Any old film can tell a concise story in the traditional order. Everyone knows about a three-act structure, everybody intuitively understands which beats should go where, and everyone can feel when a film fails to get it right. However, a filmmaker like Christopher Nolan might choose to bend the rules in order to tell a more memorable story. His second feature Memento tells the tale of an amnesiac seeking vengeance.
Christopher Nolan is obsessed with time. Almost every one of his films handles its story out of order, mixing and matching the subjective illusion of temporality. His first feature Following is a non-linear noir, but his follow-up Memento perfected the format.
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What Happens at the End of Memento?
There are technically two endings to Memento. The end of the film acts as an explanation for the events that followed it. The end of the narrative comes in the movie's opening moments. Memento is primarily a story about a man who experiences a constructed reality. Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator, is on a never-ending quest for vengeance. During a home invasion, two men raped and murdered Leonard's wife. He managed to gun down the primary perpetrator, but the second intruder clubs him over the head. Lenny is left with a crippling case of anterograde amnesia, which leaves him unable to convert any new short-term memories into long-term information. As a result, he is reliant on photographs, notes, tattoos, and help from his acquaintances.
Leonard is often entirely counting on the guidance of a corrupt cop named John "Teddy" Gammell. Leonard is convinced that the man who clubbed him is named "John G" and with little else to go on, he pursues the leads that Teddy provides him. One day, while Leonard sits in a hotel room, Teddy calls and informs him that he's found his John G. He directs him to an abandoned building and sends him after a man named Jimmy. Leonard obligingly strangles Jimmy, but his final word convinces Leonard that he's not the man he's looking for. As a result, he switches clothes with Jimmy and confronts Teddy. Teddy affirms Jimmy's role, but Leonard is unconvinced. Finally, Teddy relents and tells the truth. Leonard found and killed John G over a year ago, but his constant search for a man with a very common name has made him useful. Teddy has turned Leonard into a hitman, marking different targets for execution and allowing Leonard to forget his actions. Now, aware of the deception, Leonard sets himself a new task.
Teddy has photographic proof of Leonard's success, but Leonard destroys the photos. He intends to get a final tattoo at the end of his quest, but he holds off. Instead, Leonard plants clues to lead him to Teddy, claiming vengeance for his manipulation. In the final scene of the film, he gets Teddy's license plate number tattooed on his inner thigh. He leaves a note for himself, preparing to interact with a known liar. With this scheme in place, Leonard is convinced that he'll mistake Teddy for his John G and kill him, fulfilling his quest. This is the conclusion of the film, but it leads into the second act and the opening. Memento depicts Leonard's execution of Teddy in the opening scene, then covers the rest of the story backward.
Why is Memento Told in Reverse?
It would be easy to give a passé answer to this question. Many have called it a gimmick to make the story more engaging. Some have even gone so far as to claim it's a method of deliberately confusing the audience, hiding the narrative behind a cinematic shell game. The film's events are told out of order as a matter of perspective. Leonard experiences his life in flashes, always caught off guard and forced to piece together his surroundings through context clues. The film's structure mirrors the experience of its protagonist. It's a thematic device that also acts as a lesson in medical science. Neuropsychologists have praised the fractured structure of the narrative as a perfect crash course in the experience of amnesia. Telling the story out of order forces the viewer into the mindset of Leonard, engaging their curiosity on a second level.
Memento is an extremely clever film that demands a lot of attention from its audience. At its heart, it's a fairly simple story with well-established rules and a solid theme. Behind the grim noir detective drama, there's a deep well of existential dread that manages to dig into the psyche without insisting on itself. Memento is about a man who has been robbed, not just of his beloved wife, but of what makes life worth living. Without the ability to form new memories, he can never experience the revenge he craves, but he can also never stop looking for it. The story stops, but it never really ends.
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