goal is to hunt down the men who bonked him on the skull before proceeding to rape and murder his wife.
Since the theme of Memento is revenge and the narrative construction is so wonderfully unconventional (the scenes are shown in reverse order, so the audience—like Leonard—never knows what just happened), it would be easy to find a lot of things in this movie that might appear to define it. However, the concept that’s most vital is the way it presents memory as its own kind of reality. When Memento asks the “What is reality?” question, it actually provides an answer: Reality is a paradigm that always seems different and personal and unique, yet never really is. Its reality is autonomous.
There’s a crucial moment in Memento where Leonard describes his eternal quest to kill his wife’s murderers, and the person sitting across from him makes an astute observation: This will be the least satisfying revenge anyone will ever inflict. Even if Leonard kills his enemies, he’ll never remember doing so. His victory won’t just be hollow; it will be instantaneously erased. But Leonard disagrees. “The world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it?” he snaps. “My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.”
What’s ironic about Leonard’s point is that it’s completely true—yet even Leonard refuses to accept what that sentiment means in its totality. Almost no one ever does.
I’m not sure if anyone who’s not a soap opera character truly gets amnesia; it might be one of those fictional TV diseases, like environmental illness or gum disease. However, we all experience intermittent amnesia, sometimes from drinking Ketel One vodka[56] but usually from the rudimentary passage of time. We refer to this phenomenon as “forgetting stuff.” (Reader’s note: I realize I’m not exactly introducing ground-breaking medical data right now, but bear with me.) Most people consider forgetting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there’s nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moments for later recall (which I do all the time).
Taoists constantly tell me to embrace the present, but I only live in the past and the future; my existence is solely devoted to (a) thinking about what will happen next and (b) thinking back to what’s happened before. The present seems useless, because it has no extension beyond my senses. To me, living a carpe diem philosophy would make me like Leonard. His reality is based almost entirely on faith: Leonard believes his actions have meaning, but he can’t experience those meanings (or even recall the actions that caused them). He knows hard reality is vast, but his soft reality is minuscule. And in the film’s final sequence, we realize that he understands that all too well; ultimately, he lies to himself to expand it. In a sense, he was right all along; his actions do have meaning, even if he doesn’t remember them. But that meaning only applies to an objective reality he’s not part of, and that’s the only game in town.
It’s significant that the character of Rita in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a woman with total amnesia, and that we’re eventually forced to conclude that she might be nothing but a figment of another character’s imagination.[57] It’s almost like Lynch is saying that someone who can’t remember who they are really doesn’t exist. Once your reality closes down to zero, you’re no longer part of it. So maybe that’s the bottom line with all of these films. Maybe the answer to “What is reality?” is this: Reality is both reflexive and inflexible. It’s not that we all create our own reality, because we don’t; it’s not that there is no hard reality, because there is. We can’t alter reality—but reality can’t exist unless we know it’s there. It depends on us as much as we depend on it.
We’re all in this together, people.
Semidepressing side note: Eight months after reading Owen Gleiberman’s review in EW, I woke up with another tummy ache in the middle of the night (this time at a Days Inn in Chicago). The only thing I had to read was the July 15 issue of Time magazine that came with the hotel room, so I started looking at the “letters” page. All the letters were about Tom Cruise (Time had just done a cover story on Cruise after the release of Steven Spielberg’s film version of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report). These are two of them:
I was glad to see Tom Cruise, the most respected person in show biz, on the cover of Time. In general, Hollywood actors contribute little to society, other than mere amusement. Cruise, however, is different. He isn’t simply another mindless entertainer. He is a role model who overcame his childhood problems by being confident and motivated.
—Daniel Liao, Calgary Was this article intended to help Tom Cruise regain his clean-cut image? He lost so much of it when he left his wife and children. Most alpha males need to control the women in their lives, and since Nicole Kidman has come into her own, it appears that Cruise moved on to a woman he had more control over. Are you going to be doing a cover on Kidman? She is the one who has had to go through the humiliation of being dumped by a famous husband and deal with being a single mom. She is a much more interesting person.
—Susan Trinidad, Spanaway (Wash.) My first reaction to these letters was guttural: “Since when does Time publish letters that are written by rival publicists?” However, as I sat there in pain, feeling as though my stomach was being vacuumed through the lower half of my torso and into the bowels of this Illinois hotel, I was struck by the more frightening realization: These are not publicists! They are just everyday people, and they are some of the people I am trying to understand reality alongside. Somehow, there are literate men in Canada who believe Tom Cruise is a respected role model and “different” from all the other actors who contribute nothing but “mere amusement.” Somehow, there are women in the Pacific Northwest who think Nicole Kidman is interesting and wonderful and an icon of single motherhood, and that little five-foot-seven Cruise is an “alpha male” (even though everyone I know halfway assumes he’s gay). These are the things they feel strongly about, because these are things they know to be true.
We don’t have a fucking chance.
I hate punk rock.
Actually, that’s not true; I kind of like punk rock, sometimes. What I hate are people who love punk rock. There has never been a genre of anything that has made more people confused about what art is capable of doing, and they all refuse to shut up about it.
A few years ago, one of my favorite humans of all time died from bone cancer. A few hours after the funeral, I found myself in a conversation with someone who was as depressed as I was and almost as drunk. But—in order to avoid talking about our friend, probably—we started talking about pop music, and this guy kept saying, “Punk rock saved my life.” He said it like four times in ten minutes. “When I was in high school,” he insisted, “punk totally saved my life. If not for that music, I wouldn’t be here today. Punk rock saved my life, man.”
I have heard those exact words said thousands of times by hundreds of people, and none of them are ever joking. They exist in a culture of certainty. They want to believe what they are saying so much. They want to believe that this sentiment is literally true. And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
