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.