Another entry in the growing list of favorite stories, continuing the examination of puzzle-stories and what makes them great.
 |
"I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that when I close my eyes the world is still out there. Is the world still there? Is it still it there? Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different. Now, where was I?"
image copyright Columbia TriStar home video
|
In movies, time is an illusion. What you're actually seeing is of course a series of still images, captured and played back so quickly the eye is tricked into believing it’s real. Filmmakers use this illusion of time to craft their stories out of a series of recorded moments in the lives of characters. Like the pacing in any story, you've got to know what's important to show, what can be left out, what to spend a lot if time on, what to spend a little. Like with the written word, the moving image is a linear format, it only works for its audience going forward in time, from beginning to middle to end. So when it’s needful to show something that happened before the beginning, use a flashback, can cut back to whatever came before, get the audience caught up, then segue back to the present.
Sure at first these jumps in time could be disorienting if done improperly, but there’s actually an elaborate and shifting language of techniques for coaching an audience into understanding that what they’re seeing is happening now, or happened years ago. Elements of sound design, lighting and color, of course make-up and costuming, to say nothing of editing (match cuts, fades, title cards, and the onc super-popular wavy dissolve), and of course the way the scenes are written, all give clues as to what we’re seeing, and what significance it has.
Break these rules or ignore this language and you risk throwing your audience off-track, interfering with their ability to follow the plot or, worse, to sympathize with the characters. Often though it can be effective, when the filmmaker knows what they’re doing, to disobey these rules just enough to trick the audience into believing what they’re seeing is set in one time, but is suddenly twisted or shifted into another context altogether, not dissipating the tension (when it’s successfully done) but raising it: we don’t know what’s coming next, but we still want to find out.
What if a film to this to its logical extreme, until the sudden and jarring displacement in false time became not a side effect of the storytelling, but the cornerstone of it? If it were used to build up the feeling of what it's like to live life separated by the flow of time, but in a way the audience could extrapolate into a working picture of the character's (hidden from them) life?
To build a portrait of a mind from inside the perspective of that mind itself?
Almost everyone knows Christopher Nolan these days, and for a good reason: he is an excellent filmmaker. Apart from Batman and to a certain extent superhero filmmaking never being the same again, itself an accomplishment, he is able to use his stories to replace solid yet unreal ideas for real things the real world like no one else.
More importantly, he is able to convey characters that meaningfully struggle with these strange distortions in common life in ways that we can comprehend and root for.
And although he's made a name for himself in big, lavish, and wildly popular movies, there was one little puzzle box of a movie before any if the others that may still be his strongest work to date.
 |
| "I don't think they'd let someone like me carry a gun." image copyright Columbia TriStar home video |
Leonard Shelby is from San Francisco. At least he used to be, you see, he has this condition. Since his accident, he can't make new memories, everything fades. Trouble is, he's the only witness to the fact that there were two men in his house the night his skull was cracked and his wife was raped and murdered, and the police didn't believe him because he had brain damage. So it's up to Leonard, or the person Leonard has now become, to bring this unknown second assailant, a man he knows only as John G., to justice. He's got a system all worked out to overcome his memory handicap; photograph acquaintances, write down what's happening next, tattoo important details. Don't trust notes written in other people's handwriting.
But if he doesn't even really know, cannot know, where he's just been or what he's just done, how can he be sure he's found the right man to kill?
A day in Leonard’s life goes something like this: wake up, where are you now? what are you doing there? To answer the first question you look around and see where you are. Answering the second is where things get tricky. You can’t remember how you got there, or where you were before. So you look around for a note, a photo, some information as to what’s going on and what you’re supposed to do next. You find it, you read it, maybe it makes sense or maybe it doesn’t. You do what the information told you, maybe you figure out enough to leave another note about what’s going on and what to do next, maybe not. Then, a few minutes after you started, you wake up, all over again, no idea where you are. And this is every hour of every day. How do you ever get anything done, much less catch a killer the police think doesn’t exist.
The arrangement of the film’s scenes seems simple enough. There are two primary plot lines, one in black-and-white and one in color. The black-and-white scenes primarily provide backstory and the nuts-and-bolts exposition of how the memory-less world of the main character works, the color scenes portray (what at first at least appears to be) the primary story itself. Scenes from each alternate; one black-and-white scene, then one color, then one black-and-white, and so on. But where things get complicated is that, while the black-and-white scenes proceed in the usual chronological order, the color scenes, the ones we’re made to believe are telling us the story of the movie, are in reverse chronology. The further twist is added when, at about the halfway to two-thirds point of the running length, we realize that the black-and-white scenes and the color scenes may be more directly related than we were led to believe, that the problems of the color scenes are leaching into the “safe” world of explanation and backstory. Finally it’s revealed that the two are really one plot line, divided in the middle and both leading to the point of recombination.
About half the people I’ve talked to about this movie (I’ve talked about it a lot) have made remarks similar to “oh, that movie that went backwards? I didn’t like it, it was too hard to follow.” A fair enough complaint, as the story requires more attention and thought than the usual mystery/thriller in order to follow the action. the narrative does its best to lay out the ground rules early on, again in those slower-paced black-and-white backstory scenes, but if you’re not watching closely to how each color scene ends/begins, you’ll be lost as to how the next/previous scene begins/ends, when you get to it, if you follow me.
 |
| "So where are you? You're in some motel room. You just - you just wake up and you're in - in a motel room. There's the key. It feels like maybe it's just the first time you've been there, but perhaps you've been there for a week, three months. It's - it's kind of hard to say. I don't - I don't know. It's just an anonymous room." image copyright Columbia TriStar pictures But when you think about it, this is exactly what makes the movie so great. because we’re never sure what’s going on. Every scene hits us without background, context, or any kind of continuity, we are constantly baffled and disoriented, trying to figure out where Leonard is and what he’s up to. And, because of Leonard’s condition, every one of these scenes also begins with Leonard trying to figure out where he is and what he’s up to; we’re made to see the world as he does, again and again. It’s only as each color scene begins wrapping up that we can see how it ties into the one which preceded it in presentation (but which follows it in narrative sequence). Since the audience doesn’t have anterograde amnesia, an idea of what the story is and where it’s going begins to develop, albeit completely unknown to the hero Leonard. The entire story is a pile of dramatic irony (“little did he know”) from beginning to end. |
It’s also probably one of the only ways you could tell a story, much less a mystery, about a person with anterograde amnesia and have it be compelling, and avoid frustrating the audience’s sympathy to the extreme. Consider, if the color scenes were played in order; we have a movie where the protagonist, every few minutes, just stops, apparently utterly flabbergasted by his surroundings, and the action has to start all over again. It sounds about as interesting as watching footage of someone with an extremely short attention span. “I’ve got to catch the killer! Ooh a butterfly.”
The other great thing that the presentation of the story does is the, I think, unique and unusual decision to take a murder mystery and put all the information available about who did what to whom right at the front of the film. From the first scene we know that Leonard will murder Teddy. We’re left to figure out how and why he decided to do that, to figure out what went wrong, and the reasons grow more and more and more complex and abstract from reality as the story unfolds.
Of course there’s one simple objection to be made about how the story works: over the course of the film, Leonard seems to get more and more comfortable in his own skin as a memory-less person. He tends more and more to remember things that make his ability to function in the plot easier: the fact that he has anterograde amnesia for one thing, for another where his wife is, what happened to her, who took her from him and how. All things which we learn early on and, as in any other film, become working knowledge that can’t effectively be re-stated ad infinitum. So this is really for the benefit of the audience: we know what’s going on, sort of, or at least what’s already happened (in the future of the story), and having Leonard constantly re-discovering his basic already-known limitations and motivation would be too tiresome to work.
 |
"C'mon, Lenny - we'll take a look down there together. Then you'll know. You'll know what you really are."
image copyright Columbia TriStar pictures
|
The reason I love Memento so much is its illustration of how devastatingly necessary our ability to make memories is to this thing we call life. Leonard cannot function as a memory-making organism. He’s locked into a repeating pattern of grief, heartache, violence, and loss, in addition to the confusion and impossibility of living with this condition of his. He is conscious of his surroundings, he can use language as well as anyone, seems coherent and responsive. But is he really a person anymore? He cannot learn, cannot grow, cannot change except in the moment, and those changes are constantly washed away by time. He has been deprived of his future, and to any practical measure of his present as well: he has become divided from the identity he associates with, no longer who he thinks he is, as Teddy points out at the very beginning/the very end. He is not Leonard Shelby from San Francisco anymore, and he will never understand, for more than a few minutes, what he’s become instead.
There's this overwhelming desire, or need, expressed directly by the characters at least three separate times in the film, for some experience or new information to be so profound, so emotionally important to Leonard (or his narrative foil, the famous Sammy Jankis), that he is able to overcome his disability, even just the one time, to remember that experience or information, on the sheer grounds that it's that important to him. But nothing sticks. Nothing ever sticks, no matter how transcendently it moves him, or how blissful it makes him, or how tragic it is.
Sometimes the meaning we invest in the world just isn't enough. Leonard won't remember, because his machinery is damaged, and the software simply can't overcome the limitations of the software, no matter how much we want it to.
Who are we, really? the movie asks. And it gives us an answer, maybe the only one that matters: we are, we can only ever be, what we remember.
No comments:
Post a Comment