American Postmodernism

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.

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.

One could suggest a parallel between Leonard’s ‘condition’ and ‘the postmodern condition’ as formulated by Lyotard, such that reality goes the ill-fated way of the metanarrative, allowing for the elevation and ossification of a subjective narrative (such as a reassuring conspiracy theory of murder and its warranted revenge) that structures action and belief, and consequently a wish becomes real, a simulation of investigation leads to a certainty of innocence – all because (one could suggest) subjects are encouraged to live in a hyperreal landscape in which they are trained to refresh their expectations with each pleasing new commercial, obliterate their knowledge in a deferred and ultimately unsatisfying orgasm, and forget the historical immaterialism of consumption in late capitalism, the very disappointment of consumption (the prototype being Sammy Jankis, who is wiped clean before each grab at the electrified silver pyramid, shocking in his repeated attempts at jouissance within parameters defined and conditioned by a mild-mannered sadist with a clipboard full of market research), but when the viewer realizes that Sammy is a fabrication – or at least a conflation of identities – called into being by Leonard’s guilty complicity in fashioning a comfortable lie, the viewer pushes this guilt onto Leonard-as-the-convincing-representation-of-ourselves-who-is-not-ourselves and at whose lie we are shocked and thrilled enough to call this a pretty true and repulsive film – but it has nothing to do with us, we who are wiped clean when the screen goes black, the delivery of truth-as-our-real-relations-presented-to-us-in-imaginary-form (a la Althusser) a mere filmic residue, or perhaps it is even something we overlay with the identity of John G., whom (one could suggest) we hunt down and kill because it is something that threatens to unveil truth by its very obfuscation, or finally, it could be killed by the appellation of coolness, as in “that movie is soooo cooool.”  Totally.

Although not its most salient point, the two main settings of Memento, a run down exurban commercial strip and an abandoned industrial park, continue the familiar strain so far this semester of postmodern writers inquiring about the degradation of america’s natural environment. Pynchon, Le Guin, and Whitehead all have something to say about failing urban areas, commercial sprawl, military pollution, and overpopulated cities, etc. Sometimes I find it helpful to think of what’s not present in film or book settings. In Memento, there are no woods, lakes, parks, grass, animals, etc. There are a lot of drugs, bloody body parts, cars with broken windsheilds, bullets. Nolan chose his setting with a purpose. Its Californiaesque, and shares characteristics with Lot 49’s landscape and plot.

 It occured to me last week, as i was driving through man made fog spewing from a semi truck engine fire on 395, that this whole postmodern condition of ours can be both an economic one, as Jameson argues, or an environmental one, as many people probably have already argued, but only just recently dawned on me. i’ve never read Delillo, but from what I hear, this question will keep arising again and again.

John, very good point about the British and Canadian make-up of the film. I disagree with the Bush Administration that we shouldn’t claim everything for ourselves. I would point to Nolan’s use of setting  to consider it decidedly american in feel. Im interested in what people had to say about the form, structure of the film, with some saying how creative it was to put the audience in Leonard’s shoes in trying to put together the pieces of his wife’s murder, and another saying that it was, oh what’s the word, cliche?  i agree with jarrod’s comments that there was truth for the viewer to grasp. I almost thought that we would find out who killed his wife! Look forward to tomorrow’s discussion.

I wanted to comment on the idea of eyes and glasses as a way to discern the truth in the movie.  Leonard’s job as an insurance investigator required him to know if people were lying to him about their claims.  He said that he had to look people in the eyes to know if they were telling the truth, and he continues to use this method after the accident and he cannot trust anyone.  However, this method is unreliable, as is the “truth” that he ascertains from it, because whoever is talking to him only has to deceive him for a few minutes, until he cannot remember them anymore.  Glasses also symbolize hiding the truth, as they block the eyes and prevent Leonard from looking the person in the eye.  Natalie wears sunglasses when they meet in the restaurant and he has to ask her to take them off so he can know if she is being truthful or not.  Teddy always wears glasses, and this aligns with Leonard’s note on the back of Teddy’s picture, not to believe his lies.  However, the viewer sees the story unfolding from Leonard’s point of view and has the advantage of being able to remember what he is shown, but cannot know for sure if any information received from Teddy or Natalie is to be trusted.  Natalie sums this up when she tells Leonard, “You can question everything—you can never know anything for sure.”  This applies to the audience as well.  We know the events that have happened, that Leonard killed both Teddy and Jimmy Grantz, and probably others as well, but we do not know for sure the true circumstances that led him to that point.  “The world doesn’t just disappear when you close your eyes, does it,” Leonard asks at one point.  But for him, it does, and not just when he closes his eyes, but after a certain amount of time, since he has to re-orient himself continually because of his condition.

The movie is definitely circular in its plot and series of events.  It is also self-aware, as Teddy warned Leonard that a bad cop was setting him up and that bad cop turned out to be Teddy himself.  He was warning Leonard about himself, but without revealing his identity until the climax of the film.  Returning to the circular chain of action in the film, however, if Teddy was the one keeping Leonard going, with new John Gs to find so he has a reason to exist and thus not end up like Sammy Jenkins, what happens now that Teddy is dead?  Leonard’s tattoo shows that the man he is after has the license plate that Teddy has, so without that leading to a new person, will he just go in circles, finding someone who no longer exists?  Will he write himself a new note to tell himself his revenge mission is complete?  If so, then is his destiny to become Sammy Jenkins, the fate he was trying so hard to avoid that he altered his own version of his memories?

In Memento, there was a fluidity that I sensed between the black and white scenes and those filmed in color.  I considered these variations in color and these switching backs of scenes in a backward but linear order a metaphor for the imperfect human memory, which is intensified in the character Leonard.  Because Leonard believes he is unable to recall anything that has happened since the night of his wife’s murder/rape and at the same time insists that he will not give up the structure of living each moment in a linear, progressing order, he suffers from his desire to control his mind and get revenge on his wife’s supposed offender.  The possibility, however, that Leonard is responsible for his wife’s death makes him a tragic character—someone unable of letting go and incapable of letting go (his last memory being his wife’s death).

Then there is Teddy.  On some level, Teddy reminded me of Orr’s doctor in the Lathe of Dreams.  Of course, Teddy is and isn’t who he says he is, but what are we to believe since we’re viewing this reality from the perspective of someone with a memory disability?  Anyway, Teddy behaves parallel to Leonard.  He too wants to be in control, reduced to taking advantage of Leonard’s disability by setting him up as a hit man.  Again, I circled back, the way Memento wants us to, and considered how Leonard unknowingly overdosed his wife with insulin and that he’s already avenged her rape at some time prior to the action in the film.  This is what Teddy tells us, so his death at the beginning of the movie seemed unjustified.  But Memento made me think about whether it matters why Teddy got shot; the outcome for Teddy is having his disabled hit man turn around and destroy him (in a Frankenstein fashion).  Does Teddy deserve death?  Maybe not, though it could be that things work as they must in the long run.  Teddy was behind a lot of other deaths, Leonard was his paranoid weapon.  I wondered what would happen to Leonard after his “master” is no longer setting up his days—but then there’s that little flicker where Leonard’s the man sitting in Sammy’s seat at the asylum.  So, could that be what our writer and director suggest awaits the unchanged modernist?  Living our days around a bunch of other crazy people.  Well, that doesn’t sound so different.

Mr. Pearce may be hot, but he’s a bad actor.  I’ve seen the movie about six or seven times, and his acting gradually gets worse with each viewing.  Nonetheless, I love the movie and I think Chris Nolan is an amazing director.  He splices a few split-second shots that are extremely hard to notice – especially during the first viewing – but which are very important in foreshadowing the plot.  For example, there’s a scene where Sammy Jankis is sitting in a chair at the mental institution.  At 1:29:55, the film cuts to a split-second black-and-white shot of Leonard sitting in the same chair at the mental institution and he’s in Sammy’s clothes.  This minor but meticulous detail is one of the things that makes Nolan such an awesome director…and this leads me to a book Dr. Sample talked briefly about in class.  In Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You (or, rather, the article excerpt I read in the NYT Magazine), he argues that movies have become more and more complex as a result of VHS and now DVDs.  Movies now have to stand up over multiple viewings, and this has induced movie-makers to create more complicated films.  I think Memento is a wonderful example, because as anyone who watches the movie more than once realizes, there are so many things one misses during the first viewing.  So, I guess this is one of the ways in which evolving media have substantially changed film as an art form.

Anyway, one of the little details in the film that I think is postmodern takes place when Leonard’s wife is reading her favorite book and he says, “I always thought the pleasure of the book was in wanting to know what happens next.”  This is a self-referential joke, obviously:  the pleasure in this particular film is in wanting to know what happened before.  This is not only a self-referential joke about the chronology used in Memento, but also to the way in which Nolan’s film challenges traditional story-telling (where "the novel" is perhaps analogous to the traditional structure of a film).  This reminds me of a scene in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in which Billy Pilgrim listens to a radio program where they discuss the purpose of the novel (or whether or not it’s dead; I can’t remember exactly).  Both texts – Vonnegut’s and Nolan’s – depart radically from the story-telling structure used by those texts that have preceded them, and they both joke about that departure within the text itself.

Also, not to get nitpicky, but Chris Nolan wrote and directed this movie, and he’s British.  (Guy Pearce is British/Australian, and Carrie-Anne Moss in Canadian.)  Is the text still American?  I guess it took place and was shot in America, but I’m not so sure that makes it American.

It had been some time since I viewed this film; however, upon seeing it last week, I was struck by the same thought that occurred to me the first time I watched it:  “Can a Hollywood film ever escape the 3 act structure?”  How is it that a story told backwards adheres to a traditional narrative structure and character with no memory still manages a significant arc?  It seems to me that with the incredibly experimental nature of contemporary novels, there should be some room for similar creativity in feature films.  What we need is “Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The Movie.” 

 
Kiraprater (sorry I had to use your handle, your identity is a mystery to me), I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss truth.  In the universe of Memento, there are things that actually happen.  For instance, the audience is well informed about the nature of Leonard and Natalie’s relationship.  There is a “truth” that we witness, and then a false memory that is juxtaposed against it.  I have trouble with the idea that Leonard’s “memories” are just as valid as the other characters.  For one thing, it seems to undercut the premise of the entire film.  You are absolutely right in the case of the scene you mention in your blog, Leonard is just as unreliable as Teddy; yet, I think this speaks to the unreliability of human perception (or memory if you would rather), not the absence of truth.
 

I am reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’s short fiction “The Library of Babel,” which describes a library (one that holds more book than there are atoms in the universe) that contains every conceivable variation of a book that is 410 pages in length.  Therefore, this library holds every sentence that has ever or will ever be written.  Therefore, it must contain, within its walls, the meaning of life and the answer to every question ever asked.  However, for every book that holds an answer, there are millions of counterfeit books that are similar, but contain minor variations.  Borges describes “librarians” who waste their lives searching through the volumes in the hope of finding meaning within the seemingly infinite number of book variations.

 
The reason I recounted this story was not to reach my 300-word minimum, but rather to argue that there is a truth, we just have no hope of ever knowing it.  In the universe of the text, Leonard did, or did not kill his wife.  There is an answer… a truth.  Yet, the truth is lost in the fallibility of the human mind and unreliability of the signifying chain.  Either way, I am sure it will lead to a good discussion in class.