Christopher Nolan's Memento

[jack]

That was a fascinating film. Leonard is an insurance agent whose wife was killed and he was coshed in a burglary, giving him anterograde amnesia. He retains his memory from before the accident, but afterwards cannot lay down new memory. He is trying to track down his wife's killer. He manages his life with notes, important information tattooed on his body, and a series of Polaroids of people he knows, his motel, his car, etc, and trained himself to check them (he can form habits by repetition, which are in a different part of the brain).

The film is interspersed between the main time-line which progress backwards, and black-and-white flashbacks of him explaining his condition, which progress forwards, meeting in the middle at the climax.

Somehow waiting to find out what just happened grabs your attention more than waiting to find out what's going to happen. Each scene is entertaining by itself, and you slowly work out who the characters are, when they're lying to him, what they want, why they're there, etc. and how he has ended up where he is. Teddy is his friend, though his Polaroid says not to trust everything he says. Natalie is his girlfriend, but manipulates him.

The time span of the film is fairly clear and consistent. (Take notice, writers who can't write a *forward* running plot without characters suddenly acting on motivations or knowledge belonging to someone else.) However, you can spend ages analysing it and wondering how exactly true the back-story is.

Funnily enough, the idea of living moment to moment fascinates me, and I'm impressed at the way he deals with it. However, the idea of letting himself forget or invent things, changing who he is, makes me shiver, and in examining the back-story I always find myself praying his story is essentially true. I think I have a disproportionate obsession with always *knowing*, and of being myself.

I think the idea of different sorts of consciousness fascinates me. I like this film for the same reason I like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and Greg Egan books, and books about aliens with radically different intelligence.

Comments

[razornet.livejournal.com]

Might I persuade you to put this behind a cut as you've give away the central grabbing point of the movie? It's meant to take a bit to sink in.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Well, I thought it didn't matter, but I will err on the side of letting people choose. I have cut the middle section, but I'm not sure which you mean though -- did you mean the time-line, or the fact of his amnesia and the killer?

[razornet.livejournal.com]

Bit of both. to be honest the film was presented to me with no spoilers at all. I took me some time to figure out that is was working in two different time lines.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Me too. I missed the first minute, and got both, but took a while to decide which direction they were going in. But for myself, I don't think I would have lost anything by knowing that.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Great film. The website has some interesting backstory.

[http://users.livejournal.com/vitriol_/]

I loved the film. Just to check, have you read Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep and/or A Deepness in the Sky? They feature extremely good and unusual aliens whose understandable personalities are made alien by their strange physiologies.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes! It wasn't too long ago someone introduced me to it, but it's one of my favourites now.