Is Manipulation Right?

In Momento, it’s revealed that Teddy manipulates Lenny in order to kill people that he was looking into for cases. However, in order to exact revenge for being used, Lenny manipulates himself into believing that Teddy is the killer, knowing that he would have no other memory of the event. The manipulations continue to be added on, as Nathalie also takes advantage of Lenny’s condition and gets him to go after someone who will kill her. All of them revolve around Lenny’s inability to create and store new long term memories, which forces him to rely on pictures and notes that he makes for himself. Each of them is aware of the power that these objects have over him. The manipulations of using these things against Lenny make up the plot of the movie.

So were any of them justified?

With Teddy, we find that he is a corrupted cop who uses Teddy’s ability to kill and then forget afterwards as a way to scam money and give himself an alibi. However, as he does mention at the end of the movie, part of the reason for why he does it is because Lenny appears to have no other reason to live beyond punishing John G.s over and over. It can be argued that Teddy has been directing Lenny to people who deserve to die because they are big time criminals. His manipulations keeps Lenny “happy” as it continues to give Lenny a goal in life as well as small opportunities for Lenny to feel extremely happy when his “revenge” is extracted. Teddy’s main personality trait of greed, however, prevents us from saying that his manipulations were justified. He had many opportunities to get Lenny professional help or, at the very least, end the killings. But he decides not to, leaving viewers with very little sympathy for him.

Nathalie is a bit harder to place. In the order of the memories that the movie presents us with, we first believe that she loves Lenny. It’s only late into the movie that we discover that she was not a love interest but rather a manipulator. Her circumstances, however, are quite different. She knows that her boyfriend/lover has suddenly disappeared, most likely died, and that her life is in danger. Nathalie understands that out of the two of them, Lenny probably stands a better chance against Dodd than she does. By manipulating Lenny into confronting Dodd, she plays the chances for both of their survival to be greater. However, she manipulates one life to be risked instead of her own without the other person’s permission or full understanding of the situation. Her manipulation, which places lives in danger that aren’t even aware of the full events, is what marks her actions as wrong.

But what about Lenny? He walked away from the scene, knowing that he’ll forget that he is a killer and that Teddy has been using him. He knew that he was angry at the moment, and that Teddy might get away with using Lenny. In order to exact retaliation that he wanted from that one moment, Lenny set himself up so that his mind would end up killing Teddy. Did he have a right to do that? Is manipulating oneself to kill someone for reason long lost okay? Unlike the other two, Lenny knows that he is putting himself at risk and he’s okay with that. He’s assuring his own happiness. But is manipulating himself really alright?

In many cases, when evaluating ourselves, we find that we can manipulate our own thoughts with perception or exaggeration. Don’t like something? Exaggerate how badly it went and eventually you’ll think it’s worse off than it actually was. If you saw things happen in a certain way, then you convince yourself that what you think happened is true.

Are we capable to manipulate ourselves into murdering? Well, that depends. Are you ready to convince yourself to go against morals that society set out and kill someone?

(Yeah, I hope not too.)

So is Lenny excused? It really depends on your point of view. He knew he was going to exact revenge during the moment and that he’ll be in a state of peace relative to him. Yet he also knows that this adds to the amount of people that he killed that weren’t his wife’s attackers. So where do the morals of manipulation lie?

Last Saturday Nite

It all started with this idea, “What if right now, at this very moment, a nuclear bomb went off and brought about the apocalypse? What would we do if we were trapped in this small room in KJ with no access to the outside world? How would we survive?”

It was Saturday night and after a fun filled day of procrastinating and doing work (mostly the former) a group of four of us decided to go on a walk through KJ to clear our minds. We stumbled upon a friend in a small study room that seemed secluded from the rest of the world. We went in to talk to her and before we knew it, we suddenly felt isolated from everyone outside of that little room. We all felt as if the world could end at that very moment and that we would be left untouched, left to deal with a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Needless to say, the conversation quickly went to that concept. My friend, Lily, asked us what we would do if we were trapped in that room. How would we get help? How would we survive without food or water? We decided to search the room to see if we would be able to get by on the supplies currently there. Someone found peanut butter crackers in a cubby and someone else had a few bananas with them. We then began discussing how we would divide up the food to help us survive as long as possible. Unfortunately, I am allergic to peanut butter. Therefore, Lily and Sabrina decided that in the event that we ran out of food they should consume me because I would be the easiest to kill (and I also would have pretty much nothing to eat so I would die the fastest anyway).

But then I presented to them my skills that would be potentially useful in the event of nuclear fallout. My many hours of playing the game Fallout 3 could finally come in handy. It was then unanimously decided that I could be extremely helpful if we were able to escape the confines of the room and therefore they decided that they probably shouldn’t kill me.

This whole time we were totally engrossed in the conversation and the idea that the apocalypse could happen at any moment seemed eerily real. It may sound silly just by reading my abbreviated account of the events, but we really felt that what we were talking about could have been the “truth.” As we learned in this class, reality is perception. Last night, our reality was transformed by our perception of the possibility of the apocalypse actually occurring.

In short, thanks to this class, Sabrina and I are prepared for impending doom.

An Inconvenient Truth

Watching Memento made me think of this phrase, and I then started to realize how this has been a recurring theme in the course. Cat’s Cradle is a perfect place to start. The dismal state of their nation was an inconvenient truth to San Lorenzans given the crashing economy, the general discord and failed attempts to salvage San Lorenzans out of their misery. In The Things They Carried, the inconvenient truth was the inability of the “happening truths,” the naked facts of O’Brien’s time served in Vietnam to convey the emotional truth of his war experience, and thus make the readers’ “stomach believe.”

The Man in the High Castle was an uncomfortable text to read too. The inconvenient truth was the very possibility of an alternative reality and the shifting notions of what’s authentic and what’s fake. Similarly, Kindred was unsettling because of the loss of linearity in time and the process of making uncomfortable discoveries about one’s roots. In Aura, Consuelo faced the inconvenient truth of losing her youth and reconciling with her inability to procreate while Felipe faced that of finding that Aura was merely an illusion. Through House of Danger, well, we ourselves started being aware of the inconvenient truth that we are constantly exposed to manipulations in our daily lives.

On that note, it seems relevant to notice that we are also exposed to several inconvenient truths in our daily lives. The phrase ‘an inconvenient truth’ itself was popularized by Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, the truth that is closing in on all inhabitants of this planet. In the various texts and movies we came across this semester, we saw the protagonists use lies, makeshift truths and illusions to reconcile with their inconvenient truths. What do we do? There are those of us who try to look for a remedy. There are campaigns being initiated and documentaries being made to hopefully find a way out. And then there are also those of us who choose not to believe it at all. If we Google ‘global warming,’ the first thing on ‘related searches’ list that comes up is the phrase ‘global warming hoax.’ There was one theory that claimed that man could maybe change the local climate, but that he’s not capable of changing the global climate as a whole, which sounds reasonable as well. It’s an ongoing debate and everyone must choose to independently prioritize the facts we have at hand. We could be like Leonard and pick the facts that give us a purpose in life. But it might as well be just an illusion of purpose. We could also be like San Lorenzans and live by harmless untruths that keep us happy. But then again not all untruths are harmless.

That being said, my biggest conclusion from the class is that everything is ultimately subject to our freewill. And the optimal use of freewill comes from being aware of our surrounding and our history and knowing that they’re all subject to manipulations.

Dear Blog

I am in the process of defending my blog grade and rereading all of my blog posts has been a trip down digital memory lane. I would like to think that my perspective hasn't been completely overturned, but a change has subtly occurred. For instance, my first blog post focused on how my sense of morality was derived from my mother's. Now, I find myself pausing and questioning the development of trust. I'm not retracting my words; I still very much believe that the majority of my ideals have been shaped by my mother, who has been the most influential person in my life thus far.

BUT why is it that I can trust her so blindly and comfortably? Why don't I try to push the boundaries of what I am familiar with? Why do I take so much for face value? Perhaps, I am internalizing Leonard and Dana's conflicts: I want to believe in the intrinsic bond and trust of kinship; I want to believe that my truths are true, that reality is reality, that life will be forever as I know it.

... and living like that would make me blissfully ignorant of what I've learned this semester from grappling with all of those mental knot and twists, a labyrinth of lies (untruths, half-truths, gradients of Truth), and don't stop me while I'm on a dramatic roll. For every "why," there seems to be another "why" waiting to be asked. It's a never-ending cycle of trying to look past another illusion.

Ironically, as Janelle has pointed out time and time again, why did I have to be taught this? Why did I lack the ability to critique my own perspective and the influences imposed on me? Why do I take the words of someone who is practically a stranger to heart? The "healthy dose of skepticism" was much more than I had expected. Instead of typical college student worries like finding a job or declaring a major, my mind was plagued by existentialism and reality. Why am I even here? Even basic questions of identity have to be reassessed. In the end, we know so little of what we think we know.

To discover myself, I'll have to do away with the misconceptions accrued over eighteen years of life.

What a terrifying thought.

It's as they say, college is all about taking risks. Who would have known that they came in the form of classes like these?

Dissection of Literature, or Torture?

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Throughout this course we have spent numerous class periods dissecting novels, stories, movies, all with one intent: to find a true purpose within it. Many times, as with the Memento discussion, we end right back where we started.

In Cat's Cradle we argued over and over again "what was the truth of the novel?" Did Vonnegut pick a side between science and religion or were they always held in a constant dynamic tension? Finally, we decided that although everything in the book was a "shameless lie", we became more aware of our own search for a true purpose and also of how "shameless lies" can portray the truth.

In Memento, no such conclusion was reached. Emphasizing Vonnegut's idea of the foolishness of humanity, we dissected every part of the movie trying to figure out what was the 'truth'. Who was actually being deceived and who was most responsible for this deception? At the end of the discussion though, once we concluded that nothing was certain, we still had no idea what to think of it. We wanted so badly to realize what the truth was, to find some angle within the movie.

Our insistent analyzing of the movie as a result of our constant search for the truth reminded me of the poem Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins. In his poem, Collins describes his desire for the reader to simply enjoy the poem and the details it presents. He wants the reader to experience it by feeling it, but instead the reader insists on dissecting it until there is nothing left. As readers we are constantly searching to determine what the text means; experiencing it is not enough. This was laughed at by Vonnegut and then disputed by Mitchell Sanders in The Things They Carried. Like Collins, they wished for the reader to experience the story rather than search for truth or morals within it. In Memento we did the same thing. We analyzed every part of the movie but we still realized we would never know what was the truth. We dissected the movie too much, as sometimes happens in literature.

Memento in Time

In our final class discussion, it seemed like we analyzed almost every piece of Memento, to the point where we realized that the more we analyzed, the less clear everything became. So, with no new ideas about Memento, I’d just like to bring up again the role of time, or lack thereof in the film. The first line of the movie is Leonard speaking about waking up in an unknown motel room saying, “perhaps you’ve been there for a week, three months,” he doesn’t really know. Although we don’t all suffer from Leonard’s condition, I think that any viewer can relate to this feeling. Sometimes when you wake up, in the brief moment between being asleep and fully awake and comprehensive lies this feeling of confusion; you don’t know where you are, how you got there, or what you should be doing. This feeling is the one that I imagine Leonard to feel at all times. Leonard feels no sense of time; therefore as viewers, we aren’t provided temporal guidelines either. The lack of explicit passage of time throughout the film allows the reader to better relate to Leonard’s experiences. As viewers, we can only guess how much time has elapsed since the previous scene, just as Leonard must guess how much time has passed since his last set of actions.

Other characters grant the only indications of the passage of time. The motel manager confesses to renting Leonard two rooms for the past week, and Teddy shows Leonard a picture of himself immediately following the murder of “John G.,” saying that it happened about a year ago. So, like Leonard, as viewers, we are left to rely solely on other characters to gain a sense of time. Whether or not we can believe these questions is a different story altogether.

Time partially dictates who we are; we define ourselves in terms of memories we may have of the past, how the past has shaped us, how we feel in the present, and personal plans for the future. Without any sense of time, identity is lost, and for the duration of the movie, the viewer has no identity but one dictated by others.

How to Avoid Driving Yourself Crazy!

After watching a movie like Memento, it can be hard to dive into the folds of the movie without drowning among the many different theories that can arise. We found this to be true in class the other day. In our discussion, ideas ranged Leonard being in a mental hospital, to him living the life we thought he lived (as an insurance investigator), and everything in between. We considered who the antagonist was; Leonard, John G (one of the many), or Natalie. We discussed the morality of the characters, right and wrong actions and a plethora of ideas that made your head spin. It truly was a schmorgesborg of everything we learned this year; from Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge to House of Danger, Memento covered it all.


So when we are at a cross roads such as this it is important to ask ourselves when enough is enough. When do we need to cut ourselves off from attempting to break down the film. When do we go past the authors intentions and begin to think to much about a novel. It is important that in order to get a clear cut (or at least trimmed down) message from the book, we can only analyze to a certain extent. This means that we must make certain aspects of our analysis, more importantly the strongest ones, concrete in the sense that they can not change. From here we can begin to formulate a safe and finalized version of what we take from this amazing story. We need to choose who we want to trust and who we don't to trust, in order to conclude who every character really is. In this process there is still room for analysis that is not concrete. We can still allow our mind and imagination wander, but boundaries are now set.

As we leave this class, and eventually this school, we must remind ourselves of the same concept. The world is full of manipulation, of illusions of choice and of truths and lies, and we must be able to handle this reality without driving ourselves crazy. We must choose which manipulations we find concrete and which we will allow to slide under the table unseen. We know that they are there but we allow ourselves to be manipulated for whatever reason. While at times this class did seem stressful in the amount of revelations made on human life, we must remember not to look through this lens when moving on. We must avoid driving ourselves crazy.              

In Conclusion

Truth is possibly the most subjective topic that can be thought of.

This is the thought that this class has left me with. After spending a semester analyzing the manipulation of authors and the truth in literature, I think it is quite safe to assume that truth has been broken down and shattered. After spending a semester in this class, the facts as it were seem to have lost all their power and a healthy dose of skepticism has grown inside me.

Should we expect it in literature? I would answer that question with a hearty "no." Analyzing literature in terms of its values of truth and fact immediately leads to several problems. When we leave literature's reality to topics as black and white as truth and lies, we inherently miss a great deal of knowledge. Analyzing literature for a larger truth that we might draw from it becomes a problem because our truth might be different than another readers truth. These larger portraits of truths become subjective based on the individual reader. Reading a text for one larger truth becomes inherently subjective. I would argue that if a certain text leads one reader to a larger portrait of truth, the work itself is simply not literature. These universal works that argue a point and impact the entire community of readers the same way would be a philosophical text.

Turning our attention to Memento, we witness a work that initially must be considered for its values of entertainment. Obviously, Memento with its plot twists and elements of action becomes an entertaining movie to watch that holds attention. Furthermore, it speaks on a larger number of themes including memory, vengeance, fact, and truth. This work becomes an example of something that has a variety of themes and ideas, not one larger truth. Even in the novel itself, one truth to describe Leonard's actions fails to hold true with the elements of memory. For instance, the idea that he knows he has a "condition" becomes problematic to a reader.

Taking Philosophy of Literature in conjunction with this class was one of the best decisions I could have done for all the inherent connections that came up time and time again between the two classes. Truth becomes a vital subject to discussions and its conditions for existence. Our preoccupation with the truth of situations becomes a characteristic that holds us back. Literature need not have the elements of truth and higher understanding.

Finally, is truth happiness? While ignorance may be happiness, it certainly does not facilitate knowledge. While truth may facilitate knowledge, oftentimes it may not lead to happiness (although it could). That seems to be the question for me. Would one rather be knowledgable with a harsher version of reality but understand or ignorant and blissfully unaware?

Dude not Cool

I really enjoyed this movie because its plot line was original and it was told in a different way than what I am used to. It was also a shocking movie. Someone mentioned in class that perhaps Leonard lied to himself to give himself a purpose for existence. I agree with that, but I also think there was more to it. I think that if he was that one who killed his wife he was trying to relieve himself from the guilt by hunting down the one who could have done it. It was mentioned in the film that Leonard’s wife did survive and that he was the one who tried to kill her. We also saw that for a second his own memory became conflicted with the idea that he was half merging the truth and a constructed lie.


Then his actions became an endless cycle of hunting down those with a John G name. Also, the film eliminates linear time, so Leonard is forever stuck in that cycle. We do know that it had been a year since he killed the most probable killer, but there is no other clue as to where Leonard stands on time. We don’t know how long it was since his wife died or how many John Gs he killed.


I think that Leonard had an idea as to what he was doing and maybe subconsciously he knew that if the hunt ended he would have to come to terms with the reality. This constant hunting and killing is the reality that he chooses for himself because he makes the decision of eventually killing Teddy. He could have done it then when he made the decision, but he let it become a hunt because he wrote down clues that would eventually point to Teddy as the killer.


“Memento” ends at the beginning of Teddy’s hunt. It was Teddy who had Leonard running around hunting down John Gs after the first one. Maybe Natalie would feed him with another hunt, since we know she used him for her benefit.


Overall, this was a good movie to end the class with because it wraps up the idea of lies being more comforting than the truth, and how the truth is harder to face than the reality we have created with our lies. At least that’s how I felt.

Tattoos

Memory transcribes one's whole life story. It is a record of all of the important actions, painful thoughts, locations and feelings that describe an individual's identity. You write memory with your life.

Writing a note gives thought a different form. A word can't necessarily carry a whif of nostalgia like memory can provide when concentrating on a years-gone scent of holiday pumpkin pie. Like how House of Danger limited the reader's options by clearly defining what such options were instead of leaving chapters open-ended, so too does a clear definition of thought on a page limit expression. A memory is about us and our relationship to our lives -- a word adds a relationship between people and language. Do synonyms always have equal emotional effect on you? Can you convey in a note all of the subtleties of a memory, both conscious and unconscious understandings and desires?

A tattoo takes this one step farther. It is thought seared into flesh. It complicates expression because it adds on yet another level of relationships to the mix -- the relationship between the body and the world. A book I read about conjoined twins (One of Us by Alice Dreger) made the point that physical presence itself constrains the possibilities of human interaction. Would you relate the same way to an old woman with glasses and a young man with a mohawk and nose piercings? Bodies mediate the relationship between individuals and society, expressing through visual cues certain things about hygiene, habits, and personality, even if such cues are misleading.

In Memento, Lennie manipulates himself through the notes that he leaves. At first, these notes seem only to constrain his choices by giving him a particular starting point for his next string of actions. Yet these notes transform Lennie's very identity, thoughts, and relationship with his personal reality, because methods of expression have many more implications than just the thought that they are supposed to express. The tattoos on his skin forever focus observers like Natalie on Lennie's self-constructed quest for revenge, and on his memory condition (because he would not need the tattoos if he didn't have it). In the case of Natalie, this leads her to be able to take advantage of him in a way that she otherwise would not have been able to.

Lennie's tattoos remind himself and everyone else of a constructed sense of identity, and transform both the way others like Natalie choose to treat him, and the way he treats himself. What he sees in the mirror is something that will follow him the rest of his life... and what he sees are words without memory, context, or nostalgia, but weighted in ways that he only catches in glimpses.

"Memento Mori"

I read the short story that Memento is based on, “Memento Mori” by Jonathan Nolan. I’ve included the link so you can check it out.

The main character in the story is named Earl, and he is in much the same predicament as Leonard. He can only hold memory for about ten minutes at a time, but remembers that his wife was raped and murdered by the same man who caused his head injury.

Even more so than the movie, the story focuses on Earl’s ability to manipulate himself. It begins with a letter written with “I”’s and “you”’s rather than names, which at first led me to believe (and I think it was supposed to) that it was written by another character. However I soon realized that this letter along with all the other letters and notes in the story were written by past Earl to future Earl. The first few letters and notes all try various ways to convince Earl to break out of the hospital and find the man who raped his wife. The first letter explains the situation and encourages him to step up, a note accuses him of cowardice, the second letter tells him he has nothing to live for so why not, and another note tries to scare Earl out by telling him that “THESE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO KILL YOU” (Nolan).

However, Earl also seems much less willing than Leonard to trust his own handwriting. The third person narrative includes different options for Earl’s actions, such as when he sees the picture of his wife’s funeral “maybe he begins to cry. Maybe he just stares silently at the picture” (Nolan). It is as if Earl has lived this scene several times before and sometimes his reaction changes. After reading these notes, instead of immediately acting upon them like Leonard would, Earl usually just closes his eyes and goes back to sleep. But apparently one of the times he reads it, the manipulation of his former self finally takes effect and he makes his escape.

As with all the novels we have read, this story has a message for the readers. A person is made up of many different personas that reveal themselves at different times, just like Earl is a different person every ten minutes, with different emotions and different reactions. But, “for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius” (Nolan). This genius persona finds ways to tell the other personas what to do. In Earl’s case, he writes himself letters and leaves himself notes. Earl is just an extreme example of a person’s past influencing his future.

I recognized a quote that the movie took from the story: “After all, everybody else needs mirrors to remind themselves who they are. You're no different (Nolan).” Just like Earl and Leonard, sometimes people get off track and lose sight of their goals. At these points they need a reminder from their past selves.

Who is reliable?

An important lesson we learned throughout the semester is that in most lies there is some slight truth. This is the same as saying, in most actions there is a motive."Just because I don't remember doesn't mean my actions are meaningless". The fact that Lenny cannot remember what he did five minutes ago does not take away from the initial motive.This concept relates to the perception of reality versus fake. It is important to remember that whether Lenny was killing, stealing, or tattooing himself, he still had reasons to do it regardless if he can't remember or not.

Then comes the question, based on these truths and motives, who in the movie is reliable? Who exposes these truths? I think Teddy formulates these truths and motives because he is a dirty cop assigned to the case, constructing these truths himself to deceive Lenny even further. But we know that our memory is also unreliable. No solid truths are provided to give us support, forcing us, the viewers, to separate the truths from lies ourselves. But overall, a lack of content in the movie to grasp onto limits our ability to interpret, making both us and the characters of the movie unreliable.

Wishful Thinking

A long time ago, I discovered I was lactose intolerant. However, I was sure that this diagnosis could not be true. So I continued to drink milk and eat ice cream and cheese. Naturally, I continued to get sick. However, I always made up various excuses for why I was getting sick. I refused to believe that I was lactose intolerant. One day I realized I could not deny it any longer. Even though I truly believed I wasn’t lactose intolerance, the reality of the situation was that I was lactose intolerant. It is often said that we only believe what we want to believe. We choose to see and hear only certain ideas and opinions, while blocking out all other ideas that are unfavorable to us. Memento explores the ramifications of this wishful thinking by illustrating the devastating effects on a man who literally lives his life only believing what he wants to believe.

Leonard, the main character, has short-term amnesia. Therefore, he keeps a physical record of every “fact” he wants to remember. Unfortunately, he wanted to believe that Teddy, an undercover cop, was lying, so he recorded Teddy to be a liar. As a result of believing that Teddy was a liar, Leonard based many of his decisions upon this knowledge, which led Leonard in a downward spiraling path leading to the death of Teddy. This murder of Teddy occurred because Leonard actually fooled himself into believing Teddy was a liar.

Our minds are so powerful that, sometimes, when we tell ourselves to believe in things that aren’t true, we actually start believing them. While Leonard is an extreme example of this phenomenon, he effectively demonstrates how easily our brains can accept falsehoods as truths. The bad consequences occur when we begin acting upon this false notion of truth, like when I continued to consume dairy, which was detrimental to my health. As this movie demonstrates, the ability of the mind to fool itself is quite powerful.

Maybe Lenny needs to “investigate” himself?

Teddy: You don’t know who you are anymore.

Leonard Shelby: Of course I do. I’m Leonard Shelby. I’m from San Francisco.

Teddy: No, that’s who you were. Maybe it’s time you started investigating yourself.

Though I remain unsure if anything Teddy says is in fact true, he does raise a valid point here, regardless. Leonard’s entire life ever since his memory disability revolves around his mission to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. To compensate for his unreliable memory, he spends every waking moment sorting through piles of notes, police reports, Polaroid photos and tattoos each new piece of “true” evidence to his body. But what if the mystery is not who raped and murdered Leonard’s wife? What if, as Teddy hints, the real mystery is Leonard’s identity? The skepticism in this movie can easily be unbalanced and swayed in Leonard’s favor since, after all, the audience spends 113 minutes through his point of view. Everyone and everything but Leonard is questioned and doubted. Perhaps the questions and doubts have been hugely off target. Perhaps there are some key facts that go against Leonard’s story. As if Memento needed more layers to its confusing and mysterious storyline, here are two holes in Leonard’s identity as he tells it.

It first becomes evident that Leonard is anything but ordinary when he unbuttons his shirt to reveal a tattoo on his chest that reads: “John G. raped and murdered my wife.” Later Leonard reveals that his final memory was of his wife dying. We are immediately introduced to Leonard’s memory impairment, which evokes sentiments of pity and sympathy. No one intuitively questions the “victim.” The film, however, does not show his wife dead. There is no proof of a corpse, a funeral, or a tombstone—no visual evidence whatsoever supports Leonard’s claim that his wife is in fact dead.

There are several zoomed in camera shots of his wife trapped inside some sort of plastic bag throughout the film but, in each shot, her eyes are clearly moving and blinking. His wife could indeed have been in the process of dying, but her death, is an assumed fact, not a verified one.

Teddy’s statement that Leonard needs to start “investigating himself” is highlighted at the end of the film when Teddy admits he helped Leonard track down and kill John G. over a year ago, that Leonard’s wife actually survived the rape, and that she is diabetic. Teddy even shows Leonard a Polaroid photo he took of Leonard smiling after he murdered John G. Leonard, before he forgets, decides to continue the hunt for his wife’s murderer. He scribbles “Don’t believe his lies” on Teddy’s photo, ultimately tricking himself into killing Teddy. So now the man with the handicap has gone from “victim” to “victimizer.” When reflecting on Leonard’s character arch throughout the film it becomes even more difficult to take his side and believe him, especially since most of his behavior is based on his own notes. He could easily have invented everything. As Leonard says it himself, “Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.”

Remember Sammy Jankis

I have read a few posts written this week that have addressed the ending of Memento and the possible entanglement of Leonard’s own story with that of Sammy Jankis. Throughout the novel, Leonard repeatedly comes back to his tattoo, “Remember Sammy Jankis”. He claims that he uses the story of Sammy Jankis so other people can relate to his, Leonard’s, condition. However, I think the more important role of Sammy Jankis is for Leonard to have an external means of portraying his condition to himself. He often compares his own lifestyle to Sammy’s. He assures himself that his conditioning, his tattoos and his drive to find his wife’s killer will allow him to do something that Sammy never could do, continue living his life. Of course, his constant contemplation of his Sammy tattoo is, itself, a conditioning technique. This close comparison of his own story with Sammy’s may help explain the entanglement. Leonard has preexisting memory of Sammy yet preexisting memories can often be distorted, especially when there used to illustrate another story. They are highly unreliable. Leonard tells us this bit of knowledge early in the movie, something he picked up during his career in insurance. This means that to fully understand the movie, we have to consider flaws not only in Leonard’s short term memory but also his long term memory. Hence the confusion regarding if his wife had diabetes or the fast shot of Leonard in the chair where Sammy is sitting.

We know now that Leonard was not able to keep the facts straight. He is a victim of his own emotions that drive him to write lies that allow him to continue his search long after his wife’s murderer is dead. Essentially, he is setting himself up for a cyclical adventure of tracking down John G’s until he gets caught. There is only one flaw that will get in his way. It’s his tattoos. Some of his tattoos like the license plate are very concrete pieces of evidence that Leonard will not be able to ignore in the future, yet they are sure to contradict with any further investigation. The first time I watched this movie, the realization that Leonard had planted false information and killed an innocent man trying to help him made me believe that Leonard is the bad guy in this film. However, I think closer consideration leads me to find this realization much more morally ambiguous. It is certainly wrong for him to plant lies that eventually kill Teddy. However, I think many people would go to extremes to feel they have avenged the death of their wife. Leonard’s short term memory loss also means that he never has enough time to rationally walk himself through the moral complexity of his actions. We all have the advantage of being able to rethink our decisions in the future. Leonard, however, will never come back to the morals of his decision because he will remember what he did. What I’m trying to get across is that we all make bad decisions sometimes but we can change the outcomes. Leonard cannot and so his decision to harm an innocent man is carried out because he doesn’t feel the guilt that he should.