When Form Meets Function

Rating: 10/10 (3 May 2005)

I loved Pulp Fiction. I was one of the many who bought into this wave of non-linear storytelling, and believed that the structure as crafted by Quentin was the cat's meow.
And then I saw Memento.
And I saw it again.
And again.
Christopher Nolan's gripping story of an amnesiac seeking revenge on the culprit who caused his condition and raped and murdered his wife takes the non-linear structure to a whole new level. Most importantly, the structure-- which is told chronologically backwards-- is not thrown in frivolously. Rather, it serves a definitive purpose and compliments the story being told: it allows us, the audience, to experience the vertigo, the unknown, that our protagonist experiences. We start with our hero's conclusion, and as the story unfolds, the issue becomes, how did our hero arrive at this conclusion.
Memento further works in taking advantage of a technique utilized so perfectly in Usual Suspects, and to a lesser degree in Fight Club--the unreliable narrator. In this respect, Nolan plays off of the long standing general principle that the narrator is trustworthy. Unlike Usual Suspects, however, where the protagonist turned out to be unreliable because he was outright lying, the unreliability of our hero in Memento is not (necessarily) that he was lying, but that his condition resulted in a distortion of his perception of what was true and what was false.
Therein rests the underlying theme of Memento. In a film where every character takes advantage of our hero's condition, he conditions himself to take advantage of his own condition.