Yay Memento!

I have never seen Memento before, and was wondering how a movie could pertain enough to what we’ve been talking about in this course enough for it to be worth watching.  I thought maybe it would be loosely connected, but really just an excuse to watch a good movie instead of having class, but I was a little surprised to find pretty much all of the themes we’ve been talking about.  Leonard’s condition makes him easy to manipulate.  Every time he wakes up he is being manipulated first by his past self in the form of his tattoos and all his notes, and then potentially by the people who know him but he does not remember.  Burt from the hotel scams Leonard by charging him with two hotel rooms.  He is aware of most of this manipulation, though.  He knows about his condition and does what he can to live with it, unlike Sammy Jenkins.  Leonard seems unconcerned with truths and lies.  He doesn’t care about anyone’s interpretation of events – he relies only on facts.  It’s kind of ironic that a man with short-term memory loss is the one who can wade through the bullshit (pardon my French) and see facts as facts and everything else as either falsehoods or opinions, no middle ground.  There was even that little metatextual bit.  Leonard’s wife was reading a book she had already read before, and Leonard says “I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next,” to which his wife responds by saying that she enjoyed it anyway.  This is a cute little self-referencing defense of the style of the movie.  Not only has the movie applied pretty directly to the class, it is also extremely freakin awesome. Yay class!