Memento traps the audience by pairing a backward-moving timeline with a main character who suffers from short-term memory loss.

Spoiler warning: This report is a spoiler for Christopher Nolan’s 2001 movie named “Memento”.

By using reverse chronology, a restricted point of view, fragmented editing, misleading visual and verbal clues, and recurring patterns of memory loss, Christopher Nolan places the audience in Leonard Shelby's unreliable point of view. Instead of just illustrating Leonard's confusion, the film makes the viewers share that same reliance on incomplete evidence and is therefore forced to consider whether the truth can be discovered or is intentionally constructed.

Firstly, Memento is a psychological neo-noir thriller directed by Christopher Nolan where the main character Leonard Shelby suffers from anterograde amnesia and cannot form new long-term memories. This film follows his attempt to identify and punish his wife's supposed killer and assaultman.

And how does Memento demonstrate this? 

Well, Memento is told in a reverse chronological order with two separate timelines. One of the timelines, which is portrayed in color, is moving back in time. Meanwhile the other timeline which is portrayed in black and white is moving forward, both narratives meet in the middle of revealing the murder of a substance dealer called Jimmy Grant. The scenes often start abruptly mid-action without context, mimicking Leonard’s inability to retain how he arrived in a specific room or situation and how they represent bursts of the limited time-frame he can remember in between each moment he experiences in real time. This presents a complex idea of dramatic irony because we know what he doesn’t: We know his information is wrong and is written through interpretation of his surroundings and experiences rather than facts. He constantly fools himself and we see him do it over and over again. We find out in the middle of the movie that Natalie is dangerous and we thought we knew Teddy was dangerous, but he ended up being a manipulative cop rather than the John G that killed and assaulted Leonard's wife. This fact comes as a shock and causes us to realise that we don’t truly know everything, and that we are in a similar situation to Leonard. By using developed dramatic irony, Nolan makes everyone feel confused together. The audience and Leonard both have to figure out what is happening without knowing the story of why things happened the way they did, while we also slowly find out the series of events while Leonard doesn’t.

Guy Pearce plays Leonard with rigid physical tension, darting eyes, and sudden confusion, physically showing his constant panic and distrust of strangers. Supporting characters like Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) use manipulative body language and shifting proximity to exploit Leonard's condition. The acting and body language in the show keeps us guessing what is going to happen with anxiety and anticipation, unsure of what happens next. This is a natural feeling in humans where we feel nervous and jittery when we do not know what is going to happen in the future, the actors play into this and manipulate the viewers as well as each other.

Additionally, sound effects like gunshots, ticking clocks, and footsteps are amplified to reflect Leonard's hyper-focused, paranoid mental state. Sometimes there will be a musical score which is ambient, repetitive, and eerie, building suspense, tension, and anxiety in the viewer as they hear it. It is creepy and heightens our senses, making us hyper-aware that we don’t know what is truly happening, just snippets of what could be the truth, but without seeing how the events were led here we cannot completely see the full picture and understand what the story is. 

Major themes are explored in Memento, increasing the depth and clarity of the genre it represents. Three of the key themes include memory,identity and reality, love and grief, as well as morality and responsibility:

Memory, identity and reality is portrayed in the fact that Leonard cannot produce short-term memories, having to rely on tattoos, notes, and polaroids. It is incredibly unreliable and it shifts his perception of reality, which in the end causes himself to go after the man who helped him kill the real John G. His identity is merged with the identity of Sammy, causing him to believe him and Sammy are completely different people when in truth Leonard killed his wife by giving her too many insulin shots. He is constantly manipulated by the people around him like Natalie and Teddy because of his inability to produce short-term memories, being guided to kill people and do the dirty work because he doesn’t remember a thing. 

Love and grief is depicted in how dedicated Leonard is to “finding the man who killed and assaulted his wife”, tattooing facts on himself and writing down information to aid him to find the man. He is driven by overwhelming grief that he won’t be able to touch his wife again, having to wake up with her side of the bed being cold. Since he cannot recall that he in fact is the one who killed his wife, his love for her and grief after her death manifests into anger, resentment, and a lust for vengeance as he plans to find the “culprit” and kill him. 

Morality and responsibility is explored in Memento through the sick and twisted events happening to Leonard, where he is constantly tricked into thinking people are helping him find his wife when in reality they are manipulating him. The audience has to be faced with the moral dilemma that although he doesn’t remember anything and this is wrong, he killed a man and continued to kill men under the guise of “finding John G”. He killed his wife. But the lingering fact he was led by his lack of memory is a standing point in this movie, emphasizing that he cannot take responsibility ever for his actions. He thinks he is the good guy, that he is finding the man that killed his wife when in reality he himself gave her an overdose. 

Ultimately, the movie puts the audience inside Leonard's unreliable point of view. The way the story is told matches how his memory is broken. The film starts at the end and goes backward. This makes it hard to see what caused what. The story is told from Leonard's side so we never get the real truth and the way the scenes are cut up makes us piece things together from pieces that don't make sense on their own. Photos, notes, tattoos and things people say seem to give us answers but each of these could be wrong. They might be what Leonard wants to believe, not what is really true. By the end we see that Leonard is not just looking for the truth. He might be making up his truth to keep his identity and keep going. The movie's main success is that it leaves us unsure. Like Leonard we are trying to decide if the story of reality we built is something we want to believe.

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