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.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think the question of who is reliable is huge in this movie and pretty much shapes us up to really feel the effects of the ending. We see that the person who we considered reliable may even be the least reliable person of all. It's one of the most concerning twists cause it makes you revisit the whole movie and start to make conjectures about what we can do to change our view of the events that perspire. This is what then causes us to become unreliable like you said.
ReplyDeleteI also found that a huge theme relating to this class is the idea that facts we find to be truth can change into lies, and vise versa, in a blink of an eye. This is what happens to us as viewers of Memento and creates more confusion then any piece of literature ever did.