Image Credit: Summit Entertainment and Team Todd

Some say *Memento* is the best film Christopher Nolan has ever made. It’s hard to say whether that’s true or not, but what is certain is that on March 16, 2001, the director made a name for himself worldwide with a film that is truly one of a kind. A quarter of a century later, Leonard Shelby’s odyssey remains unforgettable.


A broken man on the hunt for a ghost

Memento remains one of the finest examples of cinematic surprise, all the more significant because it stems from a film with a relatively low budget (less than $10 million) that received little publicity, yet still managed to mark a turning point. It was a turning point due to its success with both audiences and critics, starting with its premiere at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation, and later confirmed by box office earnings of $40 million—no small feat for a film of this kind. It was the result of word of mouth and home video, which at the time was a significant factor, and which proved the skepticism of those major studios wrong that had refused to distribute it, discouraged by its nature as a radical auteur film. But what kind of film is Memento? Even today, it is harder than it seems to give a clear and unambiguous answer; it is a mix of genres (this is the most palatable definition), and its blending of neo-noir and psychological thriller was, even then, a clear indication of the path Christopher Edward Nolan would take.

*Memento* bears his signature and that of his brother Jonathan, who began working on it in 1996 while they were traveling to the City of Angels. But the atypical, fascinating, and utterly unconventional structure that would make the film so special emerged over time, as the two refined the script, the themes, and the characters. As the final version takes shape, the two brothers gradually incorporate very clear references not only to Funes, but also to the legacy of the great Jorge Luis Borges, another film exploring the concept of cognitive imprisonment. Indeed, the connection to that genre of cinema—commonly referred to as “hard-boiled”—which once made Humphrey Bogart a legend, is also evident. One cannot fail to mention Alan Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Alan Parker. But this should not be misleading; Memento is, in every respect, a work that will leave an indelible mark because it is genuine, true, and new—a labyrinth of immense complexity and depth, matched only by the excellence of its aesthetics.

At the heart of *Memento* is Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), and the very first shot already tells us everything about the utter lack of normality in his life. Shelby enters an abandoned farmhouse with Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), holding a Polaroid. On it is Teddy and a message warning not to believe his lies and stating that “he is the man you’re looking for.” He points a gun at him, accusing him of his wife’s death; Teddy denies it and tries to defend himself. A scream, a gunshot, darkness. Then it all starts over, with Leonard’s obsessive hunt for the man who killed his wife and caused him a very specific form of amnesia: anterograde amnesia. Basically, he only remembers the past and cannot store new information except for a limited period of time, after which his brain resets everything. He uses tattoos, Polaroids, and Post-its to create a map that allows him to remember his days, the people he meets, and the progress of his hunt for John G.—that’s the name of the killer he’s searching for.

The viewer embarks on a journey through an elliptical narrative, a double-track spiral where past and present, objective and subjective truth, dream and reality chase one another. Each scene lasts 15 minutes; there are 22 sequences in total, and they can be in color or black and white. In the former, they follow Leonard’s mental structure, moving backward in time; they are the subjective part of the story. Christopher Nolan presents the others as connected to a more objective perspective, but this division gradually blurs until they collide in the finale. The subjective narration of Memento is free from the omniscience that a viewer (and a first-person narrator) usually holds with confidence. This is a film about partiality—that of Leonard’s memory, and thus our own—with a puzzle that comes together (but only partially) before our eyes, while we watch him lost in a murky whirlpool of ignorance, doubts, and illusions.


Memory, identity, and the human mind as a trap

Christopher Nolan constantly moves between classicism and innovation, a trait that would later become a hallmark of his films. Guy Pearce, chosen over far more high-profile Hollywood stars of the time, wanders about gaunt, frantic, cynical, and feverish, always glued to that phone, always speaking to himself and to us. Teddy is indecipherable, both guide and enemy, and like the beautiful Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), he uses, abuses, and exploits Leonard’s weakness, as Leonard finds himself (like us) suspecting everything and everyone. Memento brings increasing order to its structure; we begin to grasp dynamics and points of reference, yet Leonard appears to us as increasingly both prisoner and jailer of himself. There is a strong semantic component to the media—the physical aids through which Leonard tries to find his bearings. Memento is also a film about the technological advancements of the 20th century; those Polaroids that the protagonist uses as a sort of map are limited, showing only a sliver of meaning, and can deceive both him and us.

I am not the truth; I am merely its shadow. Why doesn’t he use a video camera? Something that would allow him to objectively capture the truth, yet he leaves himself at the mercy of his own subjectivity? Because he knows he is living a lie. The man who killed his wife was already caught and killed long ago. But to give meaning to his otherwise hollow existence—with a mind that forces him to constantly reinvent himself—he lies to himself, always pushing that imaginary enemy a little further away, like Penelope who first weaves and then unravels her peplos. In *The Matrix* (1999), Joe Pantoliano, playing Cypher—the traitor aboard the Nebuchadnezzar—speaks with Agent Smith and explains a basic yet underestimated concept: ignorance is a virtue. Two years later, Nolan’s Memento helps us better understand that phrase—the partiality of our knowledge, which is the key to an existence that would otherwise lack direction, movement, and purpose. Is knowing everything counterproductive?

Leonard appears to us like Tom Thumb searching for crumbs that have vanished, but the reality is that he isn’t lost; he has created new ones, and he does so every day, so as not to stand still. Memory is deceptive; memory cannot truly help us, Nolan explains, because we sometimes alter it without realizing it, as a defense mechanism. Leonard is thus a castaway within a sea he himself has created—or rather, fenced in—he is the negation of that liberating impulse that, three years earlier, The Truman Show had presented as the only objective possibility, but Nolan does not believe in this. Just as in that film that foreshadowed reality TV and the society of spectacle, Memento also revisits Plato’s cave allegory, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Sisyphus endlessly pushing a boulder. Leonard relives his wife’s death; he constantly feels like a failure for not having found a culprit who no longer exists. Christopher Nolan would go on to continue exploring representation and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, the mask and the real face.

He would have woven all of this into the world of comic book movies, with his three-part Batman saga; he would have gone on to tell us about the Manhattan Project, about illusionists in Victorian England, and about dream hunters in the subconscious. Who knows if his Ulysses will have something of this lost soul in Los Angeles, on an eternal quest for the ghost of his past life. A quarter-century later, Memento continues to be a unique chapter in 21st-century cinema. Not only for having definitively launched Nolan’s career, but for how it spoke to us of our loneliness, of our clinging to images. After all, we alter them; we, too, go beyond objectivity, lying to ourselves, and have made them the center of our identity, of our lives, and of our conception of ourselves—to be renewed, reformulated, to modify the objective reality from which we seek to escape. Perhaps we are no less lost than Leonard.