The Art of Manipulation

    Memento is a movie to pay attention to. With the flashbacks, color, and montages this was an incredible watch. Christopher Nolan did a great job of portraying and telling the story of Leonard, a man who has had memory issues ever since attempting to protect his wife from invaders. We see him not only try to remember anything he can but also use pictures and notes to live his life. Using black and white versus color pictures, flashes of different memories, and discontinuity make for a great movie.

    Several instances in the movie show black and white scenes while the others show scenes in color.  Black and white in this movie represents when time is moving forward. Most of the scenes the viewer sees, with color, are moving backward in time. The backward and forward movement of time seemed to overlap towards the end when Leonard developed a picture showing the viewer that the stories from both had connected. I loved this aspect of the film because I had never seen something like this before. It was hard to notice at first but made complete sense when looking at it from Leonard's view. To me, it represented the blurred uncertainty that he faced throughout his life after the incident.  When he finally killed the person in the basement and the color came back, I understood that Leonard had finally connected the past and present memories that brought him there. 

    The cuts of several scenes represented so many different aspects of Leonard. From what he remembers to what is real, everything is a mystery to the viewer until we see what happened from his point of view. The one instance where we start to doubt everything Leonard has told or "showed" us is when he remembers Sammy in the home. For a very brief second instead of Sammy sitting and staring in a chair, we see Leonard replace him. It was almost chilling realizing that everything we as the viewer had experienced and the story fed to us through Leonard was not factual. It indicated that he was the one with diabetes and he was the one that killed his wife. Although this is further proven after the explanation Teddy gives, up until this point, there was not a sufficient reason for doubt. I thought this was an amazing introduction to a "plot twist" that made for a surprising ending.

    Discontinuity is clear in this film from the first sequence. The discontinuity in this film was needed and reflected the uncertainty and trust that Leonard puts in his "past self". We don't know what happened to get him in the current situation, and neither does he. Every time we see him wake up, nobody knows what happened for him to get there. The whole film seems to move in a backward manner. We see the photos that he has and the notes he writes for them. Then, we see him take the pictures and write the notes for himself. Seeing that one scene ends where the last started was very helpful to the viewer. This was, for the most part, throughout the entire film never following a continuous forward-moving time structure. 

    The initial confusion when starting this movie goes away after not only understanding the condition Leonard has but also understanding that we are watching the thought process behind this condition unfold. All of the minor things the producers do to improve the film such as going between black and white scenes and full-color scenes, adding a specific cut scene to represent the instability in Leonard's mind, and the discontinuity of the film worked together to tell the story in a backward fashion.  Overall, this was a film like something I had never seen before. Watching a movie start at what should be the climax was very thrilling but also a letdown at first because it felt as if I just got spoiled the end. But this movie kept me guessing quite literally the entire time through the questioning of why.