We should really be starting at the end. Christopher Nolan’s tricksy thriller broke the mould when it came out in 2000 – confounding audiences by running its story in reverse. If that wasn’t enough, the film was about a guy trying to solve a murder while suffering from anterograde amnesia (aka short-term memory loss), making the whole thing feel like a film noir about a goldfish.
Nolan once tried to explain it all on a blackboard, ending up with a diagram that somehow made it even more confusing. If you’ve just watched Memento(currently on Netflix UK)and your head still hurts, read on as we unpick the film’s biggest knots, from back to front (and back again…)
Why is everything backwards?
Because Christopher Nolan made it. This is the guy who went on to make a movie inside out (Inception) and in two different directions at once (Tenet). Memento actually follows a similar structure to Tenet – starting at the end of the second act, running backwards to the beginning of the story, and then meeting up with the middle again for the big finale.
If it sounds confusing, it’s meant to be. Getting inside the mind of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), the film throws us into the same state of disorientation that he feels every time he glitches back to not knowing what the hell is going on.
Fun fact: a hidden feature on the film’s special edition DVD lets you watch the film recut in chronological order. But where’s the fun in that?
What’s with the black and white bits?
Although Memento will always be known as “the backwards film”, only part of the story runs in the wrong direction. All the scenes shot in colour are flashbacks (remembered back to front), while the black and white footage runs chronologically, the old-fashioned way.
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The turning point comes when Shelby kills Jimmy and takes a photo of the body – with the Polaroid slowly changing from black and white to colour as it develops. In Nolan’s mad blackboard scribble, this is the point where everything finally starts running in the same direction.
Partly because it helped sell the film by having a shirtless Guy Pearce on all the posters (dye-job blonde boys were all the rage back in 2000, blame Sum 41 and NSYNC…) But it also makes a lot of sense. Shelby constantly forgets everything, so he has to write it all down. The Polaroids help with faces, but tattoos are essential for the really important details that are likely to get lost or washed off.
The confusion starts when Shelby starts getting passed the wrong information, trusting the wrong people and even lying to himself – as the film’s finale reveals.
What did Teddy and Natalie have to do with it all?
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We know Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) isn’t all that he seems (“don’t trust his lies”), but we only find out late in the game that he’s actually a corrupt cop who’s been using Shelby to do his dirty work. Shelby thinks Teddy is his friend, but all Teddy cares about is money – taking advantage of his memory loss to trick him into going after random scumbags that he wants to rip off.
Random scumbags like Jimmy (Larry Holden). The most he has to do with anything is introducing his girlfriend, Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), into the story. With Jimmy dead, his old associates come looking for Natalie to pay off his debts – before she steals Teddy’s idea of tricking Shelby into taking out her enemies. Shelby knows he’s being used, but Natalie steals all his permanent pens before he can write it all down to remind himself.
So who’s the killer?
We never find out. “There’s no conspiracy,” says Teddy. “It was just dumb f*cking luck.” The whole revenge plot was a ruse set up by Teddy to get Shelby to target other people. It was (probably) him on the phone the whole time, masterminding everything – right up until the point Teddy tricks himself into killing him.
Shelby gets his revenge by writing false clues for his future forgetful self to find – knowing that his trail of notes will convince himself into believing Teddy is the man who murdered his wife. And he’s right, since the film opens (or closes?) with Shelby killing Teddy.
But what about Sammy?
Remember that other guy who had anterograde amnesia? Sammy (Stephen Tobolowsky) isn’t just there to make everything even more confusing. What starts off as a side-story from Shelby’s old insurance days gets tangled up in the main plot at the end as we find out half of the film’s “flashbacks” maybe aren’t as real as they look.
Did Sammy accidentally kill his wife, or was it Shelby all along? Did Sammy ever exist at all? The last riddle of Memento is deliberately left unsolved. And that’s the perfect place to start.
Leonard has repressed and distorted the truth out of guilt. As Teddy later confirms during his confession, the real Sammy Jankis was an unmarried fraud (as Leonard proved after investigating him) and his story is truly Leonard's personal story. Leonard has repressed and distorted the truth out of guilt.
After killing Jimmy, he resolves to go after Teddy, and makes a note to himself that will make Teddy his next target by default, effectively sealing the other man's fate. As he drives away, he contemplates his own personal view of reality, and examines the possibility that his reality may in fact be a construction.
Finally, Teddy relents and tells the truth. Leonard found and killed John G over a year ago, but his constant search for a man with a very common name has made him useful. Teddy has turned Leonard into a hitman, marking different targets for execution and allowing Leonard to forget his actions.
In a dramatic exchange towards the end of the movie, we learn that Teddy is a corrupt cop using Leonard to kill criminals by leading him to believe they are his wife's killer. He, in fact, has already killed the man who broke into his house, only he's forgotten.
He tries to assume a new identity and possibly use the money for further drug deals. He finds Natalie, a known drug intermediary. Natalie knows that Leonard has eliminated her friend Jimmy and that Leonard also has the money. She plots to obtain it.
John Edward Gammel, more commonly referred to throughout the movie as Teddy, and situationally John G, is the deuteragonist of the 2000 movie Memento. He is an officer of the law that assisted Leonard Shelby in locating and killing the man that assaulted, raped, and potentially murdered his wife.
Leonard's lie is literal, one that helps him get revenge for a crime he cannot remember. He also layers his lie, telling Sammy's story instead of carrying the guilt of his own. Guilt is also a prevalent theme. It's under every underlying mission Leonard undertakes.
Leonard has repressed and distorted the truth out of guilt. As Teddy later confirms during his confession, the real Sammy Jankis was an unmarried fraud (as Leonard proved after investigating him) and his story is truly Leonard's personal story. Leonard has repressed and distorted the truth out of guilt.
The real John G is whoever fits Leonard's description based on his notes and tattoos. In the movie's timeline, Jimmy Grantz and Teddy(John Gammel) end up being the “real” John G for Leonard.
Teddy tells Leonard that his wife survived the attack. he says, Sammy Jankis was a fraud who was not even married and it was Leonard's wife who was diabetic.
It is unknown whether Catherine survived the attack or not - Teddy claimed that she did, only to grow weary of Leonard's condition and commit suicide by having him give her an overdose of insulin. Leonard however believed she died in the attack, and it was Mrs Jankis who committed suicide in that fashion.
In "Memento," the color scenes proceed (or recede) backwards, whereby each new scene actually occurs prior to the one it succeeds. Within the timeline of the film, these color scenes tell the story in reverse. But Nolan also shoots scenes in black and white, and these are all progressing in a standard, linear fashion.
Leonard vows revenge against Teddy for revealing the truth, preparing to frame him as John G.out of spite. Leonard Shelby is the main protagonist of the 2000 film Memento. He suffers from anterograde amnesia, which renders him unable to remember anything since the night of his wife's tragic death.
Leonard meets Natalie, a bartender who seems to genuinely care for him. She provides him with information about a drug dealer named Dodd, whom he believes could be his wife's killer. Leonard kills Dodd, convinced that he has avenged his wife's death.
She asked Leonard to administer insulin until she entered a coma and died. Leonard repressed this memory and concocted the story of Sammy Jankis, who, in reality, had been a conman that Leonard exposed as a faker.
The film follows Leonard Shelby (Pearce), a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia—resulting in short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories—who uses an elaborate system of photographs, handwritten notes, and tattoos in an attempt to uncover the perpetrator who killed his wife and caused him to ...
Its protagonist Leonard Shelby has lost some of his ability to remember. As he tells anyone who will listen, while he doesn't have amnesia (since he can remember who he is and what happened to him up to 'the Incident', an attack that left him with brain damage), he 'can't make new memories'.
Natalie, on the other hand, isn't pulling any punches when it comes to blatantly using Leonard for her designs. Her manipulation, in fact, is so blatant that she straight up tells Leonard that she is going to use him.
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