Against The Hype

These days, director Christopher Nolan is justifiably esteemed for risking his blockbusters on such nominally cerebral material as Inception, The Dark Knight, and The Prestige. But for me, Nolan’s breakout success Memento—today celebrating the tenth anniversary of its release—is still the movie that best corrals his recurring strengths and weaknesses into one taut package. I’d go further to advise fans and skeptics alike to catch the chronological-order cut of the movie (available on the Limited Edition DVD), which shores up how duly the movie’s meticulous construction serves its high-concept premise, its reliance on copious exposition and its motivating dead lovers—all tropes that have since dogged Nolan’s work, often for the worse.

But more than that, the chronological-order cut also offers a crucial look at how editing can utterly change our conception of an actor’s craft, and a writer-director’s rounded compassion. The above shot, my pick for Nathaniel Roger’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot series, offers the gist of my elations and problems with Memento. I’ve heard somewhere that, coming off the back of The Matrix‘s success (my review), Carrie-Anne Moss’ signing on to Memento was what led to the project being green-lit. Funny that we haven’t seen much of her since, while the two movies that remain her most prominent cultural legacies are still going strong a decade later. And they both reduce her to token plot points! That’s irony for you.

Of course, Memento knows from irony; it peddles unabashedly in it. Layered dream-heists, impossibly diabolical terrorist plots, obsessive magicians’ gambits: none of these quite hold a candle to the simplicity and continual thrills of Memento‘s backwards chronology, as motivated by the short-term memory loss of its protagonist Leonard Shelby. Yet this doesn’t mean we’re being dropped into scenes without preconceptions, despite some critics’ claims that this continual backwards structure is meant to put us into Leonard’s shoes. It’s not like we have anterograde amnesia ourselves! Given the way the narrative is structured, we know each new scene is going to show us how Leonard’s been duped yet again. The fun of Memento is in seeing how it’s done, and its enjoyably ironic scene-by-scene revelations play out all the way to the celebrated twist ending. As it turns out, that irony holds up just as brutally when we’re going forwards instead of backwards, only we now get to catch Leonard in the very moment of misreading the scenario in which he finds himself.

Warning: Spoilers follow!
With one exception. Carrie-Anne Moss’ performance as Natalie visibly improves from theatrical to chronological-order cut. The problem with Memento‘s structure of continual revelations is that they imply that we’re verging onto the truth of what we’re seeing. But what this does for Natalie is “reveal” her to be a femme fatale who is manipulating Leonard for her own purposes, especially since this aligns with Memento‘s use of detective noir conventions. However, watching Memento in chronological order, we learn that Natalie is really the character whose motivations happen to shift most across the events of the story. Leonard just keeps trying to find his wife’s killer, and Teddy keeps trying to get him to leave town. By contrast, Natalie has to:

1. Wonder what happened to her boyfriend, and why some oblivious stranger has his clothes and car
2. Realize she’s in deep shit, because the money her boyfriend took with him for a drug deal is now missing
3. Use Leonard as a means of getting rid of her pursuer (Why not? If he shows up with her boyfriend’s stuff, he was probably involved in his disappearance somehow)
4. Repay Leonard’s help by getting info of the driver who owns John G’s license plate, even though he probably won’t remember that he did

Now why would Natalie do this last point, other than out of kindness? Some viewers have floated the possibility that she’s trying to get Leonard to kill the “Teddy” who set up the deal with her boyfriend. Except: 1) nothing in the film indicates that she has enough information to link Teddy with “John Edward Gammell”, and 2) the license plate number is legitimately Teddy’s. This interpretation is likely influenced by the way that the original Memento tracks Natalie’s motivations backwards, so that we’re increasingly met with a Natalie who is justifiably guarded, even furious, at Leonard’s blithe audacity and his cluelessness at her plight.

The truth is, for all Nolan’s investments in scowling, grim-jawed leading men (both here and in his subsequent movies), Carrie-Anne Moss still provides the best snapshot (heh) of grief over a dead lover in his filmography thus far. As she points out to Leonard, in a line that reads as cryptic so early in the original cut, but that is fully attuned to how far she’s come in view of chronological events: “You know what you and I have in common? We are both survivors.” They have also slept together the night before, and Moss astutely implies that Natalie is doing so partly to replace her lost boyfriend (see the shot up top), while also making Natalie pragmatic enough to pull away because Leonard’s not worth the emotional trouble (“You don’t remember me.”) She walks out the diner a survivor, but only before Nolan’s partiality towards cleverness over empathy lead him to remake her in his image.