Memento: How Christopher Nolan Made the Audience Lose Its Memory
A Polaroid photograph develops backwards.
The image fades towards blankness. A spent cartridge jumps into a gun. A bullet returns from a wall. A dead man gets up.
Within its opening minutes, Memento has explained the rules without explaining very much at all.
Christopher Nolan's 2000 neo-noir is routinely described as a film told backwards. That is accurate in roughly the same way that describing a watch as some cogs in a box is accurate. The real achievement of the Memento nonlinear narrative is more elaborate: Nolan found a cinematic structure that makes the audience experience something resembling his protagonist's inability to form new memories.
We are not simply watching Leonard Shelby become confused.
We keep becoming confused with him.
Two Stories Moving Towards Each Other
Leonard, played by Guy Pearce, is hunting the man he believes murdered his wife. A head injury has left him unable to reliably form new memories, so he builds an external memory system from Polaroids, handwritten notes and tattoos.
The film builds another system around him.
Its colour sequences move backwards through the chronology. Each new scene ends roughly where the previous colour scene began. We therefore enter events without knowing what immediately preceded them — precisely the information Leonard is missing.
Between them, black-and-white sequences move conventionally forward. Leonard sits in a motel room, talks on the telephone and recounts the story of Sammy Jankis, another man associated with memory loss.
Eventually the two strands meet.
A useful visualisation of this structure looks less like a conventional timeline than something an unusually organised detective might pin to a wall.
The Trick Is Not Knowing What Happened Five Minutes Ago
Plenty of films rearranged chronology before Memento. Flashbacks are almost as old as cinema, and fractured storytelling was hardly revolutionary by 2000.
Nolan's trick was to make structure perform character.
When a colour sequence begins, Leonard may be arguing with somebody, running from somebody or trusting somebody. We do not yet know why. By travelling backwards, the film removes the contextual information viewers normally use to judge behaviour.
A person who appears helpful may have manipulated Leonard moments earlier. An apparent enemy may have been assisting him. Every new scene forces us to reassess the one we have already watched.
Leonard compensates by trusting evidence.
Unfortunately, evidence is only reliable if the person creating it is reliable.
That is where Memento stops being an ingenious editing exercise and becomes something nastier.
Hellwood's Memento T-Shirt celebrates a film in which the detective, the evidence and the unreliable narrator all occupy the same damaged head.
Before Batman, There Was a Motel Room
Memento was only Nolan's second feature after the tiny black-and-white London thriller Following. Criterion has noted that the earlier film already displayed his fascination with fragmented chronology.
But Memento transformed that interest into a calling card.
The film reached the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Sundance now describes it as the breakthrough that propelled Nolan from independent filmmaking towards the blockbusters that followed.
The Academy subsequently nominated it for both Original Screenplay — crediting Christopher Nolan's screenplay and Jonathan Nolan's story — and Dody Dorn's film editing.
That second nomination seems particularly appropriate. Remove the structure and Memento becomes a very different film.
The Neo-Noir Detective Who Cannot Trust Himself
Beneath the chronology sits an unusually pure piece of noir.
There is a murder investigation, cheap motel rooms, compromised characters, shifting loyalties and a protagonist convinced that enough clues will eventually reveal the truth.
The difference is that Leonard's greatest investigative weakness is not a corrupt policeman or missing witness. It is Leonard.
His photographs look objective. His tattoos appear permanent. His notes seem authoritative. Yet every one of them depends upon decisions made by an earlier version of himself whom the current Leonard can no longer interrogate.
That makes Memento a particularly elegant companion to the films in Hellwood's Crime & Thriller Movie T-Shirts and Dark Noir Moods collection: it takes the detective story's faith in evidence and quietly poisons it.
Remembering Memento
The backwards construction is what everybody remembers about Memento, but clever chronology alone would not have kept the film alive.
The structure works because it turns a psychological problem into an audience experience.
We continually arrive too late to understand what is happening and just early enough to discover why our previous assumptions were wrong.
Leonard writes everything down because memory cannot be trusted.
Memento leaves us with the more disturbing possibility that writing it down may not help.
Browse Hellwood's wider Film T-Shirts collection for more films that found unusual ways to rearrange what audiences thought cinema was supposed to do.
MEMENTO T-SHIRT
A Hellwood tribute to Christopher Nolan's fractured neo-noir — a murder mystery built from Polaroids, unreliable evidence and a timeline determined to leave the audience several steps behind.