Memento In Opus and Am I Trying My Best?

Having missed classed on Friday, I watched Memento alone on my laptop in Opus. It was very difficult not to finish the entire thing in one sitting (I forced myself to stop after 75 minutes). I really like it. A lot of people have written about the manipulation the film imposes on not only the viewer but on the main character himself. It was terrifying how easily he was manipulated. He even had to tattoo things on his body to make sure he would not forget things and to prevent someone from changing his hand written notes. I am excited to see where the film goes because although I think I know, I am positive it will trick me. I think he killed his wife...

On another note, I have been thinking a lot about this self-grade and it has been bothering me. Writing "I deserve an A" in an email is so easy, the temptation is killing me, but I am an innately guilty person and do believe in doing what is best. In fact, the words "you'll only be cheating yourself" keep echoing in my head, something I remember someone saying about someone who was considering cheating back in middle school. On top of all that, we did sign the honor code. Over the week I have come to some revelations about how I would grade myself. One of the things I have learned from this class is that everything is relative but it is important not to compare your successes to others. You should pay attention to your own personal progress and "grade accordingly". I do not think my "A" work is the same as a more seasoned sophomore from a prestigious private high school's "A" work. But if I am honestly trying my best, I think I deserve an A. Now I just have to decide if I honestly tried my best on these blog posts... We shall see what I decide.

same playing field

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. 

The Big Picture

As with many blog posts I have done, I will start by defining the key word, in this case "memento". Dictionary.com defines memento to mean "an object or item that serves to remind one of a person, past event". Sometimes it is spelled with an "o" as "momento", to indicate the significance of a particular moment. Leonard needs these mementos to keep track of his life, because he has lost the ability to form new memories. Each picture, or tattoo, represents a clue regarding his wife’s murderer. However, as we have seen in numerous books we have read, the mind is a funny thing; it tends to believe what it wants to believe. For example, when “Jonah” in Cats Cradle was interviewing Newt about the day the atomic bomb was dropped, Newt replied with a clear story. At first explains how he was very young so he does not remember everything, but he is still able to list facts from the day. He describes how Angela has told him about what happened that day so many times that he has taken every thing she has said to be true. In reality, because they are two different people, they had completely different perspectives.

This is similar to the anecdote someone in the class shared about a sibling hearing a story (in which they were not involved) so many times that they can tell it themselves as if they were there. Mementos can be used to remember events. When I traveled to Paris this summer, the only thing I bought home was a little replica of the Eiffel Tower. This dwarfs my entire time in Paris. When I look at this item, I think only about my time at the tower, not my time at Notre Dame, the lourve, or the “love-lock” bridge. Mementos are good to keep, but often they can lead to a focused view of an experience. That is why numerous mementos, in this case Leonards body tattoos, can help to create a bigger picture.

This is similar to the anecdote someone in the class shared about a sibling hearing a story (in which they were not involved) so many times that they can tell it themselves as if they were there. Mementos can be used to remember events. When I traveled to Paris this summer, the only thing I bought home was a little replica of the Eiffel Tower. This dwarfs my entire time in Paris. When I look at this item, I think only about my time at the tower, not my time at Notre Dame, the lourve, or the “love-lock” bridge. Mementos are good to keep, but often they can lead to a focused view of an experience. That is why numerous mementos, in this case Leonards body tattoos, can help to create a bigger picture.

Memento in Presentation Clever

One of my many thoughts while watching the movie Memento was about the presentation of the movie. The movie is very unique in that so far, it appears to have started at the end, and periodically moves backwards until it reaches the beginning of the story. Something interesting about this style is that we experience every scene, at least in some sense, the way that Leonard would experience it. We begin every new block of the story with no knowledge of what happened before it, almost the same way that Leonard does because of his memory problem. This is a very clever move on the director's part of forcing people that are able to create memories to experience the world of the movie in a similar way to Leonard.

I think that the most important function of this is how it allows viewers to investigate for themselves the choices that Leonard makes throughout the course of the movie. Viewers are presented with effectively the same amount of information as Leonard, and they are left with the opportunity to trust his note system, not to trust it, or somewhere in between. Also interesting in this work is the presence of the case of Sammy Jankis. I am interested to see how this storyline ties in, because the director chooses to leave it relatively intact, and it does not seem to have a lot of relation to the timeline of the main plot. This could be another clever timing device that I just don't understand yet because we haven't finished the film.

What have I done?

I just submitted my blog self-grade where I wrote a short argumentative piece defending the grade I gave myself. Although I feel like I graded myself fairly, I still feel as though I’m cheating the system. This is the first class where I’m getting to control the majority of my final grade, and despite the fact that I’m very appreciative, I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m unqualified and am grading myself either too easy or too hard… which is kind of crazy because I know myself and my work ethic, and after 14 years of school, I should be able to objectively give myself a grade based on the grading systems I’ve observed. I ended up sitting in front of a blank Microsoft word page for 30 minutes before realizing that I need to settle on a grade and if I am able to justify it more than other possible grades, then I’ve probably made the right choice (or close to it, hopefully). At least this way my conscience doesn’t keep nagging me.

In other news, Memento reminds me of Breaking Bad. I’m assuming that everyone is familiar with it (over-qualified high school chemistry teacher gets cancer and turns into a meth cook/dealer to pay the bills), but not everyone has probably watched it. The storylines don’t seem to share any similarities, but the way the stories are told are very similar. An episode of Breaking Bad starts with a brief scene of what’s coming at the end of the episode or finale, but you have no idea at the time when you’re watching it because an entire chunk of the story is missing. As hard as you try to come up with all of the in-between information as to how that brief scene came to be, it seems impossible, and makes you pay attention to every little detail in hopes of figuring out the end before it’s revealed. For me, this method of storytelling is the most intriguing part of the movie so far and I’m excited to see how it continues to unfold.

Memory in Memento

Something that stuck out most to me from the movie was when Leonard was speaking on the phone about Sammy Jankins and memory. I couldn't remember the exact words so I looked them up and it turns out he said "memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts." I definitely think that Leonard here makes a good point because over time our memories can become cloudy and as a result, certain details we think we remember are different from how we remember them.

Memory can be very tricky. In class we have discussed the difference between nonfiction and fiction and how its difficult to draw the line between them. Books such as memoirs, declared as nonfiction, can sometimes contain false information. Memoirs and autobiographies especially, since they are based off of memory, can contain stories that have been changed and altered. There is speculation that this has occurred in many renowned books including Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. In the end though, we can never really know more than the person who lived his life himself.

However, I disagree with his last statement saying that memories are irrelevant if you have the facts. As we have seen from the movie, Leonard struggles a lot with trust and tries to use pictures as verification of facts. In reality, those pictures are useless because there is no meaning behind them (except for the words literally written behind the pictures) and although he can trust his handwriting, the reasoning behind what he wrote cannot be trusted. Memory in this case, would come very much in handy as opposed to photographs. Memories can bring about more than pictures can. Although memories and facts can differ, that doesn't make memories irrelevant. Even "facts" nowadays cannot be trusted, so how can one tell whether memory is fact without really knowing what fact is?

Intriguing

After watching the first part of Memento, I found one essential manipulative technique that the director used throughout most of the movie. As we know, the protagonist of the movie Leonard Shelby has a type of amnesia that doesn’t allow him to have any short-term memory. Throughout the movie we learn scene-by-scene backwards of what had happened. By doing so, the director manipulates the viewers to think one thing will happen but something else happens. For example, from what we have watched so far, it seemed that John Gammel is the murder of Leonard’s wife. However, we are not sure at this point if he really is the culprit of the crime. This is because, at this point, the characters in the movie have mentioned parts where Leonard might be making some assumptions that are incorrect due to his memory loss. In doing so, I now have second thoughts on John G being the actual murder of his wife. However at the same time, we are not sure who Teddy really is and why he lied to Leonard about his name. He could in fact be the murder and continues to be by Leonard’s side to try and make sure that he doesn’t remember who murdered his wife. Then comes the thought that if John G or Teddy is really the murder, why wouldn’t he kill Leonard as well and save the trouble of having to make sure he doesn’t remember. After watching the movie, I began to think about the mediaTED artifacts and associated these movies as being one of them. Quite often in movies, the director tries to have the audience think that one course of action will happen making it very predictable. However when the time comes, they twist the plot so that the audience is amazed at what actually happens.

Chaos: a vent

    This past weekend I was in Baltimore, and since my mom knew that I had some free time Saturday night, she recommended me and my friend Ben go to the Orioles game. We decided that it was too much work (were pretty lazy people and I had to be free at 10 PM, so it wasn't something we were particularly motivated to do), and it turns out we definitely made the right decision.
     For those of you that don't know, it was outside the Orioles' stadium on Saturday night that the week of protests over the death of Freddie Gray in the hands of Baltimore Police finally turned violent, leading the city to go to, to put it lightly, complete shit. Cars, stores, and homes have been set on fire, police officers have been hospitalized, and the National Guard has been called in.
     I'm not sure what my opinions are on who is in the wrong; my base instinct is that the police officers whose violence led to a young man's death and the opportunists that took a peaceful, powerful protest and turned it into personal gain at the detriment of their own neighborhoods are two good places to start.
     Several people very close to me are in the city right now, as crowds once again are taking the streets despite a curfew, and its definitely a situation that concerns me. I understand there are serious tensions in the city and there are legitimate reasons for anger on both sides, so the main reason for this post is to just get all of these thoughts out of my head and down onto the page.

Dis(at)tractions

I was going to write my blog post about Memento, because so far the movie has me completely stumped. However, while I was perusing the other post that have been made so far, I read Conor’s post. What struck me was the use of two different colors for the text throughout the post. The change from the red to blue brought my attention directly to the final line, written in a color different from every other sentence. In fact, I read that sentence first and was forced to backtrack in order to understand the significance of the last sentence.

This experience reminded me of something else that I find myself constantly guilty of. In various articles or posts throughout the internet you can find the abbreviation TL;DR appended to the end of particularly long posts. The abbreviation stands for “too long; didn’t read” and what follows those four letters is usually a summary of whatever the author had to write. The summary is usually separated, and the all-caps abbreviation attention-drawing. While reading this summary saves time (and thus, I usually do), there is a loss of comprehension that I don’t usually consider. This action probably ends up making me even less informed, however, than if I had missed the post in the first place. Rather than reading all of the information and evidence provided, I skip to the conclusion and make my own decision based on the limited information included in the brief summary. However, Conor’s post has really brought to my attention how much is truly lost in going only with the concluding line, even if it is the most eye-catching.

Notes, Memory and Trust

I really enjoy the movie Memento so far. The layers and complexity draw you in and keep you very attentive. In my neuroscience class we just learned about anterograde amnesia and it was really interesting to see this play out in the movie. The movie made me think about what I would do if I ever had amnesia and which amnesia I would prefer: retrograde or anterograde amnesia. I wouldn't want to forget all my memories from the past, all the people I've met and all the places I have visited, but it would also be extremely difficult to live everyday not being able to remember anything.

In my everyday life, I write a very detailed schedule. I even write in what time I will wake up and work out or get lunch if I am very busy. I like to write everything down because with so much going on every day I sometimes forget to go to work or post a blog for example. I also cross everything off when I am finished. Seeing Leonard write notes in Memento made me realize how easy it is for someone to forge his writing or take away his notes. It is also very possible to forget that the notes you made were incorrect. Since I cross out all my notes when I am finished, someone could easily cross off many things without me knowing. I also think that although a tattoo is permanent and no one could remove the note, it is too risky with the possibility of tattooing false information.

Trust is a big issue in Memento. I am a very gullible person so I would be easily fooled or tricked into believing something that I did. Sometimes I cannot even trust my own memory. Although a bit unrelated, I sometimes don't remember the difference between reality and my dreams. Sometimes I think I talked to someone, but it had been in one of my dreams. Memory is so interesting because although it has so many underlying neuronal mechanisms it can also be manipulated by the environment, people and yourself.

I also really like the format of the movie and it would be interesting to see the different effect it would have if we saw all the scenes in the order of which they occurred.

Manipulation inside and out

I decided to skim through the Memento Wikipedia page before writing my blog post this week. I was curious as to how they shot the film. I discovered that Guy Pearce (Leonard), Joey Pantoliano (Teddy), and Carrie-Anne Moss (Natalie) only shot together on the first day of the 25-day shooting. It had not occurred to me until reading this that there really are not that many scenes with Leonard and Teddy, and Leonard and Natalie. Even so, Christopher Nolan was able to craft a thrilling and compelling first half of a film, and I expect the second half to continue the same way. His writing and editing manipulate the viewer to think much more footage was shot that actually was. Nolan is able to stretch a few scenes into a full-length film (at least for the first half). A fraction of the movie is interactions between the three main characters. Otherwise it has mostly been the scenes of Leonard on the phone. The nonlinear plotline manipulates us into thinking there is more happening than there actually is.

Frustrated

Today I was examined by a doctor.  My right knee was examined because I had a second knee surgery in two years for a torn lateral meniscus.  As of late I have been participating in dynamic fitness as a “requirement” for the football team.  Now my knee hurts, and I feel like I have done a full circle back to being injured.  I saw the doctor who operated on my knee twice.  He prescribed me a cortisone shot and demanded I do not participate in such strenuous athletic movements.  In other words, I am not allowed to workout with my team.

I am frustrated by this.  I am frustrated because my knee was not this sore last year after rehabbing even more this time.  I’ve rehabbed and rehabbed and rehabbed but I cannot shake this soreness and these knee problems.  I feel like after working to get back and the precision of such a surgery should warrant a healthy return, but I guess not.  I am frustrated that I felt the need to return to such athletic workouts when my knee physically was not ready to return.  I should not feel obliged to push my limits and risk my health, and my future.   I am frustrated that I am put in this scenario because I risked my physical health for a game, my team and my coaches, and then I am pressured to return to full health when I am not ready to.  This is Hamilton football.  I am not ever going to be a professional athlete.  I understand I am expected to compete at a relatively high level, but I cannot force my body to heal.  Now, I am left contemplating at what I could’ve done differently to avoid issues, and still play the game I love.

Incoherent Thoughts

I read Memento a few years ago in English class, but like a lot of things I read in high school, I forgot a lot about the plot. All I remembered was that I really liked it and it was really weird, in a good way, and that I was shocked by the ending. But I don't remember what the ending is, and it's driving me crazy, but I don't want to remember because I want the same surprise I got from the first time I read it.    Usually, people watch movies when they don't want to think much, and they just want to sit back and relax. But this movie requires you to be extremely attentive to every detail and to every flashback that occurs. Isn't that how movies should be though? So much time, money, and work goes into making a movie; it should give the audience something to think about. It should test them. What's the point in watching movies that are predictable? Why sit through those two hours when you know exactly going to end? Memento is definitely not one of those movies, and I'm excited to find out how it all resolves... again.

Justgirlythings

Lenny is a self-made man. Lenny reinvents himself by the minutes. Lenny lives in the moment. Lenny makes decisions and moves forward. Lenny participates in the worldwide movement of taking polaroid photos wherever he goes.

And yet how is it that Nolan could make all these tumblr-worthy, #justgirlythings qualities seem so dark-humorous, violent and claustrophobic (e.g the almost epilepsy-inducing flashbacks of a suffocating woman) ? How is it that the struggle of the main character as he copes with his psychological condition and the obvious emotional distress satirically different from, say, that of Joel from Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind? Both men are made vulnerable by an incident related to their significant other. Both went through deliberate, self-manipulative courses of actions to safe-guard their emotional well-beings. Their choices are different, yes, but that alone isn’t enough to constitute the drastic tonal differences between each plot. To address the difference in artistic and creative signatures isn’t exactly any better either, unless we can figure out the reasons behind this particular case of differentiation, this representative of hundreds of other endeavours attempting to expose filmic audience of hundreds of biased and subjective considerations of mental health problems. Admittedly, a part of me thinks it’s useless to devote fully to investigate these films from this vantage point, cause let’s face it, how are the films any different from the countless commercials that ruin your Hulu experience by telling you to ask your doctor about pills and drugs to help combat your mental health? God damn it binging Blackadder doesn’t mean I’m a suicidal psychopath we cool?

In any event, to finish off this rather cynical rant, the only difference I see is they have bigger budgets and directors who happen to be better hypnotists than most. So rage against the machine with me cause we’re not letting that kickass DNA-splicing storytelling mechanics that obviously refers to Lenny’s cognitive condition blind us from the fact that it isn’t just Lenny that is self-manipulating himself. Sorry Conor I had to.

The other part of me, though, is still on the fence. It has been awhile since I last saw this film. So I need to be more observant this time (and also need to rewatch Jim Carrey again) before I could make any more arguments and back them up.

Mind's Manipulation

The psychological issues of the main character in Memento is an interesting lens to look at manipulation through. Leonard’s short term memory loss manipulates him into being forced to trust everything he is told, having no memories to use to question them. This opens doors for further manipulation of people taking advantage of his condition (like when he was charged for two rooms instead of one). His condition does not only open doors for manipulation, it also eliminates them.  Memory is itself manipulation. In my psych class we learned about perception, processing and memory and learned that memory is often unreliable. When people perceive things, they rarely process and remember everything they see. When certain information is missing in our memory we fill in the blanks using prior knowledge and experience. This leads to false memories, even when the person in question believes that its the truth. False memories manipulate and mislead people, including the person misremembering. This has real life consequences including false imprisonment from unreliable eye-witness testimonies. The human conscious is not reliable and is constantly manipulating while also manipulated. Leonard’s absence of new manipulative memories and use of facts through notes and tattoos leads him to solve his case. Although its certainly easier to follow a case with a working memory, Leonard was able to find his wife’s killer successfully from facts, notes and deduction, bypassing mind’s manipulation.

Truth, Lies, and Movies

I liked the way that Momento was filmed because it seems to trick you. You constantly feel like something is being hidden from you and that Leonard knows more than you, when really he knows nothing. You have no idea why he’s never supposed to pick up the phone, but neither does he. By showing the movie in reverse, the audience is put in the same position as Leonard. Neither of you know why you’re there or what’s about to happen. You are both forced to trust the tattoos and notes. I find it similar to Aura where it makes me feel as though I’m experiencing what’s happening as opposed to watching it. We end up being manipulated just as Leonard is. The little notes give us hints as to what people are like. For example the notes that says not to trust Teddy immediately makes us not like him. The audience doesn’t trust him even though there is no evidence of why we shouldn’t. We don’t know if this could have been false information because our main character has no idea either. We are manipulated into liking and trusting Natalie, and later we find out Leonard has been manipulated by her. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point things change again, and she went back to being trusted. I also wouldn’t be surprised if she was using Leonard to kill Teddy. Either way, the fact that we don’t know what has happened before the current scene puts us in a position where we have to be very trusting, which makes us easily manipulated. In order to stay ahead we would have to trust no one and be constantly questioning everyone in the movie and everything Leonard writes down. This style of filming is what puts us in a vulnerable position and makes the movie unique. It is the same style of manipulation that we’ve been experiencing in our books, but through a movie.

 

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.

ABC

Instead of being clueless as hell while watching Momento, I decided to try and invent my own endings to each scene; however, that only made me more confused. I am so used to having a story being told sequentially. A happens, followed by B, and finally C. ABC, it is easy to follow. In Momento; however, the story jumps from Z, then to M, then to W, and then to A. ZMWA, demands attention. I have been so conditioned to prefer movies that I have some idea of what is going to happen. There is this satisfaction that comes when a story ends in the way you anticipated, because we have expectations when we watch a film or read a book. It’s subtle, but there is this injustice we feel when a director or an author completely obliterates our expectations. As an audience, we subconsciously insert ourselves as powerful contributors to a film or novel, which is ridiculous because the only power we truly have is our decision of whether or not we participate.  It is this naïve and false sense of power that we have been manipulated into believing we have. I am a culprit. While watching Momento, I had a false sense of confidence. I believed that I could resolve each sequence of events, because I was convinced that I somehow knew more than I actually did. I was trying to find meaning in possibly meaningless scenes. Directors and authors are powerful when they deliberately expose this naivety and false sense of confidence. Vonnegut, O’brien, and Christopher Nolan, manipulate readers and audiences, and effectively reveal how we have been conditioned to believe that everything has some significance. We constantly try and make sense out of nonsense. I think that is largely due to the fact that films and novels, primarily fiction, satisfy our need for fantasy. Fiction brings light and unexpected adventure to our every day, monotonous lives.