Narrative Analysis - Memento

Narrative Analysis

Memento      -      Directed by Christopher Nolan

Memento, Christopher Nolan's second directorial piece, is a psychological thriller for any person that loves having a mystery to solve. And in this case, the film itself is probably the mystery. It was one of the greatest films of its year, and in my opinion, should and would have won best editing and best director if it was not released in the same Oscar set as The Matrix. The script was based off of a pitch that Jonathan Nolan gave to Christopher and was later turned into a novel and is to this day know as one of ‘the most innovative scripts of all time’.

The film follows the story of Leonard Shelby, a man from San Francisco, and the journey he embarks on to find out who raped and murdered his wife. His journey has many problems along the way, the main being that due to the past trauma he suffered at the hands of his wife's killer, he is an amnesiac that is incapable of creating new memories. Basically, every five minutes, he forgets what he has done, but he still has all of his memories from before the injury. To try and make himself remember everything that he figures out, he writes notes and takes polaroid photographs of people he meets and writes at the bottom what he thinks of them or what they have done. The main polaroid that frequently visits our screens during the film is the one that pictures the character Teddy (John G) with the words 'Don't believe his lies' scrawled across the bottom of the photo. This photo plays a major part in the outcome of the film. He also tattoos the most important information onto his body. Like the polaroid, the main tattoo he has is across his chest and it reads ‘John G raped and murdered my wife’.

After learning about these tattoos, especially the one mentioned above, we can apply PROPPS theory of narrative to determine what sort of a character we believe Leonard to be, even if he may not be in the end. Based on what we saw up until Leonard showed Natalie his tattoos, we believe that Leonard will be the hero of PROPPS theory. I think this is because he is seen to be avenging his wife after she has been killed in the most degrading and upsetting way possible ; It is understandable that he would want to kill the murderer. By the time the film has finished however, we are left thinking that Leonard could be placed under the category of villain due to the ending that we are left with, which I will talk more about later.

The formally mentioned Natalie is a woman that at first, we like as she is shown to be helping Leonard discover who John G is. This makes us believe that she is PROPPS helper as she is providing Leonard with all of the information into discovering who John G really is. But at the story develops, we learn that she doesn’t like Leonard as he has in fact murdered her ex-boyfriend, Jimmy, after Teddy claims that he (Jimmy) was in fact the real John G. If we apply PROPPS theory again, we then could say that she was a false hero ; It seemed as if she was helping Leonard but really, she was just using him and his condition for her own gain. This theory can be backed up later in the film as we discover that Natalie did use his condition by making him run a man named Dodd out of town, whether Leonard killed him or just beat him up badly before he left, we don’t quite know.

The other main character is Teddy. He is the character that is presented to us in the shadiest way possible. We automatically want to place him as the villain because within the first twenty minutes of the film, we see him get shot dead twice (the same circumstance but at different parts of the film) by the man that we assume to be good, Leonard, and we assume that he is good because he is the main character (protagonist) that we follow throughout the film. This makes us not want to trust Teddy because Leonard doesn’t trust him either. This can be backed up by the polaroid that we continuously see of Teddy that reads ‘Don’t believe his lies’. And as the film develops, we begin to stop trusting more and more of the characters, possibly because they don’t even trust each other.

As I’ve been writing, I’ve realised that the film hasn’t been explained really well. So, Memento is a film that has multiple timelines going on that we switch between, following an anachronic modular narrative. This means that we see flashbacks and flashforwards that also repeat some scenes directly. The only difference is that there is a clear distinction between the chronological scenes and the flashbacks/flashforwards. The film splits between scenes in black and white, which happen chronologically, and scenes in colour, which are ordered in reverse. I found the film hard to follow at first but once I was around 20 minutes in, I soon got the hang of it. Nolan used the repeating of scenes to keep the viewer concentrated and made them more able to understand the timeline. The film doesn’t quite follow Todorov’s theory of narrative because it switches between the past and present and the film is physically shown partially in reverse. Andy Klein did however come up with a very simple way to get the chronologicity correct. He numbered the black and white scenes 1 to 22 and labelled the coloured scenes A to V. We start with the opening credits being shown backwards (including the shooting) and then we jump straight in with black and white scene number 1. Then coloured scene V is shown, then black and white 2, coloured U, black and white 3, coloured T and so on until we reached 22A. It is a very backwards narrative that will forever stand out as one of the most interesting narratives along with award winning films like Pulp Fiction and Groundhog Day, and even more recent films like Edge of Tomorrow.

Klein and Propp weren’t the only theorists that could be applied to this film, Claude Levi-Strauss also came up with the theory of binary opposition. This is where there are two terms that have opposite meanings : Men and women, adults and children, good and bad, and many more. There are, however, a few that can be applied to this film and one that I thought of was the idea of a few versus many. In my opinion, this is the idea of the few being Leonard and the many being all of his thoughts and feelings. Leonard is just one man that is already having to carry on living after loosing his wife, and then to have this condition on top of it all just piles on the pressure. This one man is up against all of these thoughts that different people, including himself, are throwing at him and he doesn’t know how to deal with it all, so he channels these feeling into a mission that is all he can focus on.

Another two forces that go against each other are good and evil. According to Leonard he is the good trying to defeat the evil that is not only his wife’s killer but is also the man that left him in this state. And even though the end of the film is left wide open to the fact that Leonard could have in fact been the person to kill his wife, we can see that he may well be in a state of angry denial in which he is trying to supress all of his own memories of in fact killing his wife. So, because of the ending, I was left not knowing what to feel towards Leonard because he could have been the bad or the good. In his own mind he needed someone to enact his vengeance upon because he knew that he couldn’t hurt himself anymore than he already had been.

By the end of the film we have taken the time to realise that we have all made assumptions based on Leonard thoughts. He is the only person that we see a point of view from, so we automatically want to trust him as we’ve gotten to know him as the ‘good guy’. But we have also realised that the confusing film order puts us into the mindset of Leonard and how his condition must make him feel. Neurologists have reviewed the film saying that is one of if not the most accurate and real representation of what anterograde amnesia is like for people that suffer with it in real life, therefore making it an understandable and stand out film of the 21^st century.

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