Memento

"[The United States] is the only culture in the history of the world where the expression 'your history' is an insult. And we're all ceaselessly enjoined to develop more amnesia."

—Christopher Hitchens, C-SPAN (discussing The Trial of Henry Kissinger)

"'Do you suffer from long-term memory loss?'
'I can't remember.'"

—Chumbawamba, "Memory"

of Memento's compelling narrative is the analogy between the psychological denial of personal iniquity and the falsification of American imperial history. What Nolan (working from his brother Jonathon's short story "Memento Mori") sets out to exploreis the peculiarity of protagonist Leonard Shelby's inability to form new memories. And to depict Leonard's deliberate decisions to lie about his own past. Leonard is doomed to repeat those lies over and over until he himself believes them, to destroy evidence that would undermine those lies, and to fabricate new memories that further mask the truth. By so doing, Leonard not only justifies to himself an indefinitely extended series of new murders, but ensures that those crimes too will fall into the memory hole.

Leonard is among the wickedest characters we've seen in recent narrative cinema (a medium which standardly invites audiences to identify with seriously flawed or damaged heroes). Film treatment of villainy as great as Leonard's is usually reserved for documentaries, since the lives of historically distinguished war criminals—like Cambodia's Pol Pot, Chile's Augusto Pinochet, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein—are rarely seen as fit material for narrative features.

The originality of Memento thus lies less in its selection of an unusual premise about memory loss (Tom Twyker's Winter Sleepers explored the same premise only five years ago) than in its allegorization of that phenomenon. For the revelation that Leonard Shelby is a moral monster—far more sinning than sinned against—is not what makes Memento the most important anti-imperial message film since Eyes Wide Shut.

Previous discussion of Memento has focused on the use of reverse narration to unwrap Leonard Shelby, the protagonist's, misguided pursuit of his wife Catherine's murderer. Much of this discussion, however numbingly modest in its critical ambition, has at least offered up well-deserved admiration for British director Christopher Nolan's neo-noir plotting. Some writers, notably Andy Klein in the June 28 issue of Salon, have even managed to straighten out large parts of the narrative's development. This was nice of them. But such efforts are a waste of time unless they lead beyond mere plot explication. Just answering the question "What happened?" hardly gets us started in understanding a work of art as frighteningly shrewd and disruptive as Memento.

Memento exposes not merely the moral depravity of a single individual (or of the petty criminals who befriend him for their own sordid purposes), but the defining pathology of contemporary American elite culture at large. Leonard Shelby's inability to acquire new memories after being clubbed on the head is not only a character-deforming individual catastrophe for him. It is also a carefully elaborated metaphor for the obstruction of historical memory about the criminal exercise of American global power—a criminality which, just like Leonard's perverse and ultimately absurdist mission of retaliation, is deliberately masked as a pursuit of justice.

In Memento, considerable subtlety and elaborate metaphor operate side-by-side to expose and indict the methods of memory control and historical falsification by which even major American war criminals (like Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell) are permitted to maintain positions of prestige and power in our depraved political culture.

As Leonard tells anyone who'll listen, his wife was raped and murdered. His last new memories are of intervening in that assault, shooting and killing one assailant but then being clubbed on the head by the second—and, finally, watching his wife die. The second assailant escapes without a trace, and the police investigating the case remain unconvinced that there was any such person. Despite, or perhaps because of, his damaged memory, Leonard persists in his own investigation. He has acquired the police file on the case, and, despite the many missing pages and numerous blacked-out sections, remains convinced that there is a "John G." whom he must find and execute in the name of revenge.

This is a familiar but compelling premise: a weirdly handicapped American Everyman is denied the support or understanding of the legal and judicial system and struggles against long odds to prove his version of the truth about a terrible crime, and to secure "justice" for it.

Leonard's efforts are aided by a pair of characters who seem to offer him crucial help, but instead only perpetuate his vain pursuit of reconciliation with his history. Teddy, a corrupt former cop, and the only official investigator of the assault case who believed Leonard's version might be correct, now makes it his business to set Leonard loose on a series of cash-heavy local narcotics dealers, each a perceived incarnation of John G. Leonard's search for justice is further thwarted and perverted by his involvement with Natalie, a barmaid who convinces Leonard she will help him because she too "has lost someone." We learn right along with Leonard that Natalie has no qualms about using him.

The tendency to identify with a hero who, like Leonard Shelby, has suffered a serious loss—especially one who takes dangerous risks to recover what's been lost—remains one of the most powerful dynamics in all of film-viewing. (Nolan's chilling dissection of this tendency yields the most notable contribution since David Lynch's Lost Highway to the recent revival of film noir.) Leonard's vulnerability to Teddy's greedy conniving and Natalie's fearsome duplicity further ratchets up our sympathy for him.

But even this is trumped by the credit we're inclined to give Leonard for his own efforts to surmount his "condition." He has learned to rely on a series of reminders (brilliantly conceived and only gradually deconstructed). He preserves key items from his married life to remind him of his dead wife. He struggles to glean information from the massive police file on his wife's assault (although its missing pages and blacked-out passages make it more mystifying than enlightening to him). He takes Polaroid snapshots of persons, objects, and places, then stores them in the six distinct pockets of his suit jacket, and in pre-marked locations on a folding wall-map. On the back of each Polaroid image, Leonard makes brief notes to remind him of the most germane information he's acquired. And, most strikingly of all, Leonard tattoos his body with the most important "facts" he has discovered both about John G. and about his own psyche. Leonard's proud of the elaborate "system," which he is convinced allows him to pursue justice with impartiality, relying on recorded evidence rather than the "interpretation" involved in mere memory or the contradictions of eyewitness testimony.

All of this—the background of Leonard's pursuit of John G, the mixed motives of his associates, the rigors of his effort to compensate for his condition—is revealed to us with elegant precision. Memento is so ingeniously constructed that there's hardly a two-minute interval within which new and critical information does not come to our attention. This remains the case right up to the film's final sequence, at which point we are able to reach some surprising but firm conclusions, that bring into question virtually every aspect of Leonard's character, his relationship to reality, and our relationship to same.

But these are all mere matters of plot. By comparison to Memento's more central ambitions, they're obvious, even trivial. For Memento is a work of art—by definition, an object that calls for prolonged examination, contemplation, and critical interrogation. It is only when we move from plot to the implications of plot for the character of the hero that we secure a set of stunning and far more disturbing conclusions laid out below—conclusions which open up for us the historical significance of Leonard Shelby's wayward pursuit of justice.

We learn that Leonard has been steadily destroying all the evidence which reminds him of the reality of his marriage. He's staged a long series of reenactments which temporarily bring back the memories he wishes completely to obliterate, and at one point offers the single most important confession in this film: "I must have destroyed a truckload of your things." In other words, Memento reveals to us that Leonard is in the process of systematically obliterating the memories of his marital history.

Leonard has also regularly and deliberately falsified critical elements of his system of "reminders" about the assault on his wife. It's Leonard himself who discarded nearly a dozen full pages from the police file and censored other large sections. He has also burned and destroyed Polaroids which threatened to remind him of facts he preferred to forget (most crucially, that he long ago found and killed the true John G). Leonard also knowingly deceives himself into false beliefs by exploiting his notes to himself. In precisely this way, by writing "Don't believe his lies" on the back of a Polaroid of Teddy, Leonard sets in motion a chain of beliefs that will lead him to mistake Teddy for John G.—although he knows at the moment he decides to write these words that Teddy was not involved in the assault on his wife.

Leonard has furthermore insured that he will remain in perpetual pursuit of further phantom-John G's by leaving blank a space on his chest previously reserved for reminding him that he has secured his revenge.

Through an intense regimen of deliberate repetitions, Leonard has thus conditioned himself to believe in a version of his past life which is substantially untrue. And, as Teddy points out to Leonard at a crucial moment in the film, Leonard's stories have gotten better every time Leonard tells them. The same goes for the re-engineered history of Leonard's marriage. And Leonard has gotten good enough at the game of deliberate self-deception that he can now even improvise.

Memento's Leonard Shelby has learned to use his condition as an opportunity for evasion of moral responsibility. He blames John G. for "taking away [his] life." Leonard blames the assault for destroying his ability to make new memories—when in fact he exploits the resulting condition to rewrite his old ones. In short, the deformations of Leonard's moral character—greed and ambition, a tendency to quick and often murderous violence, even a certain bloodthirstiness—have embraced his condition and turned him into a spectacularly effective and uncontrollable serial killer precisely because he has found the means not even to have to live with the memory of what he is. "You're not a killer," Teddy tells Leonard ironically, before pinching his cheeks and grinning "That's why you're so good at it!"

Leonard's penchant for denial, deception—and damaging assaults on the lives of innocent others—long predate the assault which damaged his brain. Before Catherine was raped, Leonard worked for an insurance company investigating potentially fraudulent claims. His job, in other words, was to secure the company grounds for declining to pay. So, at one point in the film, when Leonard indignantly declares to Natalie, "What do you think I am? I'm not gonna kill someone for money," we should remember that Leonard, in fact, made it his career to do just that.

Evaluating the significance of a film hero's experience in the context of his choice of profession is no more arbitrary than doing so for a real human being. Filmmakers don't need to signal any explicit interest in order to make this part of their film's story. But director Nolan has taken care throughout Memento to offer such signals anyway. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that Leonard is actively re-writing his past so that it will conform to his preference for seeing himself as a victim, innocent and virtuous. He likewise prefers thinking of his former profession as a kind of public service, an analogue of honest police work or medical investigation.

Leonard was, it seems reasonable to assert, a bad man prior to the assault on his wife, a man content to use his ingenuity and ambition to cheat clients out of settlements they deserved. And Leonard remains a bad man throughout Memento, one who finds his life's meaning in the debased morality of eye-for-an-eye revenge, who actively works to transform himself into a less-and-less responsible moral being, and whose illusions so fully replace any accurate memory of the past that he can go on killing with less and less remorse or self-understanding. Leonard transforms himself into a vengeance machine, perpetually in search of new victims upon whom to wreak vengeance for murder that never occurred. He has invented revenge as a blanket motive, and he uses it to meet the need for meaning in his life. Projecting his guilt holds Leonard Shelby together, but at the cost of a mounting pile of corpses.

One of the last carefully constructed lies we hear Leonard tell is, "I'm not a killer—but right now I need to be."

And this, Nolan seems to be asserting with his cinematic exploration, is precisely the lie with which American imperial violence is committed again and again around the globe. Leonard's lie is followed by a description of its motive: "Do I lie to make myself happy? In your case, Teddy, I will." The pursuit of a selfish happiness pulls the trigger of American empire, however persistently the latter's ideological organs call it a pursuit of justice. The confusion of movie critics who failed to recognize that Leonard Shelby successfully conditions himself to acquire new long-term memories (and to rid himself of others) has surely been suborned by the degree to which this dynamic operates among the gatekeepers of American historical memory. For every honest and competent historian, there are literally hundreds of media and "think tank" propagandists.

For every honest historian of the War in Indochina for example, from Gabriel Kolko to Michael Parenti to Noam Chomsky, who remind us that the U.S. undertook an illegal and immoral invasion of that region which resulted in many millions of deaths followed by decades of environmental devastation and extreme poverty, there is a veritable clot of PR flacks and pundits busy repeating for money the lie that the U.S. nobly sacrificed itself in Vietnam to preserve a fragile democracy from communist aggression.

"I'm not a killer," Leonard Shelby insists, displaying all the irritation of the perpetually-clean-handed G.I. who just did what he had to do. American politicians are almost universally committed to exempting American war criminals from prosecution under the system of international laws and policies, courts, and tribunals which are good enough for prosecuting war criminals throughout the rest of the world. The current administration's refusal to sign onto the International War Crimes Tribunal unless there's a guarantee that there will be a flat and permanent exemption for U.S. soldiers and statesmen has the full support of the Senate—Democrats and Republicans alike.

The recent spectacle of former colleagues (and major media outlets) rallying around ex-Senator and confessed mass-murderer Bob Kerry represents a deeply established norm of the American commitment to evading justice. (Did anyone in the mainstream media during the latest presidential primaries "balance" details of candidate John McCain's individual suffering while he was a POW in Hanoi with details of the suffering he caused to Vietnamese civilians as a bomber pilot?)

This sort of example has everything to do with the falsification of American historical memory. It takes a massive and well-funded ideological apparatus to keep in place myths about the U.S. role in Indochina and around the world. Artists who bother to make any of this their business typically draw the fierce reproach and condemnation of well-rewarded American mainstream "intellectuals." (Consider the dismay which greeted the great Italian playwright Dario Fo's winning of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997.) It's therefore even more to the credit of filmmaker Christopher Nolan to have layered Memento with signs that he's buying none of these apologetics.

Where before have we seen official files looking like those Leonard possesses—blacked out beyond recognition? The answer's obvious. They look like government documents which—despite having been liberated through the Freedom of Information Act—have been so massively censored as to render them nearly useless.

Memento is a serious message film. The intricacies of plotting through which we learn the true significance of Leonard's inability to form new memories is an especially bloody red herring. As a film, Memento offers a powerfully developed metaphor for the social and political consequences of living in a culture where powerful ideological institutions devote huge resources to discouraging residents from acquiring or retaining any significant historical "mementos."

In the most common usage, the word "memento" denotes a keepsake, something that recalls a significant person or experience—a snapshot, a handwritten note, a thoughtful trinket. The sentimental value of such souvenirs of our small human intimacies famously outweighs their market value. There's dark humor in choosing a term that has such positive connotations to title a film so full of revealed horrors about the falsification of memory. Leonard, as we discover, keeps mementos of his wife Catherine only in aid of his effort to destroy unwanted memories about her.

But the full resonance of the title comes when we remember that it is a partial echo of the full title of Jonathon Nolan's story. "Memento Mori" is a Latin phrase meaning "Remember death," used by art historians for a category of paintings in which skulls, short-lived candle-flames, and cut flowers encourage contemplation of life's fragility and brevity. The term has been picked up by poets as well for lyrics that encourage the same self-consciousness, among them Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," in which the monumental statue of a murderous tyrant lies toppled and sand-swept.

Christopher Nolan's Memento thus deals only implicitly with tyrants, past or present, and the efforts of tyrants, vain or successful, to suppress the record of the deaths they've caused. With elegance and economy, Nolan cut the term "Mori" from his film's title; in essence, removing death from us.

But not us from it. In this way, too, Memento invites us to contemplate the eternal costs of participating in our culture's mad race toward imperial oblivion and disgrace.

Reviewed by Rob Content
10.01.01