Memento: An Expose, Not a Tantalization

Rating: Null/10 (22 April 2006)

Structural and contextual conundrums are not very attractive to me, if only because they subtly seek dismissal. Despite the fastidious cleverness of their creation, those who develop these films and stories silently and self-destructively want their works to be decoded and subsequently discarded. Their influence is therefore transitory, since they singularly prioritize the initially impregnable and overwhelmingly meticulous content of their pieces. This is dangerous because, when something is enigmatic but in an inevitably understandable way, it means that its audience will not only decipher its puzzles, but think that those puzzles represented the only substantial elements of the film. Once they are recognized and understood, a collective dismissal takes place, and everything else which accompanied those cryptograms is also disregarded.
The primary developers of this film, author and screenwriter Jonathan Nolan and director Christopher Nolan, knew that this response was ineluctable, and therefore probably take responsibility for the potential transience of their movie. Or, at least, I personally hope that they would have been this responsible, since it would be unfortunate if they did not realize that the complementary beauties of the film, (e.g. Guy Pearce's acting, the clarity of its presentation, the sleekness of the black and white scenes and the historical depth of the characters), would all be neglected once the general enigma of the film was understood. Personally, I think that being a director like David Lynch would be much more individually profitable and endlessly rewarding, since Lynch is a director who provides no enigmas, and immediately informs us that there is nothing mathematical or puzzling about his film other than its incessantly apparent and omnipresent artistry. In this sense, one can always respect the originality of his form, while original content, like the kind which appears in Memento, is less devoted to its creator than to its audience. Lynch's magnificence lies in his uninhibited dedication to his intuition; it is something which he never departs from, which is why he annoys and frustrates a large number of audiences. When I claimed that he solipsistically refuses to part with himself, that also includes the departure from oneself which is an essential part of a director's empathy toward his audience. Lynch repudiates this departure and therefore only trusts himself, and yet this wonderful obduracy only allows us to trust in its endless exactitude and consistency, especially since it depends upon one director and therefore one vision, which is easier to preserve in an unchanging state than a variety of people who are all trying to wholly and consensually agree on the same principles. The Nolan brothers will not have this consistency because Memento is not about them. It is a film that could have been created by anybody. While these filmmakers are positively unusual in that they are interested in making a film selflessly isolated from their own lives, they must understand the unfortunate Machiavellian idea that such empathy goes unrewarded, and people will fail to recognize the anomalous sympathy that has been given them and will nonetheless discard the film after they have understood it. But, overall, as I solidified in the first sentence of this comment, the film asks for it. If it comprehended its own situation a bit more, it would have known that it should not just prioritize its own content, because, once that content is understood, the entire film will be disposed of. The creators also could have realized that, if they placed more importance upon elements that were timelessly important to themselves, the audience's dismissal would not matter because a few of the film's qualities would perpetually exist solely in their own minds. Nevertheless, they do not take advantage of these opportunities, and everything in the film is servile to the content rather than to their own independent vision. For instance, the black and white shots of the film have a refreshing beauty to them, (if only for their extreme contrast with the film's color scenes), but, because the movie is generally subservient to its clever structure and story, these aesthetical elements will be neglected and forgotten because the viewer will correctly know that they were secondary to the enigma of the movie.
This consideration is the result of just one form of viewer-response criticism that can be applied to Memento. Although I have elaborately and passionately written about the transience of the film's conundrums, they are illuminating in their initial complexity. Nonetheless, I could not help but respond to the film's self-destructive desire for an inevitable diminishment.