Memento
Memento is a 2000 American neo-noir psychological thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Memento was considered "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the US Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017, the first narrative feature of the 2000s to be honored (Variety).
In the film, Guy Pearce stars as a man, Leonard, who has anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories) as the result of an “event” and has short-term memory loss approximately every fifteen minutes. The movie is centered around his search to find the man who supposedly attacked him and killed his wife. The last thing that Leonard remembers is the attack, and consequently uses a system of polaroid photos and tattoos to track information that he cannot remember.
Lenny wakes up every morning and has to discover his identity all over again, starting from the event. He uses the story of a man, Sammy Jankis, who also had anterograde amnesia to remind himself of his condition and explain it to people. “Remember Sammy Jankis” is tattooed on the back of his hand in script.
Leonard’s other tattoos are in the forms of “facts”: things he has decided to believe are certain about the man that raped and killed his wife, who he names “John G.” In the story's chronology, Leonard amasses a bunch of information about John G. from various sources, and ends up getting his license plate number tattooed on his body. In the meantime, Lenny meets with a contact, Teddy, who tells Lenny he is a cop. Lenny’s main interactions end up being with a woman, Natalie, that agrees to help him in return for running a man named Dodd out of time, and Teddy. Eventually, Natalie provides Leonard with the driver's license for a John Edward Gammell, Teddy's full name. Confirming Leonard's information on "John G" and his warnings, Leonard drives Teddy to an abandoned building, leading to the opening, where he shoots him.
This is one of the first scenes of the movie. As the movie progresses, in the form of flashbacks, the events leading up to this are revealed. This includes Leonard swapping clothes with Jimmy, wondering if he has met Jimmy before, and Teddy arriving. When Teddy arrives, in further attempts to have Leonard not kill him, tells Leonard that he helped him kill the real attacker a year ago, and he has been using Leonard ever since. Teddy points out that since the name "John G" is common, Leonard will cyclically forget and begin again and that even Teddy himself has a "John G" name. Further, Teddy claims that Sammy's story (in which Sammy accidentally killed his own wife) is Leonard's own story.
After hearing Teddy confess all of this, Leonard burns the photograph of dead Jimmy and delivers a monologue saying that he is willing to lie to himself in order to get justice against anyone who has wronged him. He therefore targets Teddy by ordering a tattoo of Teddy's license plate number and writing a note to himself that Teddy is not to be trusted so that he will mistake Teddy for John G. and kill him. Leonard drives off in Jimmy's car, confident that, despite this lie, he will retain enough awareness of the world to know that his actions have consequences.
Quite disturbingly, Teddy, before his death, reveals to the viewer the possibility that Leonard manipulated his own memory to escape guilt, and furthermore, ends up manipulating his own memory to give his life purpose and ends up killing Teddy as a result of this.
This makes us wonder if Leonard can in fact be held responsible for his actions. John Locke for example thinks that if a person cannot remember the action that they did when they were 18 at age 60, they should not be punished for it. Locke would say that Leonard does not have moral culpability for an action he can’t remember. Why is this? Locke argued that it is the continuity of our consciousness that gives us this sense; my awareness that I am still the same person I was yesterday is secured by my ability to construct a continuous story about myself from yesterday to today. But this is just what Leonard is unable to do.
Is it as Locke would argue? Is Leonard a completely different person, or can we understand this through a different philosophical approach. David Hume argued that memory creates the concept of a unified, enduring self. Hume compares the viewing of a film to the creation of identity. When we watch a film, our imagination associates the different sensory impressions and makes them into continuous action on the screen. Each frame is really distinct, but we piece together a story line anyway. In the same way, Hume argues that we don't directly perceive an enduring self, but our memories generate the feeling of having an identity. Is identity then as Hume would say just the sum of sensory experiences and memories? Does Leonard not have one true self that has vanished?
I believe that most of us would be inclined to come to a similar conclusion as Locke: in the absence of consciousness about his memories, Leonard is a different person, he has a different self. However, our readiness to accept this might not necessarily be for Locke’s reasons. What makes Memento such a powerful movie is not necessarily just the philosophical arguments that it brings up, but the feeling of discomfort it provokes in an audience. We as humans find it very disconcerting that our memories could be manipulated so easily and that the manipulation of them, either by external forces or ourselves, could lead oneself to becoming a completely different person with different motivations and concerns.
One of the exchanges in the film is as follows:
Teddy: “You do not know who you are.”
Leonard: “I’m Leonard Shelby. I’m from San Francisco.”
Teddy: That’s who you were.
Are we just the sum of our malleable memories?
Works Cited:
"'Titanic,' 'The Goonies,' 'Field of Dreams,' 'Memento' Added to National Film Registry". Variety. December 13, 2017. Retrieved December 13, 2017.
