The Multiple Personality Theory

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2004)

This review is for those of you who have seen the film and have caught the "what's it really about" bug. It contains major spoilers!!!
I don't want to think about how much time I have wasted watching and re-watching this film, analysing it frame-by-frame on DVD and surfing the net 'till the early hours trying to find a suitable meta-theory that tied up the movie and conveniently explained all those difficult questions it raises. Chris Nolan, the film's director has apparently said that there is a cogent, underlying truth that explains everything in the movie, I'm sorry to say I haven't found it yet. But I think I might have found an important clue...
In the course of my explorations I came across the short story: Memeto Mori by Nolan's brother Jonathan
In reading and re-reading this story one persistent and important question arises, who is the narrator? It seems clear that the narrator is in fact Earl (the protagonist , read Lenny). But oddly the narrator has a much clearer idea of what is really going on than Earl does. The narrator instructs and advises Earl. Note in particular these words: "You know there's a lot of work to do. It may seem impossible, but I'm sure if we all do our part, we'll figure something out..." I think that in the story, Earl doesn't have memory loss as such. What he is really suffering from is multiple personality disorder. This truth is even alluded to (pretty strongly) in the passage: "People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes ..." The narrator is the master personality, but he can't remember everything because he can't remember anything that happened while the other personality (the one that thinks it is suffering from memory loss) is in control. Does that make sense? I hope so.
So I watched the movie again, thinking this theory might help explain all those unexplained things ... and it sort of does and sort of doesn't. There certainly are parts of the film where Lenny appears to be behaving in a pretty coherent way (when he and Teddy run Dodd out of town), when he gets the tattoos, the black and white sequences where he is talking on the phone to Teddy (at first), and several others, It looks as though some of the occasions when we see Lenny appear to forget (sitting on the toilet at Dodds room ... when Natalie comes back in after Lenny hit her etc.), he may in fact be adopting a different personality. It may be in fact that different personalities live in the 2 different hotel rooms. This theory explains why Leonard hates being called Lenny, because Lenny is one of the personalities, perhaps the one that actually killed his wife. Sammy Jenkis may also be one of the personalities, the subliminal substitution of Lenny for Sammy in the asylum scene seems to suggest this might be the case. I also wondered for a while whether Teddy is real, or if he is an imaginary friend .. another manifestation of Leonard's fractured personality, but there are scenes where Teddy interacts with other characters and this would seem to rule this theory out.
The multiple personality theory doesn't explain everything. I don't see how it explains the "I've done it" tattoo, but maybe someone can take this theory and develop it. You never know, it might just turn out to be the meta-theory that Chris Nolan says is out there waiting to be discovered.