MEMENTO AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF POSTMODERNISM

NARRATIVE, CHARACTER, IDENTITY, CONSISTENCY, STABILITY

• “Extreme emotions… pieced together… add ‘em together, you end up with a person.” This is Leonard describing his memories of his wife – to what extent is this also a good description of Leonard’s own identity?

• What strategies does Leonard use to combat his condition? In the scene where he and Teddy discuss his ‘aide memoirs’ Leonard insists these mementoes are better than ‘normal’ memories – what are his arguments? How ‘trustworthy’ (or open to distortion) are his mementoes in the story?

• What are your impressions of Natalie – in the first scene in coffee shop? In second, at her house when Leonard awakes in her bed? In third when she comforts Leonard? In fourth, when she arrives at the house bloodied… and the fifth, where she and Leonard argue? To what extent could you see her as a completely different person in each situation?

NARRATIVE, CHARACTER, TRUTH, IDENTITY, POSTMODERNISM

• What is the significance of the story of Sammy Jenkiss to Leonard? How ‘true’ is this story? What does this tell us about the relationship between facts, memories and fiction?

• By the end of the film, do we feel like Leonard got the right man by shooting Teddy? List arguments for and against this view. How satisfying is the end of the film? What questions do you have left?

Postmodernism & Memento

Big Question:

How could ‘Memento’ be classed as a postmodern text?

• Deliberately playful, intertextual, reflexive
• Fragmentation, disorder, displacement
• A disconnection between cerebral and physical (ie mind and body Descartes – The Cartesian dilemma)
• A lack of coherent time and place
• creates a world built around uncertainties and half-truths = a virtual world
• A lack of knowledge and understanding
• Lack of Metanarrative – the new postmodern world is structured and built upon complex and sometimes contradictory layers of organisations, instructions, ideas and individuals.
• Individuals struggle to make sense and meaningful connections with this postmodern world.
• No rational explanation, for cause and effect.
• A loss of faith in scientific, empirical evidence.
• Emphasis on repetition = Simulation – a series of simulated events, sequences and characters
• Lack of overall Truth or coherent meaning
• Memento represents a world of nobody’s living in nowheresville!
• Individual and community alienation Individualistic / isolated narrative
• Results in individuals becoming isolated and vulnerable
• So individuals on focus on (understand, can cope with, are knowledgeable about) surface and style. As opposed to substance, content, cohesion, meaning, truth.
• Individual personal pleasure and gain is the only significant motivating factor
• Role of big organisations in dividing up society and individuals
• pastiche (re-makes of familiar genre, Film Noir, Thriller or Who dunnit?) re-make
• Fractured / split / multiple identity
• hypperreality – it seems real, but unreal? exaggerated reality? an un-reality?

Look for evidence of these postmodern phenomena:

• Intertexuality: sampling artistic styles, plot or character conventions from other forms and genres

• The ‘writerly text’ (Roland Barthes): a text whose meaning is created by the reader/consumer rather than being fixed in the text by the writer/producer.

• 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.