Spoilers for Memento
and Inception ahead.
It’s hard for me to know how I would have reacted to Memento if I had seen it when it was
first released without knowing anything about it. Maybe I would have been as enthusiastic about it as just
about everyone else was. All I can
possibly know is that when I finally saw it after seeing every one of
Christopher Nolan’s other films at that time (it was sometime in 2011), I was
underwhelmed and a little disappointed.
What went wrong?
Nolan is one of my favorite modern filmmakers (as a quick glance through
this blog’s archive will tell you).
I consider The Dark Knight and
Inception to be among the very best
films of recent years, and I think Batman
Begins and The Prestige are
fantastic movies. I even enjoyed Insomnia and his very first feature Following. So why couldn’t I enjoy the movie that many consider to be
Nolan’s first masterpiece, that even many of his detractors acknowledge as a
good film.
Maybe, as I suggested above, part of it had to do with
knowing too much about the movie before viewing. It’s a little ironic (given the famous structure of the
film) that Memento, the movie that
launched Nolan’s career was the last of his films that I went back to
watch. By that point, I already
knew a lot about it: that the protagonist has short-term memory loss, that the
film is told backwards and that it is eventually revealed that the protagonist
is responsible for his wife’s death.
This is one of the problems that arises when a movie with a twist of
some kind becomes a pop culture phenomenon: it becomes hard to avoid
spoilers. There are examples of movies
that I have enjoyed even when I already knew The Big Secret: Fight Club, The Sixth Sense and The
Crying Game come to mind. But
there are also movies that depend so heavily on a big reveal at the end that
the movie becomes hard for me to enjoy if I already know the secret: The Usual Suspects comes to mind.
Memento fell into
the latter category for me. The
purpose of the backwards-chronology narrative is to give viewers a sense of
memory loss similar to the protagonist’s (Leonard). But if you already know the secret, the movie becomes a game
of trying to figure out how the pieces are eventually going to fit the way you
expect them to. It also creates
the frustrating situation of knowing that a character is on a wild-goose chase,
which means that I tend to stop caring about what happens because I know that
it ultimately won’t matter.
Obviously, this is not really Nolan’s fault. He constructed a movie that is intended
to be seen (like all movies) with open eyes and no preconceptions. However, Nolan is responsible for a
movie that cannot stand up to repeated viewings. Unlike Inception (which
I think requires multiple viewings in order to understand the movie’s themes), Memento begins to fall apart the second
time through. The behavior of
Carrie-Anne Moss’ character in particular makes no sense upon second
viewing. In terms of the film’s
narrative, her behavior follows the rhythms of a standard film noir femme
fatale: at first the audience trusts her because we think she’s helping the
(anti-)hero, but then she reveals that she can’t be trusted. But since the movie is told in reverse,
her actual behavior is that she uses him for her own purposes first, and after
she has used him, she helps him and acts like he should trust her.
I really don’t understand why she helps him at this
point. She knows that Teddy
arranged the meeting that got her boyfriend killed, but there is nothing to
suggest that she knows she is giving him Teddy’s real name. Even if she does, she could not
possibly have known his license plate from Leonard’s tattoo. So, the idea that she is still using
him for her own purposes is out.
Maybe she has begun to feel sympathy for him? But I don’t really buy that either (despite what Leonard
writes on his Polaroid of her).
She has gotten frustrated with his constant talk of his wife, and she
has used several unkind words to describe her. There is a nice scene when she takes off his shirt and sees
his tattoos, so maybe seeing the extent of his obsession makes her want to help
him. But it still doesn’t make
sense that she would take off his shirt in the first place. Her behavior essentially feels dictated
by the plot and not by her character.
Nolan has never been particularly good at writing parts for women, but I
think his characterization of Mal in Inception
is a way of acknowledging this, so hopefully this weekend will reveal that he
has broken that streak.
I like that Nolan was playing around with story structure in
Memento, but the film is full of
elements that he has been able to do much better in subsequent films. After the brilliant opening scene
showing Leonard killing Teddy in reverse, the rhythm of the first few scenes
feels wrong. The scenes are
frustratingly short so not only is the audience confused (which is fine), but I
was also feeling like I was being jerked around. It doesn’t help that each short scene is bookended by quick
fades to and from black, creating a sense that these are just separate scenes
placed one after the other instead of a complete movie (he used a similar
technique in Following). My dad tells me he almost walked out on
the movie when he first saw it and with this frustrating opening, I can’t say
that I really blame him. In
contrast, Nolan’s film The Prestige
has a far less frustrating time-shifting narrative. The crucial difference is that almost every transition in
this film is done with a straight cut rather than fading to black as Memento does to distinguish different
timelines. As a result, The Prestige flows much more easily as a
narrative than Memento.
The emotional purpose of Memento’s
structure is to create a sense of reaching further into a character’s past
while the story is moving forward, eventually arriving at a major secret, but I
think Nolan does this to a much more powerful effect in Inception. Part of
this is because Nolan disguises it in Inception
by making the audience think that we are watching a straightforward narrative
film. There is a fascinating
tension as realize that while the story is moving forward, we have also been
moving steadily backward in Cobb’s past.
The timeline here is marked with three utterances of a line, the first
two times by Mal, the third time by Cobb: “You’re waiting for a train, a train
that will take you far away. You
know where you hope this train will take you, but you can’t know for
sure…” Each time this line
appears, it takes on more meaning until we arrive at its origin. The tension between a forward narrative
direction and a backward emotional direction make this all the more
powerful. Yet in Memento, the audience knows after a
certain point that the story is being told in reverse and that they should
expect a big revelation at the end.
It lacks the narrative tension that makes the revelation in Inception so powerful.
Nolan also accomplishes the revelation in Memento with what is essentially an
enormous info dump. A common
criticism of Nolan’s films is that he uses dialogue rather than images to explain
things. Memento is the worst offender in this regard, which makes it odd
that Nolan detractors sometimes consider this to be his best work. Inception
uses dialogue to explain its revelation, but the power of this scene doesn’t
come from Cobb’s description of planting a thought in Mal’s head, but from the
circumstances surrounding the third utterance of the repeated line: that we’ve
heard it before, but each time from Mal; that Cobb is now saying it; that we
can see where they are when Cobb says it.
Now, we understand what this means. It’s a combination of dialogue, images, placement in the
structure of the story, and the fact that this revelation is occurring at the
same time as an enormous action climax involving three other sets of characters
(just thinking about all of that is making my heart pound a little
faster). Memento’s dialogue-driven revelation just comes up short.
For me, the most disappointing thing about Memento is that the ironic twist just
makes things feel smaller. After
two viewings, it leaves me with a feeling that nothing in the movie really
matters. This also contributed to
my lack of interest in the film during my second viewing. I just didn’t really care. The idea of a man seeking revenge
because he can’t remember that he has already accomplished it is an interesting
idea, but I don’t think Memento
really makes it work. I think
Nolan intends the movie to be a tragic film noir (listen to the music; it’s
clearly scored for something powerful and significant), and it is possible to do
this. Look at The Third Man or The Dark
Knight for that matter. Hell,
“Hamlet” is essentially a noir tragedy.
But the ending of Memento
reveals that is neither noir nor tragedy.
The essence of noir is of a man (traditionally) trying to accomplish something,
trying to do good for himself or someone else, and discovering that the world
is a place that won’t let him do this.
The world won’t let him be a hero.
In Memento, it’s not the world
or the system that has trapped Leonard.
Leonard has knowingly trapped himself using his own mental condition (knowing
both that he has trapped himself and that he will forget the trap). This is not the same as a character trapped
in his own mistakes or his own hubris.
The deliberate decision to do this just doesn’t really fit with film
noir. It’s more absurdist than
noir, more Waiting for Godot or The Myth of Sisyphus than Double Indemnity (come to think of it,
Sisyphus is a really good comparison with Leonard). And before you say anything, yes, noir can be existential (Le Samourai, The American), but existentialism and absurdism are two different
things. Existentialism questions
whether there is meaning in life.
Absurdism believes there is no meaning.
I suppose there could be an absurdist noir, but certainly
not an absurdist tragedy. Tragedy
can certainly be pessimistic, but there must be meaning in it, there must be a
catharsis. Above all, tragedy
demands that the audience care about what happens. The first time seeing Memento,
I did feel something for Leonard, but it was closer to pity than sympathy. I felt that it was a sad situation for
him to be in, but that certainly is not enough emotion for tragedy. After the second viewing, I honestly
didn’t care about Leonard at all.
In fact, the only character I felt anything for was Teddy (yes, I know
that’s not his real name). The
last shot of Teddy in the movie is of him scrounging through bushes looking for
his keys while Leonard plots his death.
Teddy isn’t a good guy, but he isn’t particularly evil. He’s a fool with a goofy smile, and I
felt some pity for him knowing that he was going to get his head blown to
pieces at the beginning/end of the movie.
But like I said before, pity is not enough emotion for tragedy. Maybe if Leonard had a different
relationship with Teddy there would be some tragedy in the knowledge that
Leonard would eventually kill him.
But as it is, Teddy’s just a silly goof who gets his head blown off by a
guy who isn’t even going to remember it.
Is all this to say that Memento
is a bad film? No, just one that I
found disappointing. There are
moments that I like (“I don’t feel drunk” and “No, he’s chasing me” are
particularly memorable). Almost
all of the individual scenes work well.
It’s a great-looking movie (Nolan’s first collaboration with Wally
Pfister!), and it’s clear from Memento
that Nolan is a good director. And
Guy Pearce does a good job with the difficult role of playing a character who
doesn’t really grow or change and can’t really know anything in any scene. But for a movie with its reputation, it
was quite a letdown when I finally saw it (I guess I understand how people felt
when they weren’t as impressed with The
Dark Knight and Inception as lots
of people). I don’t approve of the
term “overrated,” but if I were going to use it, I would use it to describe Memento. Essentially, I think it’s a clever screenwriting exercise by
a filmmaker who would go on to make much better movies.
