Memento movie essay

Sigrid Guzmán

English 124-1

May 8, 2017

Prof. Myrna Monllor

Memento

The movie memento is about a man with a type of amnesia which doesn't allow him to make new memories. He only remembers his old memories which were created before the accident. The only way he remembers about current events is with pictures, small notes and tattoos all over his body. He needs to remind himself that he is seeking revenge on the man that killed his wife and the clues he has are very ambiguous like the name of the killer being john D. another clue is that the subject is male and white. We are presented with various characters all playing a crucial part in our protagonist life, but we aren't completely certain of who they are and if they are trustworthy.

We have Teddy which acts as Leonard’s best friend and keeps giving him leads to people he suspects that could be this john D. However, later in the movie we notice that he isn’t his best friend, but rather a police officer that was put on Leonard’s case and he is fooling Leonard into making him kill other, false, john D's so that he could make some extra cash. We also have Natalie that seems to be a great help with the search of this killer by giving good clues to Leonard like a license plate and an ID with the face of Teddy. We are made believe that Teddy is the killer and Leonard has already make his mind that he has to kill this man. Later we see who Natalie really is and that she is just using Leonard’s amnesia to trick him into killing people she wants dead. An example of this is when she fools Leonard into killing Dodd, because she said Dodd was the one who punched her when in reality it was Leonard. We also have the lesser character which is the hotel managed that has booked multiple rooms under Leonard’s name so that he has to pay double. 

In this movie we see continuously distrust through all the characters, including the protagonist because he also plays with his own mind by writing false notes about people because he felt mad with him at that moment. Because there is so much with tampering with evidence and facts that we don’t even know what the real story is. We don’t really know who killed his wife, we don’t even know if John D is a real person, we don’t know if his wife is dead and we don’t even know the difference between Sammy and Leonard. Sammy was a man who had the same condition as Leonard, but Leonard thought he was faking it, because he remembered some tasks like how he would inject his wife with insulin. Teddy then tells us that Sammy’s story is fake and that he is confusing it with his own; he says that Leonard was the one who was faking it and that his wife was the one with diabetes, but Leonard doesn’t believe it, but we don’t know what the truth is.

This is a movie that plays with your emotions and your memory. The movie ends with an open ending so that you can believe what is right and what is wrong. The director hides some Easter-eggs through the movie like changing handwriting or small details to express to the viewer that memory isn’t really reliable with crimes and shouldn’t be base of a case. It’s a really interesting movie with great actors and a unique way of telling the story by starting with the ending and ending with the beginning. It portrays very well the way that Leonard’s mind work and it shows it with the weird cuts so that we could see and know the same thinks Leonard’s sees and knows.

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