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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
But it's important to remember that this Gothic noir is dribbled out to us, largely in voice-over, in short black-and-white scenes in chronological order that alternate with the much more kinetic and confusing main backward story line, which is told in color.
The first of the film's cosmic jokes is revealed in the final color scene (which is of course the first scene chronologically of the color story). We see Leonard kill Jimmy, who we know is Natalie's boyfriend; with this act, Leonard thinks he's killed the man who killed his wife. But then Teddy appears to articulate something we're just beginning to understand: Leonard has already tracked down his wife's killer: He just doesn't remember it. It's one of "Memento's" delicious ironies that the avenging murder we've already seen Leonard accomplish is different from the one Teddy's talking about, but the net effect is the same: to give us a sudden and monstrous realization of Leonard's sanguinary condition.
Teddy even shows Leonard a Polaroid of Leonard, bloodied but beamingly happy, pointing proudly to an empty, untattooed spot on his breast, where we know he wants to imprint the news that he finally avenged his wife's death. Teddy says he'd taken the photo right after the deed to give Leonard evidence that he'd achieved his desired revenge.
Teddy explains to Leonard that he has manipulated Leonard to kill Jimmy and possibly several other similarly loathsome bottom feeders before that. He says something to the effect that it was "to give you something to live for"; of course, Teddy also has to admit that his own motivation had a little bit to do with the $200,000 in drug money stashed in the trunk of Jimmy's Jaguar.
Leonard gets angry, and Teddy, apparently frustrated by his lack of memory, hits him hard with some uncomfortable truths: Leonard's wife hadn't even died, Teddy tells Leonard. She actually survived the assault. Leonard himself had killed her, by administering insulin shots. The Sammy Jankis business is a dreamy conflation of a real story with events from Leonard's own marriage, events so horrifying and guilt-causing that Leonard has had to project them onto someone else -- poor, hapless Sammy Jankis.
This astonishing scene at once solves one part of the movie's puzzle but creates a new one in its place. For the first, we understand that Nolan has upended the conventions of the film noir, in which a flawed hero tries to find some measure of justice in an unjust world. Leonard has suddenly become an Everyman in a potentially infinite purgatory, blindly trying to revenge an act that has already been avenged, and finding himself manipulated, over and over, by people who would use a splendidly configured avenger for their own ends. (It has been hinted along the way that even Teddy's death may be the handiwork of another manipulator, with a few hints pointing at Natalie as the possible perpetrator.)
Nolan lets us bask in this revelation for all of a minute before unleashing another cosmic joke.
Leonard, having learned this, struggles to deal with it. He knows he won't be able to remember what Teddy is telling him. So he empties his gun, to fool himself into thinking he hadn't used it. He burns the bloody and triumphant photo of himself. He pulls out a Polaroid of Teddy and writes on it: "DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES"; and he copies down Teddy's license-plate number. He drives off to have the number tattooed on his leg as a clue to help himself track down the killer later. In effect, he turns himself into a time bomb, ready to go off when, at a period sometime in the future that he won't be able to appreciate fully, he will finally "solve" his wife's murder again, and wreak vengeance on Teddy.
In the end, "Memento" rights itself, and the wronged will somehow be avenged, in a corrupt way that is the only way to achieve justice in a corrupt world.
Right? Perhaps.
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Once you see "Memento" a couple of times, you figure out the devilish scheme Nolan has constructed. Here's how I think it works. If we give letters to the backward color scenes and numbers to the monochrome scenes, then what Nolan presents us with is this:
Credits, 1, V, 2, U, 3, T, 4, S, 5, R, 6, Q ... all the way to 20, C, 21, B, and, finally, a scene I'm going to call 22/A, for reasons I'll explain in a minute.
What is beautifully clever here is that black-and-white scene 22, the last sequence in the film, almost imperceptibly slips into color and, in an almost vertiginous intellectual loop, becomes (in real-world order) scene A, the first of the color scenes: This then serves as the link between the forward progression of black-and-white material and the backwardly presented color stuff.
