“Memory can change the shape of a room, it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record. And they're irrelevant if you have the facts.”
— Leonard Shelby, Memento (2000)
A Review on Reality in Memento
During my first viewing of this film, my interpretation of events was always the least dependent on Leonard’s. I was distrustful of him not only due to his condition but also the build-up of contradicting clarifications, the most important of them delivered from Teddy. While Leonard’s narration constantly felt puzzled and scattered, Teddy’s grand finale explanation provided context that seemingly put those disjointed puzzle pieces together. If what Teddy said was true, the subtle scene in which Sammy Jenkins transitions into Leonard while sitting in the hospital can be understood as a head-nod to Leonard’s forgotten identity as Sammy himself. It can then be theorized that Leonard’s role in his wife’s death was unbearable for him, so he leverages his own memory disability to go on a quest for false vengeance rather than accept the truth. His memory tools, from Polaroids to tattoos, are not actually helping him remember much; they actually help him misremember if anything, because they portray the web of lies he’s spun to continue searching for his wife’s killer. In the game of manipulation, Leonard is his own biggest victim. He knows he will later refer to these mementos with no recall of anything, which enables him to write down provocative clues like “Don’t trust him” to continue the unending pursuit for someone who does not exist. When micro-narratives of the movie are interpreted together in a more chronological order, Teddy’s telling of events seems to add up much more sensibly and all we see Leonard for is an homicidal, unreliable narrator driven by a guilty conscience.
My first watch solely validated Teddy’s version of the truth, but after a few more watches, I started to learn to appreciate this film outside of the truth. Unlike Leonard, I’m not extremely desperate to find who did what, instead just fascinated by Nolan’s genius in crafting a complicated narrative steeped in unreliability. I think of Inception’s ending, where the last shot does not clearly disclose whether the dream totem continues to spin. It’s an open-ended ending to reinforce the film’s theme that ideas exist in our minds with great power. With Memento, even Teddy’s character uses Leonard’s amnesia for his own criminal gain and is also not free from manipulative tendencies, so there’s plenty of room for manipulation to carry the audience away from the truth. In this instance, one theory can make more sense than the other, but I think it’s art because there’s opportunities for multiple.
Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir puzzle film, much like many of the director’s works, implores the audience to pay close attention to the screen in order to understand the calculus of the story. I remember when I first tried watching it I had already tucked myself into bed, certainly not the best conditions to fully unpack this movie’s stupefying mystery. Its brilliance is using unconventional forms of narrative storytelling, from scattered sequences that are out of order (and edited either in color or black & white for time-framing) to the limited point of a view of an unreliable narrator found in Leonard Shelby, a vengeful man seeking revenge for his wife’s murder but impaired by his anterograde amnesia. It’s impossible for him to remember any recent events, so he surrounds himself with physical artifacts that can help him remember — Polaroids, tattoos, handwritten notes. Because events are told non-chronologically in the film, the audience experiences alongside Leonard this obstructed field of understanding, left to puzzle over what actually happened before the scene in front of us just as he is.
The first scene of the movie is Leonard shooting someone named Teddy in a frenzy after seeing a Polaroid that says, “Don’t believe his lies he is the one kill him". We know nothing else at this point, almost biased toward this version of the truth. As the movie progresses, we learn that Teddy is a cop who appears to be half-crooked and half-confidant, using Leonard as a hitman for his own criminal gain but also the person who is most often there with him, attempting to rationalize him out of an irrational manhunt. By the end, we find out from Teddy that Leonard’s version of what happened is far from the truth, that the cause of his wife’s death is in fact his own doing. Teddy’s explanation of events indicated that Leonard forgot he gave her too much insulin and injected a lethal amount, which is parallel to a story that Leonard retraces throughout the film to an old client of his named Sammy Jenkins. Sammy also has anterograde amnesia and is, according to Teddy, one of Leonard’s many invented fictions to cope with the guilt.