Memento: A Crisis of Narrative

Selected excerpts from the video:

Identity can't be constructed from receipts, Polaroids, and tattoos. It's something only memory can provide; a messy fluid story about himself. We all need mirors to remind ourselves who we are, and I'm no different.

In 1936 philosopher Walter Benjamine wrote "The Storyteller", an essay lamenting the decline of traditional storytelling in a world increasingly oriented around information. He claims that information is directly opposed to narrative. The purpose ofinformation is to make the world transparent, whereas stories derive a lot of their power from withholding explanation and embracing distortions, just like memory. See the goal of a narrative is never to give a 100% objective recreation of an event, that would be in Leonard's words, a record. What distinguishes narrative for Benjamin is that it requires forgetting, and leaving out a great deal. A narrative selects, edits, and interprets events, shaping them to convey meaning and evoke emotion. It's the same process as memory, per Benjamin, the gapless repetition of past experiences is is not a narrative, but a report or record.

To be able to narrate, or remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal. So, as a personal example, when I was in high school everybody was obsessed with the show 24. It branded itself as a realtime narrative. Each season was 24 episodes. Each episode a full hour of continuous time, with the whole season covering a single day. A "record" you could say. There was this lame joke you'd always hear where people would say, "Well, if it's really a full day, why doesn't anyone ever use the bathroom?" Silly I know, but it nevertheless points to the fact that even stories that market themselves as seamless records of reality still, by virtue of being stories, have gaps. Because it's through editing reality that we create narrative.

For Benjamin, it's actually a lack of explanatory power that makes narrative work. Take Hitchcock for example. The master of suspense was able to keep us on the edge of our seats because he was a pro at depriving us of information, "How much does the detective know? What's happening in the apartment across the street? What's the deal with Norman's mother?", Etc. Obfuscation, a lack of information, gives us drive. It's in the "not knowing" that we find momentum, meaning, and purpose.

In the same vein, self-understanding is not a fixed State, like a piece of information. It's a constantly shifting Horizon, something we Chase rather than possess. It's a narrative process, not a record. And although Leonard doesn't realize it, he acts out his Reliance on memory and narrative for identity through the story of Sammy Jenkis. "Remember, Sammy Jenkis?", a story he constantly tells everyone because it helps him understand his situation. "Sammy's story helps me understand my own situation."

The black and white scenes in which Leonard recounts the story of Sammy worked in a few ways. First, he's literally telling a story to Teddy over the phone. The act of telling a story, a story of narrating and remembering, is a way of anchoring himself. At one point Leonard claims that notes weren't enough for Sammy, but they are for him. "Sammy wrote himself endless amounts of notes but he get mixed up. I have a more graceful solution to the memory problem I'm disciplined and organized." The great irony is that notes aren't enough for Leonard either, and him telling the story of Sammy Jenkis over and over is like his wife reading the book over and over. it's proof that he needs narrative to know himself.

Second, the story is a series of disjointed out of order scenes. A lot is left out because the moments are selected to frame Leonard's condition in a way that empowers him to cope. It's storytelling at its purest.

Third, and most importantly, the story of Sammy Jenkis is revealed to be a fabrication. At the end, or beginning, Teddy reveals that Sammy didn't have anterograde Amnesia, he was a fraud. Leonard was his claims investigator, but Sammy didn't have a diabetic wife, Leonard did. "Sammy's wife wasn't diabetic, you sure?" Leonard told Teddy that Sammy's wife couldn't take the uncertainty of Sammy's condition, so she gave him a final test, to administer her insulin shots over, and over, until she overdosed. In reality, that happened to Leonard. His wife survived the attack and the challenge of dealing with Leonard's condition, led her to end it. But that's the thing about memory, it's not a perfect record. We don't simply recall events. We reconstruct them, shape them, mold them into narratives that serve our psychological needs. The story of Sammy Jenkis isn't just a coping mechanism. It's the vehicle through which Leonard creates a version of himself.

Conversely, the movie shows how facts alone are insufficient for achieving those same ends. On an obvious level, the facts are easily manipulated too. Everyone in Leonard's life is constantly taking advantage of him. Teddy sicks him on drug dealers so he can pocket their payloads. Natalie manipulates him into to taking out an abusive boyfriend. Even the hotel clerk double charges him because he can.

But beyond that, the movie quite cleverly points at how poor information is at building identity when Leonard essentially becomes another guy. After he kills Natalie's boyfriend Jimmy, Leonard finds himself wearing his clothes, driving his car, and finding notes meant for him in his pockets. This deception is, of course, validated by the so-called facts. "My car." "This is your car?" "Oh, you're in a playful mood."

While Leonard started the film fixated on information, he eventually realizes that his twisted salvation is the destruction of information. He burns the evidence of the real John G's death, and discovers that the redacted police files he obsessed over, were redacted by him. Like a story or memory that's full of gaps and obfuscations to maintain narrative tension, Leonard deliberately deprives himself of information so he can, like his wife and her book, go on a romantic Quest over and over again. "A romantic Quest that you wouldn't end, even if I wasn't in the picture."

Now Leonard isn't alone in this delusion of thinking we're looking for facts when we're really looking for interpretations. Consider Nostalgia. We're all addicted to this stuff. "Hey, hey, remember Ghostbusters?" "Oh I 'member."

The allure of nostalgia lies in the belief that we're remembering the fact that things were better back in the day. But, on some level, we know the real appeal comes from how we've shaped the Narrative, how we've idealized the past by keeping all the good parts, and
forgetting the bad.

Or consider the corporate world's obsession with data. Pretty much every Big Business these days is driven by Big Data Solutions. But no matter how sophisticated these graphs that go up and to the right may seem, they can only ever show correlations. It requires interpretation to map the data points into some kind of narrative, to actually comprehend. Despite the veneer of objective reality, Big Data remains firmly in the domain of theory.

And I suppose that's what this channel is about. The intersection of the stories that reflect our world, and the theorists who try to explain it. Whether you're theorizing about the world, or creating films that reflect the experience of living in it, you're doing something similar. Selecting events, framing them, and casting them into something intelligible and meaningful. As Leonard says, "We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are." I'm no different. But information can't be that mirror, only a story can. So Leonard destroys the facts, and obscures the record, to elevate reality to a story.

The Tragedy of Memento is that Leonard isn't actually looking for the answer of who killed his wife, he figured that out. He's looking for the Enchantment of reality that only narrative can provide. And without the ability to remember, to self-narrate, he must live out the only story available to him, the one of the vengeful husband, over and over again.

When once asked what people will dream of once everything becomes visible, philosopher Paul Verilio said, "We'll dream of being blind." Because as Leonard shows us, without the mystery, without the narrative gaps, life loses its enchantment. At the end of the film, Leonard restates one of his most iconic lines, "I have to believe that when my eyes are closed the world's still there." Just because he doesn't remember it, doesn't mean his actions didn't happen. But even a pristine record of those actions can't be used to develop an identity. So while the world might not disappear when you metaphorically close your eyes, you just might.