Favorite Scenes #1: Memento
“No – he’s chasing me.”
Leonard has short-term memory loss. He comes to in the middle of a chase, and assumes that he’s chasing the other guy – at least, until the other guy shoots at him.
This scene serves a number of key purposes in “Memento”. Firstly, it’s funny. The story of Memento is a fairly grim one. Sensibly enough, it’s peppered with just enough black humour to lighten the mood and distract from the task of puzzling out what’s really going on. The landlord charges him for two rooms. He puts on the wrong shirt as Natalie’s place. But there’s no scene in Memento that serves just one purpose. He puts on the wrong shirt – that mirrors his accidental appropriation of Jimmy’s clothes and identity. He has two hotel rooms and doesn’t know it – well, besides underscoring that he just can’t trust anything about his situation, it emphasises all his lost pasts, accidentally discarded in some other room, missing documents, burned-up photographs. And finally, “No – he’s chasing me”. He wants to believe he’s pursuing, of course, because he would like to think that he’s in control. What’s interesting is that he is, and he isn’t: he’s currently being chased, but he *is* pursuing Dodd, because Natalie asked him to. Likewise, he is and he isn’t in control of his destiny. His past-self sent him on the chain of events that culminate in him killing Teddy.
There are no accidents in Memento, no incidents that have only one level of meaning, no revelations that don’t have at least two or three bits of foreshadowing. I can still watch Memento and find new structures and themes (I only made the connection with the clothing joke as I was writing this). If you were to ask me in another year about the best moment in Momento, I’d probably mention something completely different.
May 8th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
A briiliant first choice for a new catagory.
May 8th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Cheers. This is the first of a set, obviously – I have a couple more already written, so hopefully this will allow better periodic input to FF. I’ve also got one other category started, and have some ideas for a few more. Always good to have a couple of different threads to sew.
The full-length FFs are a bit daunting to write (I’m part-way through a couple at the moment) and the “plot summary” bit, although useful, looks like it’ll be a bit of a pain to write up, as most of them will require another viewing of the film. I’m thinking of only adding plot summaries to new films for the moment, unless I recall a film particularly well. It might be good to hunt down a film website that does full plot summaries (not just teaser summaries, like imdb) and link to it.
May 29th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
I agree that Memento is an absolute corker of a film. It begs to be watched multiple times.
June 2nd, 2006 at 7:54 am
Is dodd a red herring? are there red herrings? are we to believe teddys stories? tonight was the second time I have watched this film, and it still leaves me baffled. I love it. I feel I should straight away watch it through again, but at the same time just want to hold onto the feelings it leaves me with.
June 7th, 2006 at 1:34 am
I’m still not certain about what really happens. It’s clear that most of what Teddy says at the end is true – he has no reason to lie, and much of it ties in with the subsequent flashbacks and other clues. The one thing that really baffles me is the very brief shot of him lying in bed, with his wife, with “I’ve done it!” tattooed on his chest.
My best guess is that his wife’s “test” occurred after that flashback – that she died of insulin shock, and he left (escaped?) the hospital where he was living, and got the “I’ve done it!” tattoo erased. However, I couldn’t see any evidence on his chest of an erased tattoo.