Memento

This was the second time that I was watching Memento and i felt that I picked up more from the movie that I did before. More of it started to make sense as I was able to pay attention to the details that allowed me to create a full picture of what went on.

A labyrinth was created in the mind of the main character because of his memory problem. In this case the labyrinth was in the sense that he would be stuck in the same situation unable to remember past a certain point. He remembers things from the past but cannot remember the current situation and is unable to make new memories. He is entrapped in a  labyrinth that keeps him locked into the past unable to progress forward. The polaroids and tattoos are treated by him as form of keys to unlock himself and set him free from this mental torture. However at the end of the movie it seems as though he was creating a labyrinth for himself because ironically this maze of events gave him a purpose to live. It helped him cope with his own wife's death.

The use of black and white in film VS colour in different parts allows the viewer to have some sort of order in terms of the sequencing of the film. The scenes in black and white are in fact the very first scenes in the movie and are cut up and played throughout the movie perhaps to represent a form of entrapment in the past and to show that it actually does not matter who he is tracking down because he starts off with the same problem but changes different facts to mess with his own memory so that he can have a purpose to live. It shows how his daily life is like and the routine that he goes through. He is trapped in this cycle deliberately because he sees it as a form of conditioning and training of his body. Leonard constantly repeats how he needs a system to function. ("You really need a system if you're trying to make it work") and this system as a form of labyrinth that he traps himself in not because of choice but because it is his way of survival.

It was easier for me to pay attention to smaller details because I had a rough idea of what the film was about having watched it earlier so I started noticing things like the tattoos he had and when he got them to put together a timeline of the events that happened. For example the tattoo that he had on his left thigh was not there when he was having the phone call in the black and white scene but at the end of the movie he was seen getting that tattooed because it was a new clue in which he created for himself to keep the puzzle unsolved. The scars on his face also gave an indication of which incidents came first. The repetition of scenes created a sense of de ja vu for the viewer and perhaps also mimics the way in which Leonard perceives things in a fragmented manner. It allowed for the viewer to experience life the way Leonard did, getting flashbacks but unable to piece everything together.

The narration was from the point of Leonard throughout the movie and it is of him recalling all the details even about the case of Sammy Jenkins. This is especially ironic since he keeps repeating the fact that memories are not to be trusted and that he only goes by facts. There are hints of him being similar to Sammy Jenkins such as how he talked about the tests Sammy went through and that conditioning didn't work on sammy because he couldn't act on instinct but then when he was talking to Natalie he admitted himself that he does not act on instinct either. He was unable to tell reality from his imagination because he wanted it to be so. It is ultimately revealed in the movie that Sammy Jenkins is Leonard and this is confirmed in the scene of Sammy in the mental hospital when there was a quick flash of lenny replacing sammy in the wheelchair at around 90 minutes into the film. Thus the viewer is left to wonder if this whole mystery of events was in fact all self implicated.

The last scene in the movie was in fact the first scene that took place chronologically as the polaroid comes back into colour and matches up with the very first scene that we saw at the start of the movie. Teddy's polaroid had nothing written on it and in fact it showed us how Leonard wanted to regard Teddy as the killer by writing down facts about him knowing that he would forget where he had gotten these facts from and treat them like a mystery to be solved. In the very end of the movie there was flashback of him and his wife on their bed with his wife stroking his chest and he had a tattoo saying "I've done it" tattooed over his heart. This confirms that Teddy's explanation at the end was the truth on how Leonard had already gotten his revenge and that he is trapped in this cycle of finding the "killer" because he needed a purpose to live for after his wife's death.