Untrustworthy Notes

I found Memento disorienting and confusing to watch. Part of the time the story is told in chronological order, with Leonard talking on the phone, but we don’t even know who he’s talking to. The other part of the time the story is told backwards, starting with Leonard killing Teddy. I think it’s told this way to kind of mirror the ‘condition’ that Leonard has. We only get fragments of the whole story and it’s slowly being built backwards for us. It really made me empathize with Leonard.

            In the beginning when Leonard reads the note off the picture of Teddy that says not to trust his lies, I assumed the note was trustworthy. But as the movie went on and I realized how he writes the notes and how easily he could misplace them or get them confused, I realized that they are not trustworthy at all. In one scene, Natalie takes one of Leonard’s pictures of Dodd so that he won’t remember that incident ever happening. And just like that the memory is erased. It made me wonder how many times that’s happened before.

At one part Teddy tells Leonard not to trust Natalie, but at that point Leonard has already written that he can’t trust Teddy’s lies. So Leonard chooses to believe his notes. But we don’t know yet when Leonard wrote that, or what context, or if Natalie somehow made him write that to turn him against Teddy. As the movie went on I thought it seemed like Teddy was more of a friend to Leonard, and Natalie was only using him. The whole situation was very confusing and just like Leonard; I didn’t know who to believe. But unlike Leonard, I really didn’t trust his notes, even if they were written in his own writing.