Maybe Lenny needs to “investigate” himself?

Teddy: You don’t know who you are anymore.

Leonard Shelby: Of course I do. I’m Leonard Shelby. I’m from San Francisco.

Teddy: No, that’s who you were. Maybe it’s time you started investigating yourself.

Though I remain unsure if anything Teddy says is in fact true, he does raise a valid point here, regardless. Leonard’s entire life ever since his memory disability revolves around his mission to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. To compensate for his unreliable memory, he spends every waking moment sorting through piles of notes, police reports, Polaroid photos and tattoos each new piece of “true” evidence to his body. But what if the mystery is not who raped and murdered Leonard’s wife? What if, as Teddy hints, the real mystery is Leonard’s identity? The skepticism in this movie can easily be unbalanced and swayed in Leonard’s favor since, after all, the audience spends 113 minutes through his point of view. Everyone and everything but Leonard is questioned and doubted. Perhaps the questions and doubts have been hugely off target. Perhaps there are some key facts that go against Leonard’s story. As if Memento needed more layers to its confusing and mysterious storyline, here are two holes in Leonard’s identity as he tells it.

It first becomes evident that Leonard is anything but ordinary when he unbuttons his shirt to reveal a tattoo on his chest that reads: “John G. raped and murdered my wife.” Later Leonard reveals that his final memory was of his wife dying. We are immediately introduced to Leonard’s memory impairment, which evokes sentiments of pity and sympathy. No one intuitively questions the “victim.” The film, however, does not show his wife dead. There is no proof of a corpse, a funeral, or a tombstone—no visual evidence whatsoever supports Leonard’s claim that his wife is in fact dead.

There are several zoomed in camera shots of his wife trapped inside some sort of plastic bag throughout the film but, in each shot, her eyes are clearly moving and blinking. His wife could indeed have been in the process of dying, but her death, is an assumed fact, not a verified one.

Teddy’s statement that Leonard needs to start “investigating himself” is highlighted at the end of the film when Teddy admits he helped Leonard track down and kill John G. over a year ago, that Leonard’s wife actually survived the rape, and that she is diabetic. Teddy even shows Leonard a Polaroid photo he took of Leonard smiling after he murdered John G. Leonard, before he forgets, decides to continue the hunt for his wife’s murderer. He scribbles “Don’t believe his lies” on Teddy’s photo, ultimately tricking himself into killing Teddy. So now the man with the handicap has gone from “victim” to “victimizer.” When reflecting on Leonard’s character arch throughout the film it becomes even more difficult to take his side and believe him, especially since most of his behavior is based on his own notes. He could easily have invented everything. As Leonard says it himself, “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.”