What struck me most about re-watching Memento this week (besides the fact that I found I disliked the movie much less than I initially did when I saw it a couple years ago, when I wrote it off as pretentious and gimmicky), were the structural similarities to Lot 49. Both stories find their arcs within what are basically splices of their character’s lives, and end with the effect of an ellipses. With Oedipa it’s at the auction, and we as readers are unsure of the validity of the Trystero situation, but we do know now that it’s Oedipa’s to maybe endlessly decipher. Memento’s treatment of Leonard’s re-definition of his own meaning (“you can be my John G.,” etc.) is handled more self-effacingly, in that he knows and acknowledges the fundamental flaw then chooses to wipe it away, but we’re left with the notion that his work will never be done. I’ve been thinking about it, and I may be off-base here, but if it weren’t for Nolan’s choice to merely chronicle one of the many, many detective searches by Leonard, he may not have been able to succeed in using a backwards-told storyline. What the splice effect does is remove the expectation of a finite solution, in which the actual search slowly begins to take a decided backdrop (when the black and white portion bleeds into color) to the truth behind his condition, and the characters actions in relation to it. I’m still trying to work this one out.
I also thought Nolan’s choice to install a sense of placelessness to the whole thing was interesting. We only get place-related history in two ways. “I’m Leonard Shelby from San Francisco,” and license plates to automobiles, which leads me to believe that it was set in California, but we can’t be sure. As opposed to other notable noir films like L.A. Confidential, Bound, and Chinatown, which were so rooted in place that the setting very quickly became a character, the setting in Memento is drab, forgettable, and unstylized. I keep thinking how the story would be different if it were set in Paul Auster’s New York, or James Ellroy’s Los Angeles. It then would have been more of an obstacle for Leonard in a way that the nameless place Nolan chose wasn’t, and in a way erasing that prospect allowed for the storyline to be essentially a one-man character study (Teddy, Natalie, and even Sammy Jankis are arguably two-dimensional characters). So far, the texts that we’ve read have had a strong sense of place that often colored their outcomes, but is this placelessness something born of postmodernity? The idea that “this story could happen anywhere” applies also to the DeLillo story we read early on in the course, and I’m wondering how it relates.