revelations in Memento only become clear in the last minutes, where we discover the truth behind so many of the character motivations we’ve seen play out that feed directly into a final assessment of Leonard Shelby, his sense (or absence) of morality and the fate of all memory to be warped or forgotten in place of guilt.
Of course the biggest bombshell of Memento is the revelation following Teddy’s implication in deceiving Leonard that all the action we’d seen play out from the very beginning of the film were fabricated strands that the Leonard of the past engineered for his future self to follow and connect. This revealing look at the man we thought we could trust is jarring, and soon his overall ethics can be viewed in a new light.
Leonard’s morality in the last moments of the film amounts to the most masterful sequence of the piece, because it’s the first time where he is openly honest with not just himself, but the viewer as well. At this time the concept of a memento returns to have its definition become warped by Leonard’s own memories: he’s holding on to remnants of his past, but can’t allow himself or anyone else to understand the truth of them for how it would endangers his unrelenting mission. Like the eye witness claims he pokes holes in at the story of the film, Leonard fudges his facts and has lied to himself in so many lost instances that what he first had to design as lies feel as crystal clear genuine as anything. When a memento of his past no longer serves his narrative, he changes the memento’s meaning or burns it entirely, no longer willing to accept it for its captured truth.
Leonard’s misguided struggle is inherently human, and speaks to his very flawed yet interesting character. He has such faith in his “system” of facts in the form of tattoos that he doesn’t even seem to suspect that, in another time, he could strategically plant elements in such a way as to fabricate a result for himself down the line. For the entire duration of the film Leonard isn’t following raw data, active police reports or fresh clues, he’s tracing the map he himself sketched right back to Teddy, making himself as big a pawn as he was made by Burt, Natalie and the crooked cop. A puppet, with his own hand up his ass.
It becomes difficult to know where to stand in regards to Leonard’s soul as the story concludes: where does he fall on a range from savable to damned? On one hand his story since the trauma to his head has been that of a tool, a man who was too loose lipped about his condition and invited wolves to come in packs to use him for their own needs. In that way, he can earn some sympathy for receiving uninvited advances. The worst of which is Teddy’s touch, the man who placed him on this spree of murder in the first place, the events that led from Leonard transitioning from a loving and protective man to a lost and delusional vigilante who placed too much value in his own unconsciously flawed memories of what he wanted to see, and not what was. On the other hand, Leonard must take some blame of his own because, despite not being in full control of his actions in his search for John G., his lack of honesty with himself and his inability to know when he’s lied to himself underscores the failure of his character.
One of the most melancholic aspects of Memento is the unifying idea that tied Teddy, Catherine and Leonard together, the belief that the human mind could spring back from damage and heal itself. Catherine, if Teddy is to be believed, died because she was invested in testing if Leonard’s mind really was far gone from the man she knew, and Teddy was ripped up with anger and regret when, contrary to his beliefs at the time, Leonard’s killing of one of the men responsible for his wife’s attack didn’t snap his brain back to normal. Leonard seems to be under Teddy’s same delusion, as revealed in the final dialogue they share as the film closes. If Leonard killed John G., he confides, his mind would just know it. He has such belief in himself to know the unknowable, and his lack of understanding of the frailty of the human mind even after his constant conditioning with the story of Sammy Jankis is tragic. Each character in the film holds on to a poisonous faith, and it’s that same faith in the mind that drives Leonard to consciously and blindly kill in the name of finding John G.
In the end, that’s been Leonard’s whole story: making things up or acting in a way that doesn’t really serve the truth, but the comfortable notions of happiness and satisfaction that he desires. The killer has to be out there and when he kills him it will matter, so on he’ll search. He couldn’t have killed innocent people who weren’t the true killer of his wife, so he’ll burn the pictures that prove him wrong. He can’t be held accountable for his wife’s death when she didn’t believe him, so he’ll concoct a story that she was killed in the bathroom to wipe out the truth that he helped her overdose on insulin. He struggles with the guilt of his actions, so he will craft a story about Sammy Jankis, projecting his life onto a fable that is as sweet as it is tragic, implying that he’s just as innocent and good as Sammy as he does so.
In orchestrating these mental gymnastics of sabotage, fudging and deceit, Leonard leaves breadcrumbs for his future self to prolong a purposeful sense of identity in his search for John G, a man he knows is mythic. Most unfortunate is the fact that the Leonard we meet in reverse during the main section of the film is unaware of the past lies he has told himself to go after and how he’s built up a castle of sand over time, literally and figuratively becoming his greatest enemy.
The ultimate question of the film, and of Leonard’s character, opens the film and the ending presents the first leg in the journey that leads to the fateful moment: can a deluded man come out of delusion and face honesty? Unknown to the viewer, the movie begins with the same decision that ends it; with Teddy dead in front of him, the man he has strategically set up as the real John G., will Leonard be able to trick himself into believing that his mission is over? Will he finally get that “I did it” tattoo that he appears to see as a dream-like vision while driving off at the end of the film, the visual metaphor he yearns for; his work done and his wife avenged beside him in an impossible fantasy?
The choice Leonard makes, to strategically order himself in the future to kill Teddy and break the hold the man has had on him, shows that the character has an understanding of how he’s been misled, but by the time that he collides with Natalie, Dodd and finally Teddy as the movie starts, the memory he had of what really went on and the ultimate truth about him and his wife is lost, mentally putting him back to where he was at before Teddy’s revelatory confession near the end. Leonard’s mood and motivation in killing Teddy is unchanged from the viscous and lost man who killed Jimmy in the same way, showing us that nothing will change and that our protagonist is as lost to his mind as ever with only another body to throw onto a pile of untold others. The lack of difference the endless killing makes in Leonard’s life and to his mental state and overall sense of happiness is a great metaphor for the hollowness of vengeance and revenge as a whole. Would he-could he-learn and make a change without all the truth that could turn him back on a straight path?
Nolan does a lot of teasing at the end of Memento to swing us either way regarding Leonard’s ultimate choice following Teddy/John G’s death, until nothing is certain during what becomes one of his strongest open endings. In the past, Leonard comes to a halt in front of a tattoo parlor, the same tattoo parlor we hope he would speed off to after killing Teddy to delude himself into the right choice for once. The ideal scenario would be his choice to get an “I did it” brand on his chest, the brand that would be inked quite tellingly close to his heart, the ultimate motivation behind his misguided mission to kill. But his final dialogue as the film closes, addressing to himself, “Where was I?” could be a verbal clue that Leonard is doomed to repeat his delusions until only his own death can stop him.
When it comes to the existential crises of Leonard’s life, both with his wife after the accident and on his later killing spree for “justice,” I don’t think it’s any secret why Nolan utilizes so much repetition in Memento, not as an accidental lack of narrative cohesion, but as a way to highlight the revolving door of Leonard’s suffering. The film spatially circles itself in repetition, with the protagonist constantly returning to the same killing ground, a nice visual metaphor for how his spree may never end.
Even a sartorial pattern emerges, where Leonard unknowingly takes upon the robes of his recently killed “John G.” It’s an obvious and oft pointed out detail that Leonard wears Jimmy’s clothes after killing him, not only giving him a symbolic new role but also painting him like a predator wearing the skins of his old prey. Like his memories of the past, Leonard is always changing in appearance and by showing the character in a different set of clothes in the black and white scenes leading up to the murder of Jimmy, Nolan could be implying that Leonard is again dressed in the clothes of the last man he mislabeled as John G, a man who could’ve been a drug crime target Teddy set up for his own needs.
As Leonard kills the fresh John G. he sheds his last skin and puts on the new one, presenting a cruel pattern. His mad devotion to a wife he may not even remember for who she really was any more has driven him to tear down another misguided person, all in the service of delusion. A choice hangs in the air, a choice we aren’t privy to. After his murder of Teddy as seen in the opening of the film, one can only hope that Leonard resists putting on the crooked cop’s clothes and avoids dooming himself to begin the same viscous cycle again through a mad dash to achieve his shattered and deluded form of happiness.
I find myself falling quite positively on the side of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, which is realized as an undeniable feat of the man’s ability to utilize images, dialogue and both the repetition and warping of those dialogues and motifs to create a deeply layered and artistic character piece that plays with a reversing and fast-forwarding structure on top of it. There’s so much going on from the pacing of the narrative to every line of dialogue revealed, because Nolan had to make sure he didn’t reveal details in reversing the action that would spoil what was to come much later. Unlike you would logically expect, as the plot moves backwards the more we know, and that’s all down to how Nolan was brilliantly able to use his protagonist’s lapse of memory to reveal stuff to us, the viewer, without him having any notice or recollection of it minutes after. We always know more than Leonard and, as he is manipulated, we become shadows of a Mrs. Jankis/Catherine Shelby or Teddy, upset that Leonard can’t snap out of it to see the traps being sprung around him.
Nolan also plays beautifully with the concept of expectation in Memento, and not only from a mystery standpoint where details are revealed gradually and minor characters are shown to be more than they say they are. More than that, he sticks us with an unsettling and unreliable narrator in the form of Leonard Shelby who is unique as the archetype because he’s an unreliable narrator who believes himself to be reliable. We get tricked because we expect to trust Leonard. How could he be wrong, a guy who makes such a prescient effort to tattoo facts onto his body so they stay with him outside the folds of time?
Memento would already be fascinating from a narrative perspective for how Nolan crafts a sequence of events that at first reveals its hero to be on a stark but quasi-noble act of revenge for his wife against the scum who did it, all before it’s revealed to be a selfish exercise in denial and comfort. What exponentially adds impact to this film is how Nolan and his team were able to weave such a beautiful and intricate series of callbacks, metaphors, hints, motifs and reversals into the story to give it even more depth and satisfaction.
Additionally, there’s the obvious and metaphorical comparisons littering Memento, like how the story of Sammy Jankis, of a man led down a wrong road by his own mind, is a commentary on Leonard’s own attempts to manipulate his mind as he leads himself to more murder. There’s even the clever fashion in which Sammy’s story is teased as being a projection of Leonard’s life, like during one of the final black and white sequences where Leonard briefly takes Sammy’s place in the imagined location of a medical ward that he actually occupied. And how about the way that the narrative drives Leonard and the fictitious Mrs. Jankis into the same position as both characters think something is there, but can’t prove it; Mrs. Jankis is assured that Sammy’s mind is still there, despite the facts not standing on her side while Leonard believes John G. is still out there, but the police don’t see the same thing and the facts don’t add as the protagonist unknowingly burns the files that would aid him in finding a culprit faster.
Furthermore, Nolan injects some interesting visuals and callbacks into the film that connect or parallel earlier or later moments. There seems to be a double focus on needles in particular, and how the utensils ultimately spur Leonard and Catherine on to danger. The insulin needle is the object of the very suicide that breaks Leonard more than the hit he takes to the head, and it’s needles that Leonard uses as makeshift inking pens to brand himself with more false missives on his hunt for a man he already killed.
A more subtle visual is the contrast of who Leonard used to be when he was married and truly happy, and who he is as a blinded killer. In his old life, with the love of his wife and the security of his home life and job, Leonard is the very image of put together; his hair is well-combed and his style and body language are professional and controlled, from his tied collar, fine grooming and very upright and fine posture. The Leonard that died with his wife then gives way to the Leonard we know best. The Leonard with disheveled hair, unshaven stubble, unaddressed cuts across his face and a rugged and manic posture that betrays his mad and paranoid condition and his secret mission to track the mythic man tattooed across his chest. The contrast of the before and after is jarring, conjuring up thoughts of, “What happened to you?” whenever the “new” Leonard appears on the screen. I can almost hear him responding, in an awkward and slightly dry fashion, “I’ve got this condition.”
When it comes to Memento’s visual callbacks that parallel others in the film, of particular brilliance is the way in which Natalie tests Leonard by spitting in his drink, her own twisted way of testing if he’s bluffing to match the more fatal extreme that Catherine underwent in order to discover the same thing. The filthy and mischievous tactic employed by Natalie speaks to that side of her character hidden behind an abandoned and abused woman, contrasted with the selflessness of Catherine’s own act, a woman who was prepared to die to discover the ultimate truth of Leonard’s condition. In Natalie’s trick Leonard is the abused, but in Catherine’s method she is the one receiving the direct consequence of it all, again the selfless act of a woman with love in her heart.
Continuing the theme, when Natalie eventually warms to Leonard following his incapacitation of Dodd, the pair share an intimate moment where they lie in bed to match Leonard and Catherine on that fateful night. As Leonard rises to go out of the bedroom following his recounting of his past trauma and how he misses Catherine, signified by the cold side of the bed that tells him she’s gone, Natalie reaches over to touch the warm side of the bed where Leonard had rested, simulating the feeling that Jimmy is still with her. It’s a beautiful moment where two lost people alone in the world try to deal with their pain. The tragedy that overwhelms every scene between Leonard and Natalie, including these tender ones, is the fact that Natalie is growing close to the man who killed Jimmy on a fluke. For once, it’s the viewer that has one up on the characters.
Nolan delivers other Natalie centric tricks in the film as the action brings us back in time. In a moment I referenced previously, at one point Teddy urges Leonard not to trust the woman, knowing her connection to Jimmy, and wishes for him to write the message with caution on the photo he took of her. We see Leonard write the warning, but in a finer hand and not in his rough upper case style, showing us that he doesn’t want his future self to believe the warning he’s jotted down, which he crosses out later. This represents one of the only times when Leonard’s system retains a sense of credibility to it, untouched by his own delusional tricks from the past to muck up the proper memory of events.
Lastly, during the shouting match between Leonard and Natalie that results in the latter getting hit to simulate a beating from Dodd that will compel the former to action, we can see Natalie preemptively hiding away all the pens in sight so that, in his moment of anger and revelation as to her motives, Leonard is left unable to write down the truth of the raw deal he’s setting himself up for as his memory refreshes on call.
When all is said and done, I think it can be agreed, no matter one’s feelings on the final product, that Memento is an interestingly packed, paced and structured piece of filmmaking. Obtuse? At times, perhaps, but I think one will be surprised how clear the picture gets once the weaving plot rests in their mind. Clever? Most definitely, and not in a pseudo-intellectual way, either; Nolan shows how adept he is with all the tools in a director’s belt, evidenced from his editing advisements, how he focuses the camera, the way in which he directs his actors and how he injects the movie with both overt and covert messages and hints to the greater picture that become fascinating to peel back and examine.
Some in the film community label Memento as a one-trick pony, a decently executed experience whose cleverness may in fact be its greatest sign of weakness. Those critical of the movie believe that it doesn’t stand up to many watches, as once the greater picture is revealed there’s little to make subsequent viewings enjoyable. You know the players, the plot and the twists, and the reversed and sometimes choppy pacing of the action may grate for viewers that want to get on with it already. Further criticism comes from the film’s structure entirely, as its reshuffling in a chronological timeline would reveal how lacking in impact it is; the stylized edits and structure of the film that pulls us backward and forward in time disguises an otherwise ordinary bit of plotting. I don’t mean to disparage any of these criticisms, as I see where the critics are coming from, and they are well backed up with clear support from what the film gives us and simply from what it is. It will find its fans, but its experimentation and bag of tricks may wear on others.
That being said, I count myself as a fan of Memento for the unique (and I mean this truly) experience of viewing it as Nolan intended it, for the jarring nature of the plotting and the richness of the characters as we learn about them backwards. So much is off about the movie, purposefully so, and that alone gives it a feeling all its own.
To say nothing of the cast would be criminal, as the minor actors and actresses make major impressions by bringing their characters to life in all their assorted gradations of morality. Guy Pearce is a cracking lead, simmering with an edge and existential fire under the seat of his pants as a man who you believe has wholly lost his handle on reality. Carrie-Anne Moss plays a perfectly metamorphic wounded bird as she shifts in mood from a helpless woman to a dangerous and ice-cold dame to get what she wants in a surprising turn of events that makes her the pronounced femme fatale of the picture. Especially resonant is Joe Pantoliano, strategically cast by Nolan for how he would make viewers instantly suspicious of his character so that, when it was revealed that Teddy may in fact have the most honest moment of the entire film, our expectations of where the character was headed collides with the reality of the truth. We can’t be entirely sure if Teddy is being truthful, but Pantoliano sells a genuine moment that you wouldn’t expect his character to lie during, as he has nothing to gain with his guilt weighing on him.
In a fairly meta moment of filmmaking, Nolan observantly (and prophetically) created a scene to place in between the unfolding action where the story pauses for a breather on Leonard and Catherine’s home life. In a simple scene, Leonard is depicted dressing for the day ahead while Catherine is laid up in bed digging into a book. A book, it turns out, she has read over and over, much to Leonard’s confusion, as he is a man who finds little utility in experiencing a story you already know so well. This moment is interesting for how it comments on Leonard’s later life, where he lives his days repeating the same routines, visiting the same circle of locations and reading the same information tattooed on his body because of his amnesia, the author of his own book of sorts that he’s always trying to write the ending to. But Nolan goes deeper to offer an even more figurative message to viewers using this moment between the pair as his meta-metaphor.
In this metaphor, Catherine is the passionate filmgoer and Leonard the rather stuffy and opinionated critic. While critics are within their rights to watch a movie once and let it rest for good, film fans are constantly rewatching the films they love, just like they read the same books over and over, because they enjoy the experience of it despite knowing how it all ends. In this way, Memento is no different from any other film, its structure aside. Nolan understood this delineation, and the mind of a film fanatic, because he himself is one, afflicted with the desire to watch a movie until every frame, line of dialogue and piece of score is committed to memory. It’s fitting that he placed a metaphor for how we enjoy storytelling time and again without the experience of it staling inside a movie that is so predicated on well-crafted repetition, when it often only appears as sloppy redundancy in the medium.
Amongst its other feats, Memento succeeds in engaging the perhaps irrational but undeniable thirst in the right film viewer to return to a story again and again, the work itself compelling them to experience a rich and beautifully laden film full of perfectly tuned depth and a cast of desperate and morally ambiguous characters that always reveals something new no matter how many times they may pop it in.
I can just e-mail you the original copy if you want.
Sorry for the delay guys, I will find a good link for La Notte today when I'm back home.
However, I did find something similar:
L' AVVENTURA (1960)
It is the first part of the unofficial trilogy of which La Notte is the second. It is also directed by the great Michelangelo Antonioni and it is equally high-regarded by film scholars as my first pick.
It also features Majesty's Gabriele Ferzetti and the lovely Monica Vitti.
Just type in the words:
Does that work for everybody interested?
So I guess the question to pose to the members here is, do you all want to take this week to watch the film, basically up to Sunday, then use the next week after that to do a spoiler discussion? Or do we want to take one week a film and go into a spoiler discussion of it after we watch it this week before moving on to the next film this Monday?
I have already written my own review of the film, which I will post next week.
This.
Anyway it's part of the same Antonioni trilogy:
1. L'Avventura
2. La Notte
3. L'Eclisse
http://www.allreadable.com/mv1474eJW9k
Maybe it can be useful in the future for those who like L'Avventura as much as I do and want to give the other two a go as well ;)