The protagonist of Memento, Leonard, has lost his short-term memory. He retains–or so it seems–a basic knowledge of who he is and, most importantly, that his wife was the victim of a brutal assault. Leonard’s life is oriented around pursuing his wife’s killer; vengeance gives him purpose.
A foundational exhortation of the Old Testament is to “remember the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 8:18). That is the impetus behind every feast and observance commanded in the Torah. Memory is likewise the underlying necessity for the “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love. Without memory, there can be no narrative of God’s faithfulness to his people, and thus, no proper response of worship by the people back to God.
Memento explores the violence that results from Leonard’s efforts to construct a narrative for his life after he has been stripped of his ability to properly remember. The scriptures likewise recount the fatal consequences of forgetting what God has done.
Memory in the Torah
In Exodus 12:24-27, God instructs Moses about how to celebrate the Passover: “Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.”
The memory of God’s miraculous deliverance from Egypt is to be L’dor V’dor, seamlessly passed from generation to generation.
The crossing of the Jordan is likewise to be memorialized. In exact parallelism to God’s instructions to Moses about observing the Passover, God commands Joshua to take twelve stones from the Jordan, over which the Israelites crossed as God held back the waters. Joshua set up the twelve stones they took from the Jordan at Gilgal:
“He said to the Israelites, ‘In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God” (Joshua 14:20-24).
As God parted the Red Sea, so He parted the Jordan, and in both cases the inquiries of future generations are to prompt the community to remember and re-tell the stories of God’s past faithfulness.
Memory Loss in Memento
To create continuity between past and present, Leonard uses notes, tattoos, and a Polaroid camera. Not quite the law written on the heart foretold in Jeremiah 31, Leonard’s tattoos provide his only incontrovertible truths. As he gathers information about his wife’s killer, he tattoos it on his body, so that despite his memory loss, those Facts are always right there for him to see. Leonard likewise uses the Polaroid to take pictures of significant people and places, and then writes notes about them, so that when he encounters them again he will know who and what they are even though he doesn’t actually remember them. As he says, “you learn to trust your own handwriting.” When we first meet Leonard’s friend, Teddy, for example, we, like Leonard, view him through the lens of Leonard’s note about him: “Don’t believe his lies.”
While Leonard is confident in his ability to uncover the truth, despite his memory loss, his tools fail him throughout the film. Natalie is able to manipulate Leonard, for instance, because he cannot find a pen in time to write himself a note about her shocking cruelty.
Forgetfulness in the Torah
If memory is the biblical virtue that makes all others possible, then forgetfulness is a most debilitating vice. No matter how faithful God is to his people, if they fail to remember what he has done it will do them no good. The paradigmatic Old Testament example of forgetfulness is the bad report of the spies and the Israelites’ subsequent refusal to enter Canaan. When the twelve spies return from Canaan, all the people, other than Joshua and Caleb, turn against Moses, as they clamor to return to Egypt:
“And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, ‘Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! Why is the LORD bringing us into this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become a prey. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?’ And they said to one another, ‘Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt.” (Numbers 14:2-4).
The Israelites’ forgetfulness is so profound that, although God delivered them from Pharaoh’s army, they are unwilling to face the Canaanites for fear that they will die. Earlier, having forgotten the affliction of slavery they complain about the manna God graciously provided for their sustenance and mis-remember their life in Egypt:
“”Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at” (Numbers 11:4-6).
Rather than gratitude for their deliverance, the Israelites actually reminisce about the good ole’ times they had back in Egypt. This will not be the last time the Israelites long to return to Egypt (see Jeremiah 42). Their forgetfulness virtually makes void all that God had done for them. As a result, God condemns that generation to die in the wilderness.
Jesus’ disciples, especially in Mark’s Gospel, are characterized by a short-term memory loss as dramatic as Leonard’s. Although Jesus miraculously feeds a crowd of five thousand men with five loaves and two fish (Mark 6:30-44), when his disciples are faced with another hungry crowd, this time of only four thousand men, they ask, “How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?” (Mark 8:4) as if they had not witnessed the earlier miracle.
Leonard’s memory loss undermines even those truths which he claims with certainty. Throughout the film, Leonard refers to Sammy Jankis, a man with similar memory loss as himself. Unlike Leonard, Sammy apparently failed to find a system through which to cope. Sammy’s wife grows increasingly frantic as she tries desperately to restore his memory. The one thing Sammy does remember is how to administer his diabetic wife’s insulin As Leonard relates the story, Sammy’s wife tells him that it’s time for her shot even after Sammy has already given it to her. Sammy shrugs and gives her another shot. Sammy’s wife repeats this process, hoping that Sammy will somehow realize that he has already given her insulin. According to Leonard, Sammy sends his wife into a coma by giving her multiple insulin shots.
It’s not until the end of the film that we realize that Leonard has conflated Sammy with himself. Leonard’s wife survived the assault; she died when Leonard gave her too much insulin. His quest for vengeance is an illusion. Even that which Leonard believes most firmly about himself is not true.
The Israelites’ warped memory allows them to alter the shape of their communal narrative, casting themselves in the role of the victim, and descend into self-pity, rather than trust in God. Leonard’s failure of memory likewise enables him to construct a false, but reassuring narrative for himself.
Meaning and Narrative
Memento‘s final, horrifying revelation is that Leonard’s quest to avenge his wife is a fiction he has perpetrated on himself. The film’s plot unfolds ingeniously in reverse, so that the end of the film is actually its chronological beginning. In the film’s final scene, we discover that Teddy, who is a police officer, has tried to help Leonard achieve a kind of catharsis by enabling him to confront and kill his wife’s assailant. Teddy already helped Leonard kill the man who assaulted his wife a year before the events of the film, but Leonard doesn’t remember it. Teddy and Leonard recapitulate the drama of Leonard’s vengeance when Teddy arranges a meeting with a drug dealer named Jimmy, who Leonard murders believing him to be his wife’s killer.
In talking to Teddy after killing Jimmy, Leonard realizes that his life will be meaningless without something to pursue, so he turns Teddy into his suspect. He burns the Polaroid Teddy took of him after he killed his wife’s assailant and the one of the dead Jimmy, writes himself a note not to trust Teddy, and records Teddy’s license plate as that of his wife’s killer. At Teddy’s expense, Leonard provides himself with a string of clues that will give him direction every time he comes to his senses. Engineered by Leonard himself from the beginning, the film’s first scene (and its chronological end point)–Leonard’s killing of Teddy–is inevitable.
Leonard is a modernist insofar as he lives within a narrative of his own making. He is the author of the narrative of avenging his wife’s killer. It is his handwriting alone which he trusts, and his notes alone which authorize his murders.
