Final Film Critique Momento Mori - Research Paper Example

? Memento Mori “To picture is not to remember.” — Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory Christopher Nolan’s Memento tells a haunting story of a man without short-term memory, a condition that short-circuits his ability to make new memories and forces him to obsess over his last memory, a brutal assault upon his wife by some unknown assailant. “After a while,” he says, “everything just fades.” Since the rape and (supposed) murder of his wife in the attack that also produced his condition, this man, Leonard Shelby, has committed himself to finding the man responsible and killing him. This might be a straightforward suspense thriller if not for the inversion of the usual chronology of a narrative. Rather than begin with the traumatic event, or early in the story with a few flashbacks to the traumatic event, the movie begins instead at its chronological ending, with Leonard enacting his revenge with the polarizing aid of a Polaroid camera. The story then proceeds in reverse, through a series of events in which each successive event precedes chronologically the event it follows. In effect, the movie mirrors the memory disorder that afflicts its main character. Leonard maintains a pretense of continuity through a series of tattoos that define his identity and his purpose and photographs that provide basic information about the people and objects with which he must interact. Equipped with these two modes of visual inscription, Shelby uses “habit and routine” to make his “life possible.” This essay will offer a detailed criticism of the film focusing on three themes: the double constitution of the film's protagonist, the fate of Teddy as decided by the objects around him, and the unique position the audience is placed in if and when they become aware of the climactic “error” of the film. To help with this analysis, this paper will draw on the techniques of film criticism and the philosophy of a French theorist named Jean Baudrillard, whose work seems to provide significant insight into the film Memento. It’s the Ink that Writes You Every morning, Leonard Shelby awakes without memory of where he is or how he gets there. He can puzzle it out, and does, to be sure, but the passage of time effaces these efforts, as he will forget as soon (if not before) he leaves the room. But if his mind suffers from his strange amnesia, his body remains as a canvass on which to archive those questions of identity that haunt the agency lost along with his memory. Some tattoos provide routines by which to self-identify his disorder (“remember Sally Jankis”) while others provide information (the series of “Facts”) about the mysterious John G. responsible for his wife’s death. This cognitive road-map is in many was not nearly as striking and fetishized as it seems to be when it first appears on screen; in reality, it represents merely a more dramatic version of the same externalized memory technologies we have depended upon since the origin of writing. We use these external and technological memory systems to help make sense of the world around us, given that there is so much of the world we do not understand and far too much of the world for us to ever easily remember. In a book titled Impossible Exchange, Jean Baudrillard argues that humanity, unable to deal with the radical uncertainty of the world, attempts instead to liquidate it, “to destroy it by substituting an artificial one, built from scratch, a world for which we do not have to account to anyone” (2001, p. 14). Given the doubts we have about the world, we prefer to find solace in the “simulacra and simulations” of places like Disney or religion or particular versions of history (Baudrillard, 1994), rather than face the reality that we do not know any of these things for sure. This is exactly what takes place in Memento with Shelby's tattoo work. Thus, Shelby’s attempt to use his skin as a place to store his memory is not as remarkable for its strangeness as it is for its banality: in a culture defined by the seasonal rotation of clothing lines at Old Navy, there is always some sort of writing on the body, in the form of clothes, or hairstyle, or iPhone earphones, or the way men walk in a supposedly “manly” fashion. These constantly shifting forms of identification operate like an attention deficit disorder for selfhood, where people are constantly looking to find new ways to express who they are, but in reality are expressing what these products and social conventions want them to be. Subjects are always already defined by their objects, Baudrillard suggests (Levin, 1996), and even our memories are influenced by the ways we continuously update or decide to dress up our identity or to record our past. For Baudrillard, the proliferation and over-reliance on media and information only intensifies this pattern. The proliferation of objects produces a fragmented, almost “fractal” subject, constantly changing and reinvented (Baudrillard, 1999). We can see this in the film with every subsequent scene introducing a new version of Leonard Shelby, untethered to previous incarnations of himself because of his amnesia. Like a cancer or a virus, he grows uncontrolled, using the clues inscribed on his skin to infect and act upon the reality around him. Since he cannot know that reality, nor really be aware of his own experiences, this tattoo code is like a Bible or other religious text that helps to govern and interpret the world around him, creating certainty (“habit and routine”) in an extremely uncertain world. The film begs the question as to whether this condition is really very different from our more normal lived experience. For example, in once scene, in which Leonard Shelby sits in a diner with Officer Teddy, Shelby maligns (normal) memory for its inaccuracy, instead praising the importance and objectivity of facts. He celebrates these facts not as a psychological defense against his own lack of memory but because of his subjection to them; literally it is the so-called facts that write him. Facts, scientific and objective, dictate the course of his perceptions, even as the photographs and their annotations determine the whole of his interactions with the objects around him. In so doing, the artificial world displaces the real uncertainty of the world. In effect, the possibility of impossible exchange has been dissolved by an economy ostensibly generated by the loss of Lenny’s family. The real twist of this conversation, the not so subtle jab made at the audience is that the garishness of Shelby's inscribed body not its existence—it exists everywhere outside the film—but rather the pretense of its abnormality. Consider the amount of time Shelby spends before the mirror each time he wakes. In an ironic fashion, the mirror (coupled with some of the more haunting sections of musical score) generates a “quest for identity” motif; Shelby stares at himself in the mirror in order to determine who he is, as if the mirror image will reveal his true identity, and his purpose. The lost identity becomes the alibi not only for the murders and acts he will commit in its name but also for the acceptance of his status as an agent who must do what is written, as if the tattoos on his body are a sort of prophecy he must fulfill. As such, there is an irony in that certain tattoos have been written in reverse, as explicit a direction for self-reflection as the “remember Sammy Jankis” tattoo. His body directs him away from itself and toward its mirror image. In this way, the body before the mirror primes its status as text—identity literally written on the image of himself, there for his actual non-mirror self to read. In this, the mirror thus dubs and doubles the world (and its subject), investing it with Shelby’s vengeful “pensee unique.” The “real” Shelby comes to understand who he is by way of his double in the mirror. Put differently, the real Shelby is an effect of his image, rather than the other way around. Again, this may be a more accurate interpretation of our daily struggle for identity than we might otherwise think. For Baudrillard, the double is a function of media, be it the medium of self-identity we know as the mirror or the passive reception of a “world” through the circulation of television images. This doubling displaces innate duality (fragmentary nature, uncertainty) with a more univocal and unitary identity (2001, p. 101). Lenny’s drive for retribution “metastasizes” in his double, his vengeful doppelganger, who exists only as a function of a corporeally transcribed kill order and who, despite having killed unknown John Gs prior to the events of the film, forgets how to die, forgets how to end. Shelby says: “I have to believe that my actions have some meaning, that the world doesn’t disappear when I close my eyes.” Yes, but which world, and whose world is it? The double is more than just a socially constructed version of the subject: the double is a displacement of the reality of the subject, a clone harvested not to maintain a sense of presence but instead to facilitate the smooth flow of the code of signification and meaning. In Memento, that double carries two responsibilities, providing a sense of order first to the character of Leonard Shelby himself—the wronged avenger—and second to the audience of the film itself—who are supposed to come to see Shelby as a tragically flawed, tragically manipulated protagonist. In either case, the “truth” of Leonard Shelby vanishes in lieu of the double; or as Baudrillard explains (2001, p. 44): “The Real effaced by its double is a potentially dangerous ghost.” The Object’s Revenge and the Death of Teddy The concept of value haunts and determines Teddy’s fate more so than does Leonard’s departed wife. For while it is Lenny that fires the fatal bullet, Lenny lacks anything that we can reasonably describe as free will or agency (one need only consider the moment when they, and Shelby are forced to listen helplessly to Natalie’s joyful confession of future manipulation and exploitation), and it would miss too much to chalk up Teddy’s death to some misguided sense of justice and revenge. The real culprit is the object, which takes its revenge on Teddy by captivating him and giving him desire, a form of “seduction” that culminates in his death at the hands of Leonard Shelby (Baudrillard, 1990). As the viewer pieces the story together in reverse, she realizes that it is Teddy’s desire for Jimmy Gammel’s drug money that is the beginning of his undoing. While Leonard commits (another) murder, Teddy begins looking for the cash, only to be interrupted. Importantly, Leonard has changed clothes, from working class jeans and flannel to a stylish and expensive suit and shirt. The new Lenny (the subject is always defined by its objects, after all) eventually rejects Teddy’s explanation of the scene and then drives off in Jimmy’s car completely unaware and unconcerned about the huge box of money in the trunk (money that Teddy will never see but that Lenny is wearing in the form of his expensive suit), and initiates the series of events that will eventually culminate in Teddy’s death. This is what Baudrillard calls the revenge of the object. Teddy’s efforts on Lenny’s behalf are tainted not because of Leonard’s condition, but by Teddy's attempt to settle scores and gain money from Shelby's actions, to place Shelby into a logic of exchange. Such an exchange, drawing upon Baudrillard, is impossible—the radical uncertainty of the world does not let itself open up to the certainty of an economy, and Teddy’s ultimate “payback” is all but predictable: “Everything which sets out to exchange itself for something runs up, in the end, against the Impossible Exchange Barrier. The most concerted, most subtle attempts to make the world meaningful in value terms, to endow it with meaning, come to grief on this insuperable obstacle” (6). Even the dialogue the moment before Teddy’s death tells of the impossibility of this exchange: “L: ‘Beg for my wife’s forgiveness.’ T: ‘You don’t even know who you are, you sick fuck.’” Teddy then tries to bolt upright, shouting ‘No’ as the gun discharges and ends his life. This fatal violence isn’t so much a consequence of some failure as much as it is the completion of a particular narrative and logic of exchange. A Reassured Audience: All’s Well that Error’s Well Talking out the conclusion of the movie in light of Teddy’s death brings us to the most interesting moment in the film. Leonard Shelby has no short-term memory, and this rule is followed throughout the film's narrative, despite the difficulties it creates and the need for redundant bits of dialog. At the close of the movie, as the newly clothed Lenny begins the series of facts that will lead to Teddy’s untimely end, the movie makes its only slip. Leonard transcribes Teddy’s license plate on a piece of paper as Fact #6, even though he hasn’t recently looked at any of the other fact tattoos on his body. How is he able to know that what he is writing is in fact the 6th fact fact if he lacks the ability to keep the other facts in mind? A number of questions suddenly arise: has Shelby been faking all along? Is his will so strong that he can overcome this mental block in this one moment? Did the Nolan brothers (Christopher directed, his brother Jonathan wrote the story upon which the film is based) simply slip up? Does Leonard look at the other tattoos at some point during that scene while off-camera? If so, why not show that scene? Why continue the game of detective by noting only the license plate rather than simply proclaiming Teddy the guilty one? What does the continuation of mystery accomplish in the logic of the film? These questions cannot be answered with authority. Instead, I want to take this opportunity to consider how the form of the film, its chronologically reversed structure, works to produce certain effects of subjectivity for the audience. As Leonard transcribes the license plate, he narrates: “Do I lie to make myself happy? In your case Teddy, yes I do.” In so doing, Leonard narrates within the film’s plot the same logic to which the audience has already been exposed; having spent an hour and a half embraced by the film’s imaginary universe, the “reality” of the situation is placed on display, and this fact is highlighted by a subtle cinematic shift from black and white film to color. Therein reside the paradoxical success of the film: the truth and the lie become one and the same and yet the film still pretends to itself be the source of truth for its narrative; the audience walks out as the lights come on with an appreciation for the tragic truth of the tale. Leonard’s amnesia is transformed from disability to benefit through its role as the source of his (temporary) absolution through the murder of Teddy. Thus the reason to continue the mystery rather than leap forward to its resolution: “In the end, we prefer the ex nihilo. We prefer something which draws its magic from arbitrariness, from the absence of causes and history” (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 11). This is both the danger and the “gift” of simulation and the double. Baudrillard explains: Simulation is like a prophecy which, by being repeated, becomes self-fulfilling. It needs no initial motive; its motive force arises out of the process itself, without any relation of cause and effect… One is responsible only in respect of causes, whereas he can answer only for the fateful sequence of events, the irresistible concatenation of effects (it doesn’t make any sense, but it works). The perfect crime is the crime with no ulterior motive; the one which simply follows out a train of thought (2001, p. 70). An agent without agency, dominated by objects, and governed inexplicably by a “slip” in the logic of the film’s formal structure, Leonard Shelby becomes an alibi for a system routinely engaged in the “perfect crime”—the destruction or murder of the real (Levin, 1996). The danger of this particular film is not that Shelby potentially cheats the systems of memory-writing that is the core logic of the film, nor that audiences will miss a potential plot hole. Rather the danger of the film lies in the impression communicated to the audience of a truth uncovered by the film’s inverted narrative structure. Whatever fundamental challenge this narrative structure poses to audiences and their preconceptions about film narrative at the beginning of the film, by the end the oddity of this structure has given way to the more comfortable and familiar logic of history, and with it traditional narrative. As such, the film demonstrates, like the vast majority of films, that the present can be understood by way of the past, a past that is remembered. And if Leonard Shelby can't quite remember it all, the audience can remember it for him. As such, despite the seemingly radical nature of the film, Memento ends up constructing audiences in a very conservative, predictable fashion. The far more original and challenging ending would have been one that called upon the audience to think how they are exactly like Leonard Shelby and his predicament, but outside the confines and logic of the movie. This sort of lesson would have forced audiences to examine not just the narrative of the film but the logic of narrative itself, and its relation to identity. Sadly, despite so much potential to do so, the film never takes the audience in this direction. References Baudrillard, J. (1990). Seduction. New York: St. Martin's Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J. (1999). Revenge of the Crystal. London: Pluto Press. Baudrillard, J. (2001). Impossible Exchange. London: Verso. Bergson, H. (1991). Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Levin, C. (1996). Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics. London: Prentice Hall. Nolan, Christopher [dir.]. (2001). Memento. New Market Films. Read More