According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meanings of the word Memento include "one’s thoughts in relation to memory," "a reminder, warning, hint as to future events," "a reminder of a past event or condition, of an absent person, or something that once existed," and a number of other connotations that are not strikingly relevant to the film.<\/p>\n
The protagonist’s entire body is a memento, a blurred, ‘freakish’ hypertext of tatoos that function as reminders of ‘truths’ or clues he’s constructed under the limitation of short term memory loss. Who he is, as Lenny "reminds’ him, is something he can’t understand. Even his long term memories are possibly forged constructs, lies the protagonist allegedly tells himself "to be happy." The mementos of his previous identity, his life as defined by the memory of his relationship to his wife and her brutal murder, may not be ‘real.’ Whether we are to believe the testimony of a corrupt cop, who uses the noir protagonist in order to further his profit, seems to be as murky as the credibility of the long and short term memory of the protagonist. However corrupt, the cop seems to be more genuine in his soothsaying by the end, or rather the beginning of the film’s sequence of events, than the suggested protagonist. Is there any element or circumstance in the film that can be trusted? I believe that there isn’t.<\/p>\n
The memory he has of his wife’s rape and murder, a graphic recollection of her blood and suffocation in the bathroom, is the one defining element about the protagonist’s current character. If this memory is a ‘fake reminder,’ meaning it does not document an actual or ‘real’ event, person, place, or thing, than his current identity is predicated upon the meaninglessness the protagonist is most afraid of. Even when he believes that he can remember something, it could be all wrong, subjective, and incomplete. Memory is a conscious and cognitive design of how one wants to remember something as opposed to what actually happened, and its easy to ‘remember what one wants’ since we can’t recall every last detail of an event, person, place, and time. Furthermore, our vagrant hero wants to believe that ‘the world is still here’ and his ‘actions still have meaning,’ even if that meaning is constructed on false pretenses rather than none at all. <\/p>\n
He continuously claims that "he knows who he is" since he believes he can remember who he was before his "condition," and yet he contradicts himself in the film following Lenny’s exposition of the multiple truths or nontruths about the protagonist. Although he should probably trust the cop more than himself, he writes "do not believe his lies" on the back of his picture simply because he doesn’t like what "Lenny" tells him about himself. The protagonist purposefully lies to himself at certain moments throughout the film, just as he confesses in the end, or rather at the beginning of the journey to avenge his wife: "maybe I do lie to myself to be happy." <\/p>\n
According to Lenny, one history of the protagonist suggests that he killed the man who he believes murdered his wife several times, including the man he kills at the conclusion of the movie. In yet another alternative reality, "the memory guy" potentially killed his diabetic wife. In Freudian terms, he thoroughly dissociated with his fatal mistake and replaced the memory of the actual occurence with a "fake" memory:Sammy Jenkis.<\/p>\n
Sammy plays the role, in the protagonist’s mind, of the innocent amnesiac who shoots his wife up with too much insulin. The protagonist (I can’t remember his name- speaking of short-term synapse failure) exhibits such clear and unequivocal insight when he’s talking about Sammy over the phone because he is psychologically distanced from the experience of killing his wife since he remembers Sammy as the one that unknowingly committed murder. If what Lenny says is even partially true of the protagonists history since his wife’s death, the protagonist is a killer equivalent Jenkis. Both kill or continue to kill because they cannot remember what they’ve just done. Since the events do not imprint in the memory of the short-term impaired, the actions and events in the amnesiac’s life cannot shape his\/her identity. Instead, the protagonists actions bear no meaning on who he is. Meaninglessness abounds. Since he cannot remember the immmediate experiences of killing his wife and the perpetrater’s he’s framed as responsible in his long term memory, they are no longer a part of his identity according to his reality and self-awareness.<\/p>\n
Time is also of the essence in the film. Beyond the reverse sequential order of events, ‘the backwardness’ in which the film is structured, which is actually the most progressive in terms of the plot’s revelation, the protagonist wonders, "how am I supposed to heal if I can’t remember tim?" The memory he can’t forget is the one he wants to forget, his wife’s murder. Whether it acutually happened or he made it up, it overwhelmes everything else about the protagonist. He is his wife’s avenger and lives for no other reason. That is who he believes he is. While he forgets himself and all of the things he’s done since among the misinformation of tatoos, potentially of his own device, he can’t forget the memory of his dieing wife. Was the memory forged? Did she die in the way that the protagonist remembers or the way in which Lenny describes? Does it even matter? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meanings of the word Memento include "one’s thoughts in relation to memory," "a reminder, warning, hint as to future events," "a reminder of a past event or condition, of an absent person, or something that once existed," and a number of other connotations that are not strikingly relevant to … Continue reading Longing to Forget<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}