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Memento

Lennie has a problem. He can't remember. Well not really, in fact his condition, so he tells us many times, is, that he can't create new memories. Not entirely without memory, he has long term memory. These memories constitute a knowledge of past events, or of the pastness of past events. However, even this memory for Lennie, seems to be impaired - fixated, stuck, like the replaying of cracked record, around the events that caused his disablement. These events are traumatic and violent - the rape and murder of his wife by two home intruders, and his own bashing and subsequent severe head injury. These facts, or so we think them, can only be ascertained from delving backwards into the shattered fragments of the pathological status of Lennie's mind and memory.

Christopher Nolan's film Memento explores not only the paradoxical nature of memory and its relation to forgetting, but also the uses and abuses to which memory can be put. Just as memory is necessarily backward looking and often fragmentary, the film is screened in alternating time frames in point and counterpoint, between present and past. The opening scene unfolds in reverse, as a polaroid picture is undeveloped and sucked back into the camera. Described by Christley as, " a film that questions both memory and empirical evidence, a film that gives us no sure answers, plays gleefully with our expectations, and toys with chronological narrative in a way that's both ingenious and perhaps a bit smug," (Jaime Christley, Memento, http://filmwritten.org/reviews/2001/memento.html 5/27/2001) it is a thriller in the genre of film noir, which unbalances the viewers perceptions of how and why certain events occur. Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator who suffers from a rare memory disorder, anteriorgrade amnesia which prevents him from forming new memories. In fact he has trouble remembering events which happened only ten minutes prior. Yet, Shelby is determined to avenge his wife's...