Near the end of the movie, Teddy tells Lenny to “start investigating [himself].” Teddy says, “You don’t even know who you are.” How do we know who we are except through our memories? Lenny says that he can “read people.” That he is able to tell what a person is like or what he is thinking simply by looking into his eyes. But do you really ever know a person? Do you really ever know yourself?
I know that I was born in Roanoke, Virginia and that when I was ten I broke my arm on a swing set. I know that the color of my living room furniture is blue and that when I touch a working oven it will feel hot. As Lenny says, “There are things you know for sure.” But those are just facts. Lenny knows what Teddy and Natalie look like, what their names and license plates numbers are. But it’s up to Lenny to interpret the facts and that changes things a bit. Because he has no memory (or chooses not to, which is another debate entirely), Lenny put these clues together based on nothingness and comes up with answers that don’t really mean anything. He is lead astray by his false assumptions much like we are many times lead astray by our own false memories. After all, “memory is unreliable” and “can be distorted…it can change the shape of a room or the color of a car.” Whether we consciously change reality or unconsciously “forget” facts, we are always using a skewed version of “reality” to judge and make assumptions about our own life and others. The fact that Lenny kills John G. on the basis of a false memory (or a “lie to make himself happy”) makes this point even more clear as it suggests that we can never be sure of what we think we know.
Again, that raises the question of whether we even really know ourselves. If we can’t trust our own memories then how do we know that we are who we think we are? Are we who we were in the past or are we who we are right now? Lenny’s identity is not solid; it continues to change throughout the movie. He is a man with brain damage, a supposed murderer, a mental hospital patient (thanks to John for pointing out that ½ second blip). He is constantly getting tattoos and therefore changing his physical appearance. He changes into a drug dealer’s clothes in order to take on the identity of a dead man rather than that of a murderer. But “nothing ever sticks” to Lenny, just like his memory. He has to rely on others to tell him who he is since he can’t remember. At one point Lenny says, “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves of who we really are.” But is a reflection all we need…doesn’t that just show us how others view us? Lenny says he has “to believe in a world outside [his] own mind.” Maybe this means that it is hard for us to trust our own judgments since a part of us always recognizes the imperfections in memory. Perhaps we have to believe that the “world outside” holds truths that we fail to piece together in our own minds.