Memento Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Memento

Consider: you have no short term memory. You take Polaroid photos, make notes, even tattoo information on your body. You are alone, knowing only that you must avenge the death of a loved one, but you cannot even remember… cannot even remember….

That is the hell that writer/director Christopher Nolen traps Leonard (Guy Pearce) and his audience in with Memento, an atypical film that may be the most typical film ever made—in the same sense in which I describe Marlene Dietrich as the most typical person of her century. I, too, am going to leave Leonard trapped for a few paragraphs.

Early on, filmmakers discovered something very intriguing about audiences. We want to fill in the gaps. Imagine a scene of an elderly man walking up to a window and looking out. Then, we see another scene, a little girl, perhaps three or four, dropping a ball and chasing after it. Then, we see the old man again, and a smile fills his face. Nice, grandfatherly old gent, isn’t he?

Now, let’s redo these scenes, keeping the views of the old man, but substituting for the child a young woman, in her early twenties, sunbathing topless. Dirty old lecher! The old man did not change, but our perception of him did. That simple fact is the starting point for a lot of artistic, philosophical, even ethical considerations. Now, the old man and the child or young woman could have been photographed hundreds of miles apart, years apart, but we fill in the gaps of the narrative of this montage, as such a sequence of shots is called.

Montage is the most basic element of film. We don’t actually see the little girl dropping and chasing the ball. We see a series of still photos. Girl with ball… ball falling… falling lower… hitting the pavement… But, our eyes deceive us, and we perceive this series of photos as a fluid movement.

What this has to do with poor Leonard is that Nolan creates a stunning plot device to let us feel the disorientation that Leonard experiences. We begin with the end of the story. Someone is killed. I’m not going to say whom, although this film is not so much a matter of suspense as of counter-suspense, unraveling rather than setting up spirals of dialectic. Why was this person killed? What did the other person kill? We don’t know any more than Leonard does, and so, we come to feel for and identify with him as he suffers a similarly baffling malady. You don’t know what’s going on? Well, buddy, this is just a movie. Imagine poor Leonard, living this nightmare. Actually, we are one up on Leonard, because he doesn’t know what comes before or after, and we at least know the resolution.

That’s the point of this montage. We see a murder. Then, as it fits into the scheme of things, we come to understand a murder if understanding is possible. Some people take the concept of montage as the starting point for total moral relativism, but Leonard’s fractured world is held together by a strong moral commitment, even though it is a commitment to a terrible course of action, to murder.

This is definitely one of those not-for-everyone films. (Of course, other than Shrek, I can’t think of a film this year that I really think is for everyone.) It is one of those films that separates people who truly love films, who want films that they can make love to, gradually unfolding new levels of pleasure and fascination, in contrast to those folks who just want a series of quickies between bites of popcorn… folks for whom an admonition to keep their feet dry (and not stuck to the grimy floors of the megaplex) and their hearts full of noble thoughts is all too appropriate.