Memento’s sequencing was really interesting, and incredibly interesting. You only see the convergence of the past and the present into a single moment at the very end. I’m not sure if the directors wanted the entire movie to make sense at the beginning, or at the end. They string the audience along with barely enough information to get by on the sequence of the time, because they’re learning over and over again, just like Leonard. However, by seeing the past, and going backwards from the future, gives the audience this confusing idea of how it all started without the benefit of knowing that they’re all connected. Maybe that disconnection was something that they wanted to emphasize, until the big reveal at the end, when we find out that, oh, it was all because of this one thing at the very beginning. There was no single part of the story that wasn’t important to how it ended, but by showing the end of the whole thing first, there was no way for the audience to be anything but controlled by the memory fragments.
This kind of goes along with the first impressions idea that I took away from the whole movie. People always make first impressions; it’s human nature, and it’s something that is significantly taken advantage of in this movie. For every single character, we get a first impression that, had the movie been sequenced in a way that we’re used to, would have been the very last impression that we ever got. Leonard in particular is a figure that we see changed through our first impressions. In the beginning, or the sequential end, he is only a victim of a crime that ruined his life. Natalie is a stranger who is helping him out of the goodness of her heart. Teddy is the guy who committed all of the crimes. But by the end, or the sequential beginning, Leonard becomes the, technically unwitting, killer/bad guy. Natalie becomes someone who is so anguished over the loss of her boyfriend that she uses Leonard for her own gain. Teddy becomes the person who happened to be the person that Leonard pointed his gun at because he needed someone to blame for his loss. I think if the entire story had been played out in the actual sequence of time that is typical, it wouldn’t have had nearly the same effect. In regular order, we would have simply seen a grief-stricken bunch of people committing multiple crimes together, ending the movie with a very mentally sick guy who is so focused on revenge that he doesn’t care who he kills. With this kind of sequencing, the audience is left completely in the dark, and only slowly begins to realize the real ugly truth that works behind everyone’s actions. At the very end, the audience gets to see that everything that happened, happened for a reason, and that it was all connected to this one point at the sequential beginning. The big idea was connection. And I think that point was so poignant because a guy with no short-term memory can’t make connections like that, but they all happened anyway. It almost seemed inevitable.