Memento

Memento is a 2000 psychological thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, in which the amnesiac Leonard Shelby hunts his wife's killer using Polaroids, notes and tattoos, told through a reverse-order colour strand and a forward black-and-white strand. It is set for HSC English Extension 1, elective Hybrid Worlds.

Memento (2000), Christopher Nolan's second feature and the film that made his name, was adapted from "Memento Mori", a short story by his brother Jonathan Nolan, and its Latin title carries the memento mori tradition - "remember that you must die" - as a pun on a protagonist who can remember almost nothing. Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator, has anterograde amnesia: since the attack in which his wife was raped and murdered he can form no new long-term memories, and his life resets every few minutes. To hunt his wife's killer he builds an external memory out of Polaroid photographs, handwritten notes and tattoos, including the injunction inked across his chest that John G. raped and murdered his wife. Around him move two permanently ambiguous figures: Teddy, who may be a corrupt cop or a friend, and Natalie, who wears the outline of the noir femme fatale. Nolan tells the story in two interleaved strands. One, in colour, runs in reverse chronological order, each scene ending where the previous one began, so we are forever catching up to a past we cannot see. The other, in black and white, runs forwards: Leonard, alone in a seedy motel room and on the phone, narrates the parallel story of Sammy Jankis, an insurance claimant whose case rhymes uneasily with his own. The strands advance toward each other and fuse at the film's centre, when the monochrome image turns to colour and a Polaroid develops in Leonard's hand. There Teddy reveals that Leonard has already avenged his wife and is now manufacturing new targets - and Leonard chooses to lie to himself and begin again.

The film's hybridity is its engine of meaning, not a stylistic flourish. Because Memento is about the impossibility of joining cause to consequence in a mind that cannot hold the past, it could not honestly be told in a form that lets the audience remember: the backward colour strand withholds the antecedent of every action, the forward monochrome strand runs calmly against it, and the viewer shares Leonard's condition rather than observing it. His voiceover names the wound the structure inflicts on us too: "How am I supposed to heal if I can't feel time?"

The black-and-white strand reconstructs the grammar of 1940s noir - the seedy motel, hard chiaroscuro, the confessional first-person voiceover - but the borrowed confessional voice narrates a past it cannot verify, so pastiche becomes critique: the genre's trustworthy narrator is hollowed out and the inheritance turned against itself. The Sammy Jankis story nested inside the film mirrors Leonard's own and may be his disowned history, the framed story becoming the instrument of the film's deepest doubt.

Memory and truth are dismantled together. Leonard states his creed - "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." - and the film then proves his "facts", the Polaroids, notes and tattoos, as corruptible as memory. On the seam shot itself, Teddy names the film's epistemology: "You don't want the truth. You make up your own truth."

The formal climax is a moral one. Leonard's "Will I lie to myself to be happy? In your case Teddy... yes I will." stages a man choosing his fiction with open eyes, and the closing anaphora - "I have to believe in a world outside my own mind" - exposes conviction as a need rather than a knowledge. The final shot loops the ending back to a beginning, formally refusing the closure the thriller and detective genres promise: this hybrid world has no exit, and the refusal to resolve is the truest image of a mind that cannot move forward.

• The Darjeeling Limited
• Marie Antoinette
• As I Lay Dying
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• The Big Short
• Consider the Lobster
• The Collected Stories
• HSC English resources