Memento Memories

I found myself watching 2000's Memento yesterday. It's not Christopher Nolan's first film but it's the one that made him a star director. It's still a great noir, capturing the essence of noir as few movies ever have. Since it'd been a very long time since I watched it, it made me remember how great the movie-going experience used to be, when you could go and see an interesting low budget film at the cinema and find something truly remarkable.

It came from a time when a number of smaller films were making names for directors with some kind of gimmick, typically a very clever twist, as in The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense. Memento was better than most, though, because of how intimately tied its gimmick was to the protagonist's story and the story's preoccupation with guilt and memory.

It's a movie about a man who can no longer create new long term memories and Nolan puts us in his perspective by telling half the story backwards, giving us scenes in reverse order, so the audience is almost as much in the dark about Leonard's (Guy Pearce) situation as Leonard himself. So in its basic premise, it's a movie about the fallibility of memory, but its conclusion makes it about something even bigger, more universal, than Leonard's problem; the human tendency to edit memory. Leonard's condition only makes plainer something that all human beings are prone to but most are too close to to acknowledge.

Googling for reddit and other forum discussions after watching the movie, I found many people want to have the ending explained though I don't think anyone has any trouble understanding the film leading up to the ending. It's more, as they say, accessible than other movies about unreliable memory such as Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, or even Blade Runner. Memory editing may be something everyone indulges in, but the act in itself comes with an instinct not to recognise it. What good is editing a memory if you don't believe the memory is authentic? This is one of the reasons Greatest Film lists by artists and critics differ from lists of the most popular films. It's only with a combination of experience, contemplation, and education that one can recognise the greatness of some works of art because they deal with aspects of human nature that humans find painful to contemplate.

I got to thinking about why Mulholland Drive tends to rank within the top ten--and often at number one--of greatest films of the 21st century lists while Memento is in the 20s. Mulholland Drive is about a beautiful young woman--never underestimate the power that putting a beautiful young woman at the centre of a narrative has in moving a needle. But Lynch's films more truly put the viewer in the perspective of the character who edits their memories. It's a kind of high wire act. What's the difference between a film that doesn't make literal sense because it's anchored in a modified impression of reality and a film that doesn't make sense because of filmmaking ineptitude? Well, sometimes there may be no difference. The 1945 film Detour may be greater for the narrative its critics have interpreted it as having than for one that was consciously constructed by director Edgar G. Ulmer. But it's safe to say David Lynch knew what he was doing with Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive and those movies succeed in how Lynch uses sound and imagery to give the viewer a visceral experience. They succeed for how each scene is both a cause and effect; each scene reveals story and character and explores both on deeper levels. It's an interplay of surface and symbol that mirrors the complexity of human perception as it navigates the world, compulsively observing, interpreting, and, the instant the present becomes the past, which is only an instant, editing.

X Sonnet #1872

Cicada silence tricks the rain to fall.
But clever drops would wet refracted eyes.
A billion baby bees balloon the ball.
Committees purchase crows for making pies.
Reluctant pencils picture pirate fights.
Relentless voices veil the king from view.
The dreams of gold discolour sweaty nights.
The fish has swapped the tartar sauce with glue.
Remembrance fights to place on rarer lists.
Returning dreams recall adventure days.
Forgotten films remain in neural mists.
Convening brains discern the shrouded ways.
When rapid choices win in lieu of thought
In webs of ink the frightened fly is caught.