Memento, by Christopher Nolan: analysis and interpretation of the film

Memento is the second film by director Christopher Nolan, released in 2000. It is based on the story Memento Mori written by his brother Jonathan.

This film by the British director, known among film lovers as "the film that was shot backwards", has been one of the most praised and criticized of his filmography, as it represents a puzzle complex psychological to solve.

Summary of the movie

Leonard is a former insurance researcher who suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him from generating new memories and storing them in his memory. The only thing he remembers is the rape and murder of his wife, for which he wishes to take revenge and kill the murderer.

Faced with the inability to make decisions, due to the malfunction of his memory, he decides to tattoo himself on his he corps all the clues he deems necessary to find the killer, a technique he shares with the use of a camera Polaroid with which he takes photographs, on the back of which he makes annotations that help him gather information.

In this suggestive context, the characters of Teddy and Natalie appear. For one thing, Teddy is a corrupt cop trying to help Leonard with his investigation.

On the other hand, Natalie, Leonard's supposed friend who misrepresents the information for her own benefit and uses Leonard to get rid of Dood, since the latter is a drug dealer who will try to kill her to get revenge on her boyfriend Jimmy, also a drug dealer, who ran her operations at the bar where Natalie worked as waitress.

Parallel to this story, in relation to Leonard's past, a subplot appears that recounts the event of Sammy Jankis and his wife. When the protagonist was an insurance investigator he inspected the case of Sammy, who suffered from amnesia at cause of an accident, and he went to the insurance company with his wife to be able to collect the money from the policy.

At that time Leonard considered that his problem was more psychological than physical and, in this way, he denied them the collection since the insurance did not cover mental illnesses.

As a result of the decision, Sammy's wife, a diabetic, asks her husband to administer three doses of insulin, knowing that Sammy would not remember what happened afterward. The woman enters a state of brain death and Sammy is admitted to a clinic for the mentally ill.

Finally both stories converge because Teddy implies, in his version of events, that Sammy's story is actually Leonard's own life: he would have been the true cause of the death of his wife, but he would have decided to erase that event from his memory and invent a parallel story that would lead him to an infinite spiral of revenge.

Film analysis

East film noir Modern presents a complex and experimental script in which the importance lies in the way of telling the story, rather than the story itself. Because, if there is something interesting in this film, it is the structure, which serves Nolan in an almost strategic way to awaken different emotions in the audience.

The narrative game that is put at the service of the viewer leads to the obligatory approach to the following question: what are they telling us? Question that remains latent in our heads during much of the viewing of the film.

For his part, the director plays masterfully with the suspense, a narrative resource nothing new. To do this, it provides only a part of the information, leaving everything else to the service of the imagination.

However, suspense is not only the only narrative element with which the director challenges us, but also, it is committed to two fundamental components in the cinematographic narrative.

On the one hand, fixed internal targeting predominates in almost the entire story, that is, almost all the information we know is through the eyes of the main character. This particular way of telling the story inevitably leads the viewer to experience a "empathic transexistence" with the character, facing even the same perception problems as Leonard.

On the other hand, time is also a challenge thanks to the use of an inverted temporal structure, a fact that reinforces the viewer's empathy with the character. But how do we understand this way of telling the story?

Narrative lines: aesthetics and structure

The traditional way to understand a story is based on the Aristotelian version: setting, middle and ending. Although it is not entirely correct if we try to understand Memento.

Therefore, it is necessary to find the four narrative lines in which the film is divided, taking into account the role that play aesthetic elements and montage to achieve as a result that a simple story is apparently complex.

Narrative Frontline: Leonard's Story

The first narrative line, the main one, tells the story of Leonard and is aesthetically presented in color. For this plot Nolan uses an inverted mount, that is, backwards.

In it, he makes use mainly of medium and subjective shots. The camera constantly pursues the protagonist, which reinforces the interior point of view because, as viewers, we know the data at the same time as the protagonist, without any priority, we do not know more or less than him.

Second narrative line: in black and white

On the other hand, conjugated in parallel to the previous one, another narrative line appears presented in black and white. Unlike the previous one, this one describes a linear assembly.

It also provides information through a dialogue in voice-over Narrated by the protagonist and through a telephone conversation that offers details about his illness, his previous life and the system of notes that allows him to link the events.

Secondary narrative lines

These main narrative lines are followed by two others that, although secondary, are fundamental in the development of the film: the story of Sammy and that of the murder of Leonard's wife. This information is provided with the help of the technique of flashback Y flashfoward.

Narrative structure: montage and color

From the first sequence, the director establishes a kind of code with the viewer that is sustained through montage and the aesthetics of color.

On one side, a detailed shot of a hand holding a photograph of a body lying on the ground. Little by little, the image disappears when the photograph is shaken, defying the logical order.

From that moment, the images go backwards: the paper returns to the camera, the gun in Leonard's hand and the bullet that comes out of Teddy's body returns to its origin. By visualizing this, we understand that the film is built in reverse order, it begins at the end.

On the other hand, aesthetics offers us information thanks to the alternation of color, to give us understand the reverse montage, and of black and white, which affirms the linear structure of events.

This linear organization of the discourse will remain from the beginning to the midpoint of the story, at which point the color sequences and the black and white sequences merge.

Coinciding with the scene in which Leonard meets the alleged criminal who ended the life of his wife and who, finally, triggers the outcome with the death of Teddy.

The mind, the true protagonist

If at the end of the film they asked us who is the protagonist of Memento without any doubt we would answer that it is Leonard. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. There is an idea that, although covert, does not stop manifesting itself: the human mind. And he does it fundamentally through dialogue. These are some of the phrases that make us reflect on the fragility of the human mind:

Memory can change the shape of a room and change the color of a car. Memories are distorting, they are an interpretation, not a record, and they don't matter if you have the facts.

I have to believe in a world outside of my own mind. I have to believe that my actions have meaning... even when I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world is still there.

You are not looking for the truth. You make your own truth.

The alternation between notes, tattoos and snapshots allow us to understand the delicacy with which our memory works.

The raw chaos in the film as in our head when he brings us memories and mixes them in a matter of seconds.

The use of a complex narrative juxtaposition produces that the spectator empathizes with the protagonist and, with this, generates the Need to reflect on the importance of memory and what our life would be like without being able to store new memories.

The film leads us as viewers in a primary direction by reminding us that "we all need memories to know who we are."

Trailer for Memento

About Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan is a London-based director, screenwriter and producer. He began his cinematographic journey from a young age, when he was filming with a Super 8 camera of his father. He later specialized in English literature. He recorded his first short film Tarantula in 1989 and then in 1995, he shot Theft. It wasn't until 1998 that he made his first feature film, Following, recorded and financed by himself, far removed from commercial cinema.

With the arrival of the new century, he rises to fame with the premiere of Memento, his second film, leaving viewers and film critics stunned by the masterful way of telling the story.

From that moment on, his career was on the rise, leaving in the history of cinema great titles that reveal the essence of Nolan: a complex proposal halfway between independent and commercial cinema with a philosophical basis and even transcendental.

In his filmography as director we can mention the following titles:

• Following (1998)
• Memento (2000)
• insomnia (2002)
• Batman Begins (2005)
• The Prestige (2006)
• The dark knight (2008)
• Inception (2010)
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
• Interstellar (2014)
• Dunkirk (2017)

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