The movie'Memento' can be said to be the starting point of director Christopher Nolan's position.
This film he wrote and directed is a story about the time and memory of a man suffering from short-term memory loss.
The peculiar thing about this film is its direction and composition.
From the beginning, this film does not unfold in chronological order.
Each of the 22 black-and-white and color scenes is shown at an intersection. Black-and-white is organized in chronological order, and color scenes are in reverse, and eventually, black-and-white and color time meet in the last scene.
In such a complex composition, it is difficult for the viewer to grasp the composition or chronological order of the film from the beginning, and to put together 44 short scenes, the audience concentrates throughout the movie and arranges the events in their heads.
The protagonist, Leonard Shelby, suffered from short-term amnesia in shock after the day his wife was raped.
He can only remember things within 10 minutes, and after 10 minutes, even those memories disappear.
All he remembers is the moments before the accident, he lives with the last memory of his wife's eyes covered in plastic in front of him.
He uses tattoos, notes, and photos to preserve his memories.
His body is filled with tattoos that record clues about the criminal he has to kill, and he takes everything with a polaroid camera and carries it with a memo.
It feels sad to see him looking for a pen to record his memories within 10 minutes.
A man named Ted and a woman named Natalie continue to appear around him.
He relies on his photos and notes to evaluate them and decide what attitude he will take.
From the beginning to the end of the film, we focus on the actions and lines of Ted and Natalie, and make a continuous judgment as to whether they are negative characters or helpers to help Leonard.
This spectator's behavior is the same for Leonard.
He shows a conflict in the words of Ted's'Don't meet Natalie' and'Don't be fooled by his lies' written in Ted's photo.
His judgment is determined solely by that single line of memo.
Trailer
Black and white, color 44 scenes shown in the movie are listed in chronological order
(One). Leonard wakes up in a motel room. He checks his body tattoos and notes, and he remembers what he's trying to do.
(2). He receives a call from him and begins to share his memories of the character'Sammy'.
(He was working as an excellent insurance investigator, and his wife applies insurance for Sammy, who suffers from memory loss.
Leonard, through Sammy's recognizing herself, determines that Sammy is lying and dismisses her wife's insurance request.
Sammy's wife continues to suspicious of her husband and conducts several experiments to find out if he is lying.
She keeps asking her husband to give her injections for her last experiment, and Sammy follows her words straight away, and Sammy's wife dies. )
(3). The call came back to him. The person on the phone tells him to come to the lobby after telling him a clue about the criminal, saying he is a police officer.
(4). Leonard meets the police in the lobby, gives him a clue about the location, and goes to the abandoned house to find the killer.
(5). In an abandoned house, he meets a character named'Jimmy' and strangles him to death. But I intuit that he is not the culprit.
Teddy then arrives and learns that Teddy has used him, and leaves with Jimmy's car and clothes.
(6). He visits a tattoo shop and writes a memo with Teddy's car number on his body.
(7). He meets Natalie at the bar and visits her house to get information about the person named Dodd who hurt her.
(8). Leave Natalie's house and go to the motel Ted introduced. There she calls a woman there and asks her to present the situation at the time when her wife was in her accident.
Her memories come to mind, and suffers, takes her things and burns them to make the night stand.
(9). On his way home, he pursues a man on the road. According to his memo, he goes to the room of a character named'Dodd'.
There, he struggles with Dodd, binds him to him, and spends the night in Dodd's room.
(10). Ted visits him, releases Dodd, and visits Natalie's house for information about the character.
(11). He spends the night at her house knowing to Natalie that she is helping her after losing her lover.
(12). Eats with Ted in the morning and meets Natalie at lunch to receive clues about the culprit.
(13). After returning to the motel where he is staying, Leonard is convinced that the killer is Ted, and takes Ted who has visited him and heads to the abandoned house (where Jimmy was killed before).
There, Leonard shoots and kills Ted.
Organized in chronological order, the content is not very complicated.
However, it is difficult for us to understand the incident at once because the contents of a man's three days are complicated.
The black and white scenes mainly show Leonard talking on the phone with someone and talking about a person he knows called Sammy.
In fact, Sammy had no wife, and she was a simple scammer.
Leonard, a former insurance investigator, revealed that he was a scammer, and in order to manipulate his memories, he falsified a character named Sammy and his wife in his memory.
In fact, in the phrase he kept talking and inscribed on the back of his hand, "Remember Sammy Jankis," Sammy was himself.
He didn't want to admit that he had killed his wife, so he distorted his memory and believed it to be true.
In a black and white scene, there is a scene in which Sammy sitting in the shelter changes to that of Leonard.
This shows that Sammy was herself.
He remembers that his wife died at the time of the incident, and that he suffered from short-term amnesia due to the shock he received from hitting a glass mirror by a robber at that time.
But, in fact, at the time of the incident, his wife did not die.
She had to watch her husband alive and struggling with her short-term amnesia, and the story of Sammy's wife that Leonard talked about on the phone was that of his wife.
She suffered from diabetes and was killed by insulin injections he gave over and over due to amnesia.
There are scenes where he pinpoints his wife from the memory of Leonard's past wife, which appears briefly.
In fact, this pinch was a distorted memory of the act of injecting an injection.
Even though he killed Jimmy and Ted, we can tell from his memory that this is the house where he lived with his wife.
He continued to search for his old home to kill the people he thought was the culprit.
From Ted's words, we can see that he had already found and killed the killer who raped his wife a year ago.
In a Polaroid photo sent by Ted, Leonard smiles brightly as he points to his left chest, who said he would get his tattoo on if he caught the killer.
In the movie, he engraves the phrase'I have done it.' on his left chest and shows him lying down with his wife.
He had already avenged the killer while his wife was alive, but when her wife died, he continued to search for the killer, distorting his memory that he was the killer who killed her wife.
He carries a thick case file.
Several pages of data on the case of his wife's sexual assault are missing, and there are also invisible sentences.
Getting rid of the page and striking the line was what Leonard himself did to get rid of the perfect killer.
The character Ted was the police officer in charge when Leonard's wife was raped.
He is a corrupt cop who helped Leonard find and take revenge on the perpetrator and later try to take advantage of him by using what he is called amnesia.
He was selling drugs to a drug dealer named Jimmy, and Jimmy was selling drugs to a character named Dodd.
Ted was able to get Jimmy's money and drugs by letting Leonard know Jimmy was the culprit and killing him through Leonard.
In the color scene, you can see a wound on Leonard's face, which was in the process of killing Jimmy.
If you see Ted staying around Leonard even after defeating Jimmy, you can see that he's trying to keep using him.
Natalie was Jimmy's lover and knew Jimmy was dealing with Ted on drugs.
After seeing Leonard come to her bar with Jimmy's car and clothes, Natalie notices that her lover, Jimmy, has been killed by Ted.
She is the person who attempts to avenge Ted and Dodd, who used her Leonard's amnesia to kill her own lover.
Using the ten minutes of his memory loss, Dodd intimidates and assaults him, causing Leonard to pursue Dodd, and the killer gives Leonard the decisive clue that Ted is, eventually causing Leonard to murder Ted.
Whether Ted and Natalie are using Leonard or really helpful, it makes them judge through their words and actions throughout the film.
They continue to confuse each other through conflicting testimonies, but in the end, both Natalie and Ted were characters trying to use Leonard to take their own revenge and take advantage.
A man who relies on records
He can't remember the fact that he killed the killer or that he killed Jimmy.
Because he only records what he wants to remember.
To get rid of the killing of Jimmy, he immediately burns the record, the picture that is his memory.
As the picture is burned, it is no longer for him to kill Jimmy.
If he remembered that he killed the real culprit in the case, he would admit that his wife was killed by him, so he would not try to remember him too.
For him, who suffers from short-term memory loss, records take over the role of memory. In other words, he judges, thinks, and defines his identity through the things he wants to remember.
His memory stays in the time before the accident.
He keeps telling Ted who remembers who you are, "I'm Leonard Shelby, and I'm from California."
Ted to him said,'That's you in the past. It's not the current you.' Our identities do not stay in the past, but constantly change.
Even if I and I were the same person a year ago, my identity would have changed due to the experiences and events of a year.
However, Leonard consistently considers himself the same as himself in the past, when he was happy without suffering.
He will continue to try to define himself in the present within himself in the past.
In his conversation with Ted, he says:
"Memories can distort the color of the car or the shape of the room.
Because memory is not a record, it is an interpretation."
He says that memory is an interpretation, not a record, and he says that he believes in his own record, not memory.
However, his record is determined by the subjective judgment of his moment.
He is forgetting the fact that the record is also written by his interpretation.
He makes countless decisions based on a single line of memo,'Don't be fooled by Ted's lies,' made by momentary judgment.
It's also an opportunity to trust Natalie more and more, who keeps not believing Ted's words and tells him not to meet him.
Eventually he kills Ted. His one-line memo shows how much he can control his actions later.
Director's message about memory
The meaning of the title of the movie'Memento' is'(to remember people and places)'.
For Leonard, Memento is tattoos, photos, and notes. Whenever the scene changes, he loses his memory and checks his photos, notes, and tattoos to revive his memory.
This process is repeated for every scene, and I check his record with the scenes composed of reverse order.
The scenes of color composed of the reverse order and the scenes where black and white and color intersect are confusing.
What if all the events were in chronological order? It must have ended with a simple story of a man who repeatedly loses his memory due to amnesia and commits two murders.
However, through the composition of the reverse trajectory, we look at the incident in the same way as the gaze of a man suffering from amnesia without knowing anything above.
Information about Ted, information about motels, and information about Natalie should also rely on the records Leonard checks to look at them.
This composition of the director is a device that allows us to look at events in the same way as Leonard's position.
It was another opportunity to admire Christopher Nolan's performance. There are countless films dealing with amnesia, but most of them contain epic stories and stories of crime.
But Memento's story is simple.
The process of his pursuit of the criminal is neither thrilling nor tense.
Instead, we experience seeing events through Leonard's gaze, showing how a man uses his memory.
This seems to be the difference between the movie Memento and other movies.
Whenever the scenes crossed, I had to be nervous about what information to check and what characters would appear in this scene.
It seemed like my head was shaking as I combined the previous event with the one that appeared this time.
At the end, the scene where the black-and-white scene turns into a color scene was creepy.
The last scene, in the middle of every incident, is the end of the incident he killed Jimmy and the starting point of killing Ted.
It seems to be suggesting that Leonard's murder will continue, showing the process of the case being chained.
He will constantly keep track of clues and, as Ted said, there are plenty of John G's in the world, so his search for the culprit will continue.
Even though there is a reversal, it will be interesting to watch again.
The setting that it well expressed the psychology of a man suffering from amnesia and created a fictitious story in order to forget that he had killed his wife is astounding.
Following Inception, Interstellar, and The Dark Knight, it was a work that confirmed the capabilities of director Christopher Nolan.
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