Memento

Lennie has a problem. He can't remember. Well not really, in fact his condition, so he tells us many times, is, that he can't create new memories. Not entirely without memory, he has long term memory. These memories constitute a knowledge of past events, or of the pastness of past events. However, even this memory for Lennie, seems to be impaired - fixated, stuck, like the replaying of cracked record, around the events that caused his disablement. These events are traumatic and violent - the rape and murder of his wife by two home intruders, and his own bashing and subsequent severe head injury. These facts, or so we think them, can only be ascertained from delving backwards into the shattered fragments of the pathological status of Lennie's mind and memory.

Christopher Nolan's film Memento explores not only the paradoxical nature of memory and its relation to forgetting, but also the uses and abuses to which memory can be put. Just as memory is necessarily backward looking and often fragmentary, the film is screened in alternating time frames in point and counterpoint, between present and past. The opening scene unfolds in reverse, as a polaroid picture is undeveloped and sucked back into the camera. Described by Christley as, " a film that questions both memory and empirical evidence, a film that gives us no sure answers, plays gleefully with our expectations, and toys with chronological narrative in a way that's both ingenious and perhaps a bit smug," (Jaime Christley, Memento, http://filmwritten.org/reviews/2001/memento.html 5/27/2001) it is a thriller in the genre of film noir, which unbalances the viewers perceptions of how and why certain events occur. Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator who suffers from a rare memory disorder, anteriorgrade amnesia which prevents him from forming new memories. In fact he has trouble remembering events which happened only ten minutes prior. Yet, Shelby is determined to avenge his wife's murder, or so we are given to believe. Given the state of this memory how does he remember even where he is going?

Leonard Shelby and his polaroid camera are inseparable. Like an artificial leg or arm, Leonard uses his polaroid as an aid to memory. Each event is meticulously recorded on the "memory" of the camera. The time taken for each new image, or each new "memory" to develop is crucial, because Leonard is in fact forgetting, and he must write down the name of the person, and why he took the photograph. "Teddie- Don't trust his lies". And then there is his body which is also the site for memory. Multiple tattoos record the events of his life - "T.G murdered and raped my wife". In most instances he has inscribed these on his own body with the aid of the ink from his biro. Sometimes he uses a professional, but at all times he must run a bizarre race against the clock, and against the processes of forgetting. Both the polaroids, and his own body are kept as a reminder, or souvenir of a person, or of an event. Each object - his body or his polaroids - in its own way is a Memento. These multiple Mementos then constitute his memory. In fact Leonard, paradoxically, no longer has to remember, because these Mementos carry the burden of his memory.

What then do we mean when we speak of memory? In his essay "Memory and Forgetting" Paul Ricoeur writes, "To reflect upon the ethics of memory is not in the first instance an action, but a kind of knowledge like perception, imagination, and understanding. Memory constitutes a knowledge of past events, or of the pastness of past events." Yet for Leonard, there is no knowledge like understanding of events that form his past, only a bizarre collection of Mementos, hollow memories of violent and shocking crimes in which he has played an active. Leonard's memory has become all action, because there is no reflective quality to his memory, and all his Mementos are inscribed on film or on his body to facilitate revenge. These Mementos then constitute

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