Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a former insurance
investigator suffering from short-term memory loss who wants to hunt down and
kill the man he believes raped and murdered his wife. This classic film noir
scenario supplies the basic action for Memento directed by Christopher Nolan,
but in telling its story the film employs a highly sophisticated narrative
technique. I am not one for spoilers, and I do not intend to reveal the
surprising dénouement, but it is difficult to talk about Memento at all without
saying something about its adroit employment of what might be termed a
reversible time frame, in which the end appears at the very beginning, and the
events that led up to it appear in reverse order.
No doubt some viewers will remain perplexed by
this device well into the movie, but if so the fault is theirs and not Nolan's,
who provides enough subtle clues to guide them through his labyrinth, starting
with the image on a Polaroid photo seen beneath the opening titles, an image
that is at first clearly defined and then slowly fades away. In fact, not the
least praiseworthy thing about Memento is the way it demands the active
participation of the spectator, who must pay attention to details and constantly
assimilate what is taking place on screen rather than getting it predigested on
a celluloid platter.
A project like this is faced with the constant
risk of turning into a display of empty pyrotechnics, but this disaster never
befalls Memento. Nolan--who also wrote the screenplay based upon a story by
Jonathan Nolan--uses his unconventional
narrative device both conscientiously and consistently with evident rewards,
since the movie in following Leonard's steps backward into the past often succeeds in evoking a sense of the uncanny
that few films possess--the obvious bench marks are
Carl Dreyer's Vampyr, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Alfred Hitchcock's
Vertigo.
But if Memento as a whole is not quite in the same class as those movies, simply
achieving that effect with the elementary resources of the cinema and
without falling back upon all kinds of CGI wizardry is no small achievement
these days.
Of equal importance to the film's artistic success is the way in which Nolan
gives equal attention to both aspects of the film. Unlike Andrew and Larry
Wachowski's contemptible The Matrix, which uses a mediocre science fiction story as no more than a pretext
for its high-tech high jinks, Memento is equally successful as a thriller and as
an example of innovative narrative technique, reinforced by a quite traditional,
highly controlled use of mise en scène. (The film's only unconventional visual
device, a highly effective one, is that of alternating sections in color with
ones in black and white--indicating flashbacks.) It is only possible to measure the
film's novelty by imagining what would have resulted had Jorge Luis Borges or Alain
Robbe-Grillet done the screen adaptation of Billy Wilder's Double
Indemnity.
While the repetition of events may remind some
viewers of Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, others will possibly recognize that
Memento is a lineal
if remote descendent of one of the monuments of the German silent cinema, Robert Wiene's
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), whose main character also suffers from a
crisis of identity. However, according to a famous account
by Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler, Wiene's production betrayed
the intentions of its original scenarists, Leopold Janowitz and Carl Mayer--who
had composed an anti-authoritarian tract about an evil charlatan who is in actuality
the respectable head of a lunatic asylum--by making the hero himself a madman:
"The original story was an account of real horrors; Wiene's version
transforms that account into a chimera concocted and narrated by the mentally
deranged Francis."
If there is no
point in debating the probable veracity of Kracauer's assertion, it is still
permissible to contest his main thesis--that the Wiene version defused all of
the disturbing implications of the original script concept. In a certain way, it
would be more accurate to say that Kracauer wanted to protect himself from the
film's most disturbing implications. The major themes of The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari, madness and the dissolution of identity,
were also those of German Expressionist literature and drama, and recent
historians like Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper have emphasized the
importance of those themes for understanding Expressionism, just as they have
demonstrated how much those themes are objectively grounded in such phenomena as
the uncontrolled expansion of technology and the growth of great modern cities
whose inhabitants have little more status than ciphers.
By
tapping into those themes, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was far closer to the
most powerful currents of Expressionism than in its eclectically modernist
visual style, which mixes up Cubist and Expressionist elements. In effect, by
adding the framing story which introduces Francis as a patient in an institution, the Wiene picture transformed what would have been an
interesting but conventionally realistic story into a cosmological allegory of
madness. But Kracauer, who was piously addicted to realism and who subtitled his
book on film theory The Redemption of Physical Reality, would have nothing to do with allegory just as he fled
from almost any kind of fantasy with superstitious horror and disdained Expressionism as a glorification of
irrationality--hardly a fruitful basis for getting into The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari.
In Memento, the ravens of Dr. Caligari come home to roost. It would be possible, of
course, to defuse Memento's disturbing implications by pointing out that the
hero is a pathological case. But what Leonard's excursion into madness, whether
of organic or psychological origin, serves to reveal is the very fragility of
identity itself, and the movie underlines this fragility by adopting a very
postmodernist conception of identity as primarily constituted by signs. After
all what is the material Leonard accumulates in the course of trying to find his
wife's murderer--notes, photos, even injunctions and reminders that he has
tattooed on his body--if not signs whose ultimate purpose is to guard him
against his lapses of memory and to reassure him of
his true identity? Of his vocation as the avenger of his wife?
But
is his behavior, however bizarre, really any different from that of
"normal" people? Leonard's affliction, which causes him to fall out of
step with the rest of the world, opens him to a truth the others conveniently
ignore--namely, that the only tangible proof of their identity lies in the
assorted signs they bear with them, starting with their "proper"
names. Not clothes but signs make the man, and Memento graphically embodies this
premise with Leonard's tattoos. Where he believes he is preserving his memory by
inscribing messages on the surface of his body, it is much more these messages
which define who he is. Moreover, the quasi-oracular nature of the tattoos and
the power they exercise over him become radically manifest in a series of scenes
in which he studies them--and his own body--with evident auto-erotic
fascination.
Oedipus, the classic
example of confused identity in Western culture, had it far better than Leonard,
since he found out who he "really" was: the murderer of his own father
and the lover of his mother. However, Leonard's quest for the truth of his
identity leads him to the post-Oedipal, post-Freudian discovery that at its core
a person's supposedly substantial identity is nothing, only a ghost in the
infernal machinery of signs--to adapt the title of a famous book by Gilbert Ryle. But no one can confront such a revelation head on
without facing destruction, and Leonard does suffer this fate, even if he
remains physically intact. The archetypal memento is the memento mori.
I
have admired Guy Pearce's work as an actor for several years now, but it would be
difficult to exaggerate just how good a performance he gives as Leonard. This is
an alienated hero for the year 2001: neither the self-torturing neurotics created by
Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando in the 1950s nor the anti-heroes made popular
in the 1960s by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, but a lean and hungry figure
with distinctly predatory traits. In this regard there are even intriguing
similarities between Leonard and Tyler Durden in Fight
Club, although Leonard is
more obviously a character on the verge of madness, and Tyler has a deviously manipulative
side totally lacking in Leonard. But if Pearce had taken over Edward Norton's
role in Fight Club, the underlying theme of the double would leap out with a
jarring clarity no one could overlook.
Guy
Pearce is supported by a cast hardly less gifted than he is. Joe Pantoliano
is excellent as Leonard's ambivalently helpful sidekick Teddy as is Carrie-Ann
Moss in the role of Natalie, a barmaid whom Leonard leads into the tangled web
of his destiny. In addition, honors are also in order for David Julyan who
contributed the ominous sounding musical score, and Dody Dorn, who was
responsible for the editing. The expressive but unobtrusive cinematography is
the work of Wally Pfister and Jordan Alan (uncredited).
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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