Would you watch Memento in order? Perhaps you already have. Some might say the only value in the film is that of solving a complex puzzle. I don't agree this is the case, but what would be wrong with it being so? Solving a puzzle at least has some value. Anyway, there are a few questions that occur to me: where has the tattoo gone on his chest that says 'I've done it'? What does he do after he's killed Teddy? The tattoo should be there, and should stop all of the events of the film from happening. And once he's killed Teddy, surely everything is finished? He has Teddy's numberplate tattooed on his leg. There can be no other 'John G'. He can only assume that he's 'done it'. However, it seems that the first question answers the second one, and so on. He will forever search for his wife's killer. He will reinterpret what he sees in the way he wants to see it, as long as it perpetuates his quest.
The whole thing has profound psychological undertones: his drive which will never be fulfilled; his search for his wife's killer, which is in fact himself, and he can never find himself. He believes in some certainties, but even these aren't certain. Memories shape us, and are shaped by us. The whole film is motivated by what happens in the last scene with Teddy, when Lenny burns the photos and writes 'Don't believe his lies'. One last question: why is the film in reverse order? It doesn't, theoretically, matter. What is fascinating, and perhaps worth bearing in mind, is our ability to make sense of a story (and other ones such as Pulp Fiction) that happens out of order.
1 comment:
I can't remember about the tattoo because I saw it a long time ago, but I thought I remembered it not getting finished.
It always seemed to me that Memento was the one film in the genre of mixed up time (in which things like Pinter's Birthday Party also sit) which actually does make sense. All of the others do it as a stylistic device to make you understand the story as you say.
But in Memento it has an added layer which makes it truely brilliant. The main character's life restarts every five minutes. Every time something distracts him it's like he's just woken up. And he can't ever remember his past. He has to work it out from the clues around him. By having the film backwards we too are experiencing the same thing, we too are experiencing the world afresh each time just like the character.
It has always seemed to me to be one of the few movies to successfully bring you within the mind of the character as a first person novel would. In a novel of this story, if there was one, the "I" character would be able to hide things that he wasn't aware that he was misunderstanding. In film this is is much harder to do, but this device achieves it extremely well.
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