Memento
Memento
Who are we without our memory? Are we still human? Do we still have our identity? In the film, Memento, director Christopher Nolan tries to answer these questions through his character Leonard. Leonard suffers from short-term memory loss after a head injury that was incurred during an attack on his wife. Leonard believes his purpose is to seek revenge and find the man who raped his wife. As the audience, we are challenged to examine his relationships with his wife and Sammy and analyze the components of his “true self”, in order to determine if Leonard is a “freak” or more or less “like one of us”. Nolan will force us to decide how dependent human identity is on memory and if a “true self” exists if you take memory away.
Most mysteries in the film can be solved by looking at the relationship between Leonard and Sammy.Leonard always brings up and has a tattoo that says “Remember Sammy Jenkins”. Sammy’s story is something Leonard obsesses over. He even thinks that he hears Jimmy whisper “Sammy” when he is carrying his corpse.By the end of the film, Teddy informs us that only some details of the Sammy story Leonard likes to tell are true. In fact, Sammy is a screen memory of what actually happened to Leonard. In Draper’s essay on Freud, we learned that screen memories are a result of repression, or blocking emotionally painful events out of conscious awareness. An insignificant memory, which for Leonard is Sammy’s story, serves a screen memory for the more traumatic memory: hi being the cause of his wife’s death. Leonard’s wife survived the attack. Teddy tells Leonard that it was actually his wife that was diabetic and we see a memory of him poking his wife with a shot of insulin. He developed a screen memory for this that was just him pinching his wife’s leg. Teddy says, “Sammy was a conman. Sammy didn't have a wife. It was your wife who had diabetes”. Leonard was the one that gave her too much insulin which led to her death. Nolan definitely wants the
Who are we without our memory? Are we still human? Do we still have our identity? In the film, Memento, director Christopher Nolan tries to answer these questions through his character Leonard. Leonard suffers from short-term memory loss after a head injury that was incurred during an attack on his wife. Leonard believes his purpose is to seek revenge and find the man who raped his wife. As the audience, we are challenged to examine his relationships with his wife and Sammy and analyze the components of his “true self”, in order to determine if Leonard is a “freak” or more or less “like one of us”. Nolan will force us to decide how dependent human identity is on memory and if a “true self” exists if you take memory away.
Most mysteries in the film can be solved by looking at the relationship between Leonard and Sammy.Leonard always brings up and has a tattoo that says “Remember Sammy Jenkins”. Sammy’s story is something Leonard obsesses over. He even thinks that he hears Jimmy whisper “Sammy” when he is carrying his corpse.By the end of the film, Teddy informs us that only some details of the Sammy story Leonard likes to tell are true. In fact, Sammy is a screen memory of what actually happened to Leonard. In Draper’s essay on Freud, we learned that screen memories are a result of repression, or blocking emotionally painful events out of conscious awareness. An insignificant memory, which for Leonard is Sammy’s story, serves a screen memory for the more traumatic memory: hi being the cause of his wife’s death. Leonard’s wife survived the attack. Teddy tells Leonard that it was actually his wife that was diabetic and we see a memory of him poking his wife with a shot of insulin. He developed a screen memory for this that was just him pinching his wife’s leg. Teddy says, “Sammy was a conman. Sammy didn't have a wife. It was your wife who had diabetes”. Leonard was the one that gave her too much insulin which led to her death. Nolan definitely wants the