Memento: The Philosophy of Fact 6

As I mentioned in the previous review, Memento has been one of my favorite films for decades. I have never really delved into the “deeper” aspects of the film. That is odd for me. Normally, I am profoundly drawn to such things. But, Memento is such a cool idea and is so fascinatingly told, hitting both mind and heart, I never chose to delve deeper.

The film stands on its own, as is, without any further speculation. It works as a low-budget noir, as an acting showcase, as a feat of editing, as a story told backward that somehow never becomes obscure. It is surprisingly suspenseful at times. It works as ambiguity that feels like atmosphere instead of confusion. I loved it that way for years and I was right to. What follows does not make it a better film. It does not change the film's worth by a single frame. It only reveals some of the intricacies Nolan was playing with, which is why I’ve been his fanboy ever since.

I have seen Memento more than two dozen times. This most recent viewing was my first in many years, and the gap is the whole reason any of this surfaced. I knew the film cold. I had stopped watching it and started remembering it. Coming back after a long absence let me see the mechanics of the film in a philosophical light.

For most of those decades I accepted the film’s near-total ambiguity as the pleasure. I did not need to know whether Teddy was telling the truth. I did not need to know whether Sammy Jankis existed the way Leonard says he did. I did not need to know what happened to Leonard's wife. The film provides contradictory information on all those subjects. Almost nothing in the film is clear and yet Leonard has to act anyway. And it was a great film so I didn’t question it.

I always saw Leonard as this tragic character. He is being used by everyone he meets, he is desperately trying to remember facts about his wife’s murder and to avenge her death. He does not understand what he is doing half the time, acting out of context. He loved his wife and misses their intimacy which is beautifully woven into the fabric of the film. He’s tragic.

But, this time I forgot all that for a moment and really saw him for his actions rather than for his tragic self.

Leonard is a murderer.

That sounds obvious because it is obvious. The film opens with him blowing Teddy's brains out. Chronologically earlier, which is to say later in the experience, he strangles Jimmy Grantz in an abandoned building. If Teddy is telling even part of the truth, and the Polaroid he carries suggests he is, Leonard already killed the original John G. long before the film begins. That is a serial killer by the plainest arithmetic available. He’s tragic?

That is the film working on me. Nolan working on me. He gave me a story and the story organized the facts. Which, as it happens, is also what the film is about.

The Polaroid is Leonard's emblem of the trustworthy fact. He reaches for it precisely because it is not memory. The chemistry fixes the world while his mind refuses to. A photo, to Leonard, is the thing that cannot lie.

There are exactly two Polaroids in Memento that we see change state in front of us. Not handed to us finished. Not glimpsed already scribbled on. Two that fade in, or out, depending upon the time sequence. The first is of Teddy, in the opening shot, fading backward into the white square as the film runs in reverse, the blood crawling back, the gun reloading itself, a murder un-happening before we even know it is a murder. The second is Jimmy's, precisely where the two timelines merge into all color, developing forward into color as the black-and-white catches up. Every other Polaroid in the film arrives already developed or half-burned.

The only two photographs the film presents in this fashion are taken by Leonard of his murder victims. So, let’s just say I saw Leonard in a different light after that. And it lead me to ponder how the film handles the act of human narrative itself.

The film is not saying there are no facts. The film is stuffed with facts. Plates, tattoos, Polaroids, case files, bruises, bodies, cars, clothes. The facts are everywhere. But, a fact does not tell you what it means. Meaning gets assigned. And the assignment is where both manipulation and self-deception live.

Teddy's license plate is the cleanest case in the film, which is why this essay is named after it. Leonard is motivated by his rage at Teddy telling him what might be as close to the truth as the film ever comes. He spontaneously decides Teddy can be the next John G. (Teddy told him that he was a John G., too, whether Leonard remembers that long enough for it to motivate him is an interesting question.) But he might not have to consciously remember his rage. Could emotion drive memory further than thought? Is it harder to forget? He is angry and writes down the plate for Teddy’s car. He has it tattooed onto his body as Fact 6 about the murderer of his wife. Natalie runs the number after they slept together. She knows all about his tattoos and apparently thinks she has made it impossible for him to forget her. Of course, he forgets. Of course, Natalie’s check leads to Teddy. The data is verified.

The meaning is not.

Natalie verified a plate. She did not verify that Teddy deserved to die. The number is real. It may even lead to a man whose name fits. None of that proves the story Leonard is about to act on. A real fact got fitted into a self-serving narrative, and the reality of the fact lent its authority to the narrative. That is far more dangerous than a lie, because a lie can be challenged directly. A true fact inside a false story keeps vouching for the story. The number matches. The record checks out. The world appears to agree.

The plate even refuses to hold still. Nolan cleverly places two versions of it in the film. Same number, same state design, but the spacing changes, and the “I” that has bars top and bottom on one plate loses the top bar on the other. When Leonard writes it on the Polaroid he uses a plain vertical line that could be an “I” or a “1.” I did not catch this until I had seen the film a dozen times. Why bother with such tricksmanship, if not to make firm facts something that can appear differently? Even if you poke around the trivialities of the film things are not so clear-cut.

This is supposed to be the same license plate for the same car.

Same number but it is obviously different.

On the surface, Memento is ambiguous about what happened. Underneath, it is not ambiguous at all about how meaning is made. You can know exactly what the film says about fact and narrative while never knowing what occurred in it. Better than that. You have to not know, because your sitting with this plate screaming that nothing is what it seems, the exact problem the film is describing.

Teddy works from outside. He supplies Leonard a John G., withholds the ending, and keeps the machine running for money. The film almost lets the two hundred thousand dollar drug deal slide past as background, but it is not background. Jimmy arrives with the cash. Leonard kills Jimmy. Teddy moves in around the aftermath. The philosophy has an economy under it, and the economy is a corrupt cop using a brain-damaged man as a murder weapon. And yet Teddy, the greasiest figure in the film, gives the least-redacted account we get. That is the bleak joke of the thing. The closest we come to truth comes from the man we have been trained not to believe. “DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES,” runs Leonard’s note on Teddy’s photo.

Natalie works from closer in. She takes the pens so he cannot write. She mocks his wife, because she has worked out that the wife is not someone Leonard loved but the story Leonard lives inside. He hits her. She leaves long enough for his memory to reset, then comes back with the injury already on her face and supplies the meaning: Dodd did this. A fact appeared. The meaning arrived later. That is the entire film in one bloodied lip.

Then Leonard, working on himself, which is the innermost case and the worst. After Teddy tells him too much, Leonard cannot revise the story and cannot absorb the ending, so he writes the instruction not to believe Teddy's lies and tattoos the plate as Fact 6. He builds a trail for the next Leonard. The rage that authored it disappears. The fact remains, looking exactly like something the world handed to him.

Teddy lies and knows it. Natalie manipulates and knows it. Leonard is the only one of the three who forgets that he was the author. He does not deceive himself the way we do, with a rationalization we could in principle catch ourselves making. He launders the choice and loses the receipt, and then wakes up experiencing the result as simply true. Not falsehood. Falsehood washed clean of its origin.

The ultimate mind-trip of the film is that Leonard cannot invent a new story. The story is tattooed on his body. "John G. raped and murdered my wife." "Find him and kill him." He does not choose that narrative fresh each morning. He inherits it. He wakes into it. The mechanism by which he might revise it is the exact mechanism that has been destroyed.

So the story never changes. Only the “John G” does.

"You can be my John G." is the most chilling line in the film because Leonard is not writing a new script. He is casting a man into a part of his narrative. Motivated out of anger for Teddy, he is inventing facts. Teddy's license plate becomes "Fact 6" in his endless quest to kill his wife's murderer which apparently he already did long ago. The tattoos do not protect Leonard from manipulation. Nor do they mean Leonard is not manipulating himself, his story, his wife, Sammy Jankis.

Here is the philosophy of the film, stated plainly. Narrative is what gives a human life its meaning and purpose. We do not live in facts (though we all claim to). We live in the story we make of them (and call the story a fact). But the facts that story rests on are not fixed in place. As the story keeps going, as Leonard keeps avenging the murder of his wife over and over, the facts degrade through time. Some get changed. Some get invented. Some get redacted. Pages go missing.

The film shows this with its own objects. Leonard tears pages out of his files and blacks out various lines, so the one record meant to anchor him is a record he has edited himself. He burns the Polaroid that would prove the deed was done, because a finished story is no story at all and he cannot afford an ending. The note beside Teddy's face does not record what Teddy is. It records what Leonard needs him to be. The facts are everywhere, and every one of them is wearing down or being worked on while the story they serve rolls forward untouched.

Which means, of course, that meaning itself is the story not the facts and the facts may be subject to change or variability but the story stays the same.

This is why Teddy is right when he tells Leonard he does not know who he is. "You don't have a clue do you? You don't even know who you are. […] That's who you were. You do not know who you are, what you've become since the incident." Leonard knows who he was. Husband. Investigator. Victim. A man with a system who trusts facts because memory is unreliable. What he does not know is what he has become since the incident, because his self-image froze at the wound and his actions did not. The consequences kept walking. Bodies accumulated. Cars changed hands. Clothes changed bodies. A man can become a serial murderer while still experiencing himself, every few minutes, as a grieving husband on the trail of justice. That is worse than memory loss. Memory loss is the condition. The lag between the frozen self and the moving consequences is the horror.

Nolan ran the same idea right off the screen and onto the disc. The special edition DVD would trap you inside a psychological test if you did not figure out the navigation.  Catching the special features on Disc Two is impossible without knowing the secret, random progressions necessary to navigate the menu-as-psychology test. Buried in Disc One is Nolan's commentary track for the film.  

At the scene where Teddy explains everything, the commentary will give you one of four versions that play at randomly. The only way to activate the additional commentaries is to restart the disc, fast-forward to the scene and see what you get this time. You do not get to choose. In one version, Nolan says Teddy is telling the truth and trying to help. In another, he is lying and totally using Leonard. In a third, Nolan just talks shop about the shoot. In the fourth, the track runs backward and means nothing at all.

The one feature whose entire job is to kind of settle the film degrades into another version of the film. Even the authority refuses to be an authority. Pick a meaning.  Any meaning you like.

The special edition DVD packaging is a mock-up psychiatric profile of Leonard. I also bought the soundtrack back in the day of CDs. The music is excellent. You can see my notes written probably 20 years ago regarding how the menu system works. They are written on pages provided in the DVD set. The green paperclip is also part of the packaging.

The psychiatric report is fun packaging even if the disc navigation is frustrating. The sticky note to "WATCH" is actually useful.  You are not otherwise told that selecting "watch" is how you play the movie.  There are a couple of dozen other words most of which take you the psychological test that is inescapable. Start over.

Mock the wife and Leonard may hit you. Get between him and the story and he may beat you senseless and run you out of town, which is what happens to Dodd. Fit the part of John G. and he kills you. Dodd is the proof, because Dodd is the man Leonard beats half to death and does not kill. The ceiling on the violence is not set by how much rage is on hand. It is set by the part you have been cast in. Dodd has no slot in the tattooed story, so he gets the beating and the highway and keeps his life. Killing is reserved for the role he was never given.

He is not a clever killer, either. He strangles Jimmy, a bigger man, with his hands, which takes time and will. Teddy watches what Leonard is and says it with a grin. "That's why you're so good at it." Even Leonard half-knows. "I don't think they let people like me carry a gun." People like me. Then he keeps the gun.

Leonard beating people up and killing them is the result of his meaning-making machinery. It is the machinery running normally. The story that gives his suffering a shape is the same story that picks out a body. And the wife does not even have to be real for it to work. The engine does not need a wife. It needs a wife-story, written on skin, and the story produces corpses whether or not its origin was ever true.

Philosophically, the most important moment in the film is when, out of anger, Leonard decides to assign an incorrect "fact" to Teddy.

"DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES"

Then, beyond just making up the fact, Leonard burns the photo of Jimmy's murdered body and of himself supposedly celebrating his avenging the murder of his wife. Meaning emerges from "real" facts created out of context while other "real" facts are destroyed and, more importantly, forgotten. 

Teddy says the most human and most damning thing in the film, in a parking lot, the way the worst wisdom usually arrives. "So you lie to yourself to be happy. There's nothing wrong with that. We all do it. Who cares if there's a few little details you'd rather not remember."

He is not making a rare accusation. He is handing out a membership card.

Because we all do it. We keep the facts that feed the story and let the rest degrade. We do it with selective memory and a forgiving mirror instead of fire and ink, but the motion is the same. The thing that keeps it honest is continuity, a self that carries from one day to the next and can hold a fact, test it, regret it, be corrected by it tomorrow. Leonard lost the continuity. So his facts come loose and harden into commands, and the note speaks with the authority of the world because the man who wrote it is gone.

For most of twenty-five years I chose the story, brilliant ambiguous noir, enjoy it, no need to look down, and the story kept the harder fact off the table until I was ready for it. I did to Memento the thing Memento is about. The film was (and, indeed, still is) sufficient the whole time. I just found another room on the way back through, years later, and finding it was its own pleasure, and the film I loved is exactly as good as it always was.

Near the end, Leonard says, “I have to believe that my actions still have meaning even if I can’t remember them.”

There’s the film’s philosophy in a fortune cookie. Leonard is right. His actions do have meaning. Memory does not create consequence. Jimmy is still dead. Teddy is still dead. Natalie’s face was still bruised. Dodd still left town. The world does not reset because Leonard does.

But that is also why the line is so dangerous. Leonard needs the meaning of action without the burden of remembered responsibility. He needs his life to matter without having to carry the self who made it matter, consequence without continuity. The tattoos give him everything he simply must remember. They preserve the story. And we see Leonard bend the story with Fact 6. Who knows if the other "facts" on his body are any more true?

The real tragedy of Leonard Shelby is not that he lost his wife and his ability to create new memories. He is on this quest that he really has no hope to resolving because it was already resolved! He can’t remember. So he is doomed to face the same situations over and over again, constantly looking for a person he has already killed. And becoming a serial killer in the process. It’s like the story starts over each time and Memento is just one iteration of it.

There is a simple episode in the film where Leonard’s wife is reading a well-weathered paperback.  In their dialog exchange it is revealed that she only reads this one book over and over.  “I enjoy it” is her straightforward justification. There is a shot of her reading in bed with the book open to the middle.  The cover has long since fallen off but we can still see “Chapter One” in the shot.

That is Leonard’s situation in terms of narrative and meaning.  He is caught in an endless loop. The singular attraction of his wife’s book becomes the circular story he tells himself every day of his life.  Only in this case, he’s a murderer.  And he will kill whoever he can “prove” killed his wife again, no matter how many John G’s are out there.

If Memento has a philosophical stance it is that ambiguity doesn’t make associated facts any more “true.” It doesn’t matter which John G dies next as long as there is a John G to be hunted down by a man who can’t remember what happened ten minutes ago and may have factually invented his entire life.

The bottom line is narrative. In addition to messing around with non-linear story telling, the film invokes a philosophical air but, as I said, it does not make the film any better...or worse. That philosophy can be viewed from different perspectives in a completely ambiguous world. But it has a cornerstone.

Memento says that no matter if you made up some of the facts, you will become the narrative. It will engulf you. In fact, whatever epic, diverse narratives each of us clings to, each of us is engulfed by narrative. The narrative, even if it changes over time, is who you are and who you become. Teddy, for example, didn’t intend Leonard to become who he is but he is partly responsible for taking advantage of the situation. Leonard becomes whatever he tells himself...and whatever all those tattoos tell him. How can he possibly escape his tattoos?

That is probably the most universally applicable philosophical statement in the film. It isn't that profound or original, really. But it is, indisputably, Leonard's mode of living. Though we all differ, we all play the same game as Leonard. Up to a point, we become whatever story we tell ourselves.