Have you seen Memento? No?
Seriously?
Go watch it.
Right now.
I’ll wait.
Good, right?
Chances are you didn’t take 113 minutes out of your day just now to watch the movie (shame on you). Maybe you’ve already seen it. Or, far more likely, you tried to watch it once and stopped because it gave you a headache.
I’m not calling you stupid. I’m not saying you lack the mental capacity to understand this movie. But seriously, Memento is confusing. Because it’s backwards.
Backwards.
Think about that for a second.
Sounds kind of dumb, doesn’t it? If you know the ending, what’s the point?
The point is that now you’re as close as possible to sharing the main character’s perspective.
See, Leonard has short term memory loss. He experiences the world in context-free fragments. And thanks to genius of Christopher Nolan (and his brother Jonathan, whose excellent short story is the basis for the movie), so do we. I won’t explain exactly how it works here, for brevity’s sake.
But it does work, and it works well. The result is that at first you know about as much as Leonard does, and so you understand his frustration. But then you start to see the big picture, in a way that he can’t. You know which of his actions are mistakes. You know who’s stabbing him in the back. And by the end/beginning, the gravity of where Leonard is headed is clear. Not just because you know the ending. You’ve gotten a glimpse at his entire existence. And you see how truly pathetic it is. You can’t help but feel sorry for a man who doesn’t even realize that his life is going in circles.
The final realization you’ll have is that, of course, there’s more to the movie than just the surface level story. The director is saying something (aren’t they always?). We go in circles, too. And we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We make the same mistakes again and again and again, because we’re creatures of habit. The people around us can see it, but we’re incapable of looking at the big picture.
Most of us don’t have short term memory loss. But we do have a remarkable knack for forgetting (or maybe just ignoring) our past. Maybe it’s even intentional. After all, going in circles is easy. Would we even know what to do with ourselves otherwise?
But maybe it’s time to get out of the rut. Maybe it’s time to move forwards.
After all, you know what they say: if you’re not moving forwards, you’re just moving backwards.
See what I did there? Did you see it?
…Sorry.
Movies! 