Who are we without memory?

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 2004)

MEMENTO is a film about a brain-damaged man who cannot retain short-term memories and whose sense of self is limited to whatever longterm memories he'd formed before his injury. Most folk either love it or hate it or are indifferent to it (have I covered all the bases?) but only because they either love or hate or are indifferent ... to GIMMICKY movies. A friend once asked, "How do you spell GIMMICK backwards? OTNEMEM. But they miss the point -- "Memento" is not a mere novelty nor an exercise in backwards narrative. This is an exploration of what it is to be human. What generates a mind, or how does a brain store a mind? How can a person function or an identity be formed if they cannot REMEMBER? In fact, if our brain is creating our mind then what happens to it when we fall into the oblivion of sleep? Perhaps each night we die. And each morning are recreated through the power of regenerative memory. Do concepts like "soul" even apply anymore, in this age of neuroscience where we've gained insights into the physiologic and microscopic energies of what makes up a "thought"? The backwards-chronology narrative is a brilliant device to put the viewer into the protagonist's confusion. But like any mystery, ultimately we are asking ... "what happens next? and what will the final answer be?" Returning to my harangue about neuroscience, on one level *any* film or TV show is creating a reality within your mind. At least to the extent that you let yourself get immersed in it. For what is the difference between the true external world about us and some artificial world we tune into? For all that we hear and see is filtered through our senses. The true and the false are all just impressions that we experience, whatever is "out there" is separate from us and must be interpreted by us. This is why I think mysteries are such an intriguing genre for most of us. For life itself is a mystery. Our physiologic make-up is constantly probing the world about us and asking, asking, asking "what's going on out there?" Therefore it's only natural that a book or movie is going to hook us if we get caught up in the questions, "what has happened here? Who dunnit? How will it turn out?" Because subconsciously we are constantly being presented with riddles by our own senses. And in Leonard Shelby we have a character whose senses still create a world about him, except he doesn't possess the means to correctly interpret this reality.