“Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator, suffers from anterograde amnesia and uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife, which is the last thing he remembers.” – Google’s summary of Memento.
Memento is told in reverse, we find out the conclusion to the plot at the very beginning of the film (Todorov’s traditional Narrative structure has been reversed, fragmentary). It touches on topics such as:
- There is no cohesive identity, no ‘real you’; we are different people in each individual situation, virtual and actual. Our identities are in constant flux.
- There is no ‘truth’ in history (personal or national), memory cannot be relied upon as evidence for knowledge;
- People who claim to know the ‘truth’ can’t be trusted;
- Fiction and fact depend on each other to the point that they can’t be divided – in the end they can’t be separated;
- Knowledge doesn’t ‘add up’ cohesively to ‘truth’; there are too many contradictory elements.
These topics can be translated into codes, specifically Roland Barthes Proairetic and Hermeneutic codes.
Christopher Nolan’s inspiration for Memento was based on a semi-postmodernism novel, Waterland written by Graham Swift, “an examination of the end of History, the trajectory of the promise of the Enlightenment. It is set in the 80’s, but looks backwards through history, centering around 1943 providing three different plots” – Jessica on Goodreads.com. Therefore the film is intertexualised from this book.