The search for truth in Christo­pher Nolan’s Memento

When we sit down to watch a film, we do so with a degree of trust that what we’re about to see will be true with­in the world of the film. So when a film­mak­er decides to tell their sto­ry from the per­spec­tive of an unre­li­able nar­ra­tor, as Christo­pher Nolan does in 2000’s Memen­to, we are forced to reassess and search for new meaning.

The search for truth and mean­ing is at the very heart of Memen­to. Leonard’s (Guy Pearce) search comes in the form of aveng­ing his wife, and while the mur­der-mys­tery sto­ry­line – along with the femme fatale fig­ure, nar­ra­tive voiceover and black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy – are all hall­marks of clas­sic noir, Memento’s struc­ture and the way it depicts the mal­leable nature of mem­o­ry makes Leonard’s search for truth and mean­ing end­less­ly futile.

This is best evi­denced in Leonard’s tat­toos, as well as the Polaroids and notes he keeps. These tools are the means with which he records his short-term mem­o­ry and man­ages his day-to-day life. He appears to func­tion well enough at first, but when it becomes appar­ent that what Leonard believes to be true is objec­tive­ly false, we realise that these tools are mere­ly val­i­dat­ing his dis­tort­ed real­i­ty. Or, what philoso­pher and cul­tur­al the­o­rist Jean Bau­drillard might call his ​‘hyper­re­al­i­ty’: a sim­u­la­tion which has become more real to Leonard than real­i­ty itself.

Accord­ing to Bau­drillard, a total under­stand­ing of human exis­tence is impos­si­ble and beyond our com­pre­hen­sion because we have become over­ly reliant on signs and sym­bols. Exces­sive efforts to gain a com­plete under­stand­ing of our real­i­ty results in us being enticed by a state of hyper­re­al­i­ty. This is ulti­mate­ly what hap­pens to Leonard: he depends entire­ly on his tat­toos, Polaroids and notes, and the more he tries to cre­ate a coher­ent pic­ture and edge clos­er to the truth, the more he is seduced by his hyperreality.

For instance, Leonard even goes so far as to hire a pros­ti­tute to play his dead wife. In the moment where she wakes him up by slam­ming the door, he is able to sus­pend him­self in the belief that his wife is still alive. Addi­tion­al­ly, each time Leonard is chal­lenged he falls back on his notes and Polaroids and fur­ther into his hyper­re­al­i­ty, such as when he choos­es to ignore Teddy’s (Joe Pan­to­liano) warn­ing against the manip­u­la­tive Natal­ie (Car­rie-Anne Moss). Tip-toe­ing around the truth, Leonard reacts like a stub­born child, recit­ing his back­sto­ry like a script: ​“I don’t have amne­sia. I remem­ber every­thing right up until the inci­dent. My name is Leonard Shel­by. I am from San Francisco.”

At the film’s cli­max, where the back­wards-flow­ing coloured scenes and chrono­log­i­cal black-and-white scenes meet, Ted­dy reveals to Leonard (or rather, reminds him of) the actu­al truth. That he is respon­si­ble for his wife’s death and that he invent­ed the sto­ry of Sam­my Jankis to cope with his guilt. ​“So you lie to your­self to be hap­py,” he tells him. ​“We all do it.” Through this, Ted­dy expos­es the mean­ing­less­ness of Leonard’s end­less, cycli­cal search for the truth. He is, in Teddy’s words, ​“play­ing detec­tive.” Ted­dy pays the ulti­mate price for this, but because Leonard will soon for­get, he is able to set him­self off on anoth­er aim­less path of redemption.

Leonard’s expe­ri­ence with­in Memen­to reflects our expe­ri­ence of watch­ing it. We try to make sense of what is in front of us and put the pieces togeth­er, but because we are total­ly sub­ject­ed to Leonard’s view of the world, we expe­ri­ence the non-lin­ear sto­ry as Leonard does. Nolan has even said that he’s seen the film hun­dreds of times, but can walk into a screen­ing and not know which scene comes next, and that peo­ple who worked on the film with him still argue about the var­i­ous inter­pre­ta­tions of it today.

“I have to believe in a world out­side my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have mean­ing, even if I can’t remem­ber them.” Leonard’s ulti­mate goal is for his life, even if he can­not remem­ber most of it, to have mean­ing. Deep down, he knows that it can’t, but by con­struct­ing his own fake puz­zles to solve and hyper­re­al­i­ty to live in, Leonard nev­er needs to face the truth. He has the lux­u­ry of for­get­ting, after all. But he can­not go on like this for­ev­er. Real­i­ty will, one day, catch up with him.