I thought that the movie was particularly clever in the way that it continuously related and pertained back to itself. It would be impossible to watch the movie half-assed. Instead, it was crucial to pay attention to each and every particular scene in order to follow the plot line and the characters fragmented thought process. Given that the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, could not make new memories and therefore was solely able to successfully continue with his life by marking his body with crude tattoos and creating memory notes for himself, it was as if you as the watcher were as well memory-impaired; venturing through the movie on the same wavelength as the main character. You are doomed to only be able to follow the plot along with Leonard himself, and therefore have no outside or regular knowledge as to what is actually going on. To me, I actually thought this was an incredibly enlightening and intensifying experience. Instead of being able to take a step back and evaluate all of the events from an omnitient perspective, you had to live and breathe right alongside the protagonist and were thereby just as immersed in the plot as he was.
I really enjoyed your blog post. I particularly liked how you highlighted the idea that we are Lenny, that in a sense we have memory impairment. In the final half of the movie, my brain started to hurt because I was trying so hard to untangle the plot. I was trying to remember quick scenes, knowing they had some significance. It is this mental torment and manipulation that, like you mentioned, both Lenny and the audience feels.
ReplyDeleteYou nailed exactly what we ended up talking about in class. The reliable omniscient narrator is removed from the telling this story, and we are forced to take everything with a grain of salt. Every character has their own motives and biases, and we are forced to pick who to believe. It's kind of ironic that we tend to believe the guy who cannot create new memories. That is until the end when we discover that he has killed multiple John G's. But that is the case IF we choose to believe Teddy. We can never know with 100% certainty what happened. Facts don't exist in this film.
ReplyDeleteMany of Nolan's early films engage me in the same way as you described. For instance, his debut with Following, a very low budget project shot on 16mm film, marked him as an auteur who fancies disruptions of the time-space continuum as he unfolds stories fundamentally humane and as such extremely relatable despite the unlikely premises that he put his characters and the audience through. Another film of his, Interstellar, was ambitious in the sense that Nolan didn't just want to express this fancy of his through filmic techniques such as those we saw in Memento (and Following; these two are really similar might I add). But he also does it through a venue "tried and true": quantum physics, which is yet another good example of 'the sublime'. To ground a project underlined with the same psychologically puzzling and inquisitive theme with such known-unknown science effectively makes Nolan as much a magical realist as was Fuentes. Obviously he couldn't have done Interstellar had he not garnered enough idiosyncrasy as a masterful authority in producing films that are as much case studies for phenomena like self-invention, self-conviction, self-manipulation/deception as they are moneymakers (Inception, for one). But what's really amazing is that after almost two decades Nolan isn't even close to tapping in all the potential there is to be extracted from this peculiar obsession of the id,ego and super-ego. And what' even more amazing is that we get to tag along for a ride into the self for only $7.99 worth of movie tickets. Or free if your best friend is in charge of Pirate Bay. Not that I would know anything about it.
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