So, while watching Memento, the theme that really stuck with me was the idea of crafting false narratives through memory. A lot of times we perceive our memories to be truth, and like Leonard mentions in the film, memory can’t be trusted. Even police confirm that memory can be altered over time. Cars can change colors; a knife can be remembered as a gun. That’s why it’s important to get eye witness testimony as early as possible in an investigation, and it shouldn’t serve as primary evidence alone in court. What’s interesting about this movie’s take on memory is that an individual can purposely craft memories to replace bad memories, specifically related to something they don’t like about themselves.
While watching I couldn’t help but compare the themes with other movies that deal with memory. On twitter, Inception was mentioned as a film that deals with reality paradoxes, but I thought of another Leonardo DiCaprio movie that I think deals with memory quite similarly to this Memento. WARNING I am about to give spoilers for Shutter Island. If you haven’t seen the film and want to without me giving away the ending, then don’t read any further.
Similar to Memento, Shutter Island is a mystery crime thriller, and the viewer is led to believe that there is a real crime to solve. As well, like Memento, the viewer realizes at the end that there is no real crime and that Teddy (Leo’s character) is looking for the man who killed his wife when he in fact is the one who killed her. There are several parallels between the films, but this one stuck with me. Each man has constructed false realities, they’ve made up stories that help them deal with their own guilt, but none of it is true. At one point in Memento, Leonard says, “You feel angry, you don’t know why. You feel guilty, you have no idea why.” The following lines describe how Sammy killed his wife accidently, perhaps signaling a correlation that foreshadows the end of the film. The guilt has made Leonard create this false memory.
One of the lines from Shutter Island that makes this concept of false memory and its relationship to guilt is, “Which would be worse - to live as a monster? Or to die as a good man?” Teddy says this at the end, signaling that now that he remembers the crime he committed, and all of the horrible realities that go with it, he would rather die than know the truth anymore.
The human mind is capable of amazing things, and narrative is one of those things. But, what is most interesting about the narrative that we can create is that it isn’t necessarily true, no matter how much we believe it to be so.
Your post reminds me a lot, actually, of a major part of the plot to the game "Castlevania: Lords of Shadow." The protagonist, Gabriel, is on a quest to bring his wife back to life after she was murdered while, as it so happens, saving the world from the Lords of Shadow, who wish to engulf the world in darkness. What ends up happening (*SPOILER ALERT*) is that Gabriel finds out that he killed his wife; he ends up becoming Dracula as a result. Your post reminded me a lot of that.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I really found your post interesting from a psychological aspect, particularly in regards to creating false memories. That's the benefit and downfall of the human mind: we can create/delete anything we really want to in our memory. There have been numerous occasions where I've sworn I remembered something particular (like, say, I was a wearing a red shirt when I did something), but it turns out I actually wore a blue shirt. The mind is an amazing thing.