Tattoos

One of the most striking parts of Memento is the way Leonard’s body is covered in tattoos. All of them are “facts” about his wife’s murder. In his quest to find the man who raped and murdered his wife, Leonard is constantly trying to separate truth from lies. His tattoos represent how, with the loss of his memory, Leonard’s sense of reality has collapsed onto himself. Leonard uses his body as the “absolute truth.” He trusts in everything that is written on his body and everything that is written in his own handwriting or he carries on his person. Leonard ultimately demonstrates this certainty when he kills Teddy simply because his handwriting on Teddy’s picture tells him that Teddy is “the one” and to “kill him.”

It makes sense that Leonard would choose to believe in the “facts” that he himself wrote. Who can you trust better than yourself? However, as we have been discussing these last few weeks, people can be manipulated. We are being manipulated all the time, by our family and friends, by the media, by our entire environment and culture. Leonard is no different. In fact, he is even more vulnerable since he cannot remember anything. While he is successful in preventing Teddy from using his memory loss to try and manipulate Leonard’s car away from him, we see that Leonard is not successful in preventing Burt from manipulating him into renting two motel rooms. Though I do not know how this movie ends, I suspect that Leonard has been manipulated into writing something false on himself or one of his mementos. This would mean that Leonard’s system failed, and that he has no way of knowing the “absolute truth.”

To a certain extent, Leonard is like a student in this class. Just as we are trying to pull the truth from Memento and the novels we have read, Leonard is trying to pull the truth out of his situation. The difference is that Leonard has lost the ability to learn from his mistakes, while we still can. Memento warns us yet again to be wary of outside manipulations.