"Memento"

The film, “Memento”, directed by Christopher Nolan is an interesting movie that challenges the way we, the viewer, perceive what we are seeing. The director calls it a “Psychologic Thriller” and it is about a character named Lenny who cant make new memories and is looking for revenge on the man who killed his wife.

Lenny tattoos himself and uses notes to help him remember who people are, where he is living, and even what car he drives. He can have a whole conversation with a person and even have known them for years before his accident occurred yet still have no memory of them. This handicap makes him an easy target to be swayed in whatever direction a person would want him to be influenced. We follow Lenny as he tries to figure out who caused him to lose his short-term memory and who killed his wife as he meets the people who say they are there to help him.

The film is highly subjective to what the protagonist knows and thinks. As the audience we are put in the head of Lenny as he works through his memory handicap to try and figure out fact from fiction. Having so much weight put just on what Lenny thinks makes me as a viewer question his credibility, why would we trust someone who does not remember what he had done just minutes before? Perhaps he has a distorted point of view, but I think that is one of the questions the writer would like the audience to ask. My favorite part of the film is that you do not know who to trust, it is like playing a game of “Clue” without being able to ask any questions. The reliability of this narrator adds to the mystery of the storyline.

Another question the writer might want the audience to ask is what time frame does this story take place in? It might seem like the story has a non-linear structure, but it is in fact linear just in reverse. Each scene depends on the one before it and after for the story to fall into place and make sense. Sequence of events might seem confused, but they each play off of the other to tell the story in the opposite direction.