VISU1311 Blog Post #9

This movie was definitely one of the most confusing and interesting movies I have ever watched. Although, coming from Christopher Nolan I was kind of expecting it. The story of Leonard is told through a series of black and white and color polaroids. The black and white photos are in chronological order while the color are in reverse chronological. To add to the madness, Nolan then breaks the movie up into a sequence of black and white, color, and then black and white that transforms into color. Nolan really let the idea of sequential storytelling fly out the window when he was making this movie. It is a narrative, its just the narrative isn’t in a comfortable chronological sequence of events that we’re used to, thus making it confusing and difficult to remember. This feeling is what Leonard was feeling as a victim of anterograde amnesia. Actively editing the movie out of order draws the audience into the story as a sympathizer to Leonard and his mission to get revenge on John G. Although the sequences are out of order and sort of similar, Nolan gives the audience a clue on the order of the sequences by showing the photographs of the dead men. The first photo of the dead man is Teddy, who was helping Leonard, but ended up dead because of Leonard’s memory loss and unreliable notes he writes to himself. Teddy and Leonard’s relationship is told in the black and white photos   up to where Leonard kills Jimmy Gantz (the second photo of a dead man) and begins to question if Jimmy was the real attacker. Looking back on the movie this order can be made sense if you think of the black and white photos as a flashback, explaining the reason for the dead man in the beginning by revealing why Leonard distrusted Teddy in the first place as introduced in the first sequence of colored photos. The color photos can be considered the present or the most recent sequence of events, where Leonard murders Teddy. This type of story telling makes the audience actively think about the events that transpired, involving them and forcing them out of their comfort zone. I like the idea of non-sequential story telling and I’ve seen it in other movies and books. Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino has a similar out of order experience, although not as extreme as Memento. Memento takes different chunks of the story, as if they were snapshots, and rearranges them to simulate memory loss and distorted thinking as Leonard was experiencing. I actually am considering doing something similar to what Nolan did. I’ve become really inspired after watching and reading about this movie. Actively engaging my audience in my book as an active part of my message has now become my goal.