David Morgan-Mar continues his experiment, having now watched the film in the intended order…

The Second Viewing

Having viewed the film in chronological order and typed up everything above, I rewatched the film a day later, in the canonical order. The goal was to see how my impression of the film would change, watching it in the original ordering.

A major thing I noticed was that I’d made some straight out mistakes in my recollection of events as listed above:

• I had completely missed the note stuck to the mirror early on, telling Lenny to “shave left thigh”. Thus my incorrect impression that he was about to shave his legs completely.
• I didn’t remember that Lenny himself had the police reports when typing up my notes. All I had was the scrawled”Police reports, looking for John G.” written down, and I reinterpreted that as meaning that the guy on the phone was telling Lenny about the report.

Besides these outright errors, there were many other interesting observations I made in my second viewing. Again, I recorded them as I watched, this time ending up with a single page of notes.

The Notes - Second Viewing

• “Not nice to make fun of handicap” - could think it’s just that he can’t recognise his own car. With this scene where Teddy tries to trick Lenny into taking the wrong car now occurring very early, before Lenny’s memory condition is explained, the viewer could take it to mean Lenny is suffering from some mental problem that simply means he can’t recognise his on car without referring to a photo. This is a totally different take on the scene to the way I first experienced it.
• Oh - the b/w parts are intercut! Aha! This explains a lot. I had not realised that the original ordering had been done in this way. I thought that the film had originally been ordered with all the scenes in reverse chronological order, ending with all the black and white scenes one after another. I’d noticed that the b/w scenes tended to be much shorter than the colour ones, particularly at the very start of the chronology. I thought the effect of reversing these would be to make the memory lapses appear to get closer and closer together, until perhaps they converged to a point at the beginning of the chronology where his memory occupies almost no time at all. Then the ending of the film would be when his memory converges to a point and we never get to see anything from before that time, perhaps implying that he had only just woken up from his brain damage and his memory is slowly improving throughout the film. Realising now that the b/w scenes are actually intercut suddenly changes my whole impression of what the original film must be like.
• Lenny seems a lot more thoughtful as he discovers Teddy is John Gammell. This refers to the chronologically second time Lenny discovers this fact, but the first time we see it in the original ordering, as he examines the licence details Natalie gave him. Whereas in the chronological viewing, I already knew this by this point, in the original ordering it comes as a revelation, and it makes Lenny appear to be significantly more thoughtful about the discovery.
• Finds tattoo - sets up Teddy as much more sinister. When Lenny then finds the tattoos implicating Teddy: white, male, John, G____, drug dealer, licence number; it now plays out as much more dramatic than in the chronological viewing. It makes the viewer believe much more strongly in Teddy’s guilt, since you don’t know the circumstances that led up to it.
• First encounter with Natalie reinforces idea she is his wife. She calls him Lenny. By now we know Lenny has problems remembering things. He meets a woman who calls him by the name his wife “used to” call him by. I think this was designed to suggest to the viewer that Natalie may be Lenny’s wife and he just doesn’t remember her. At this point in viewing the original ordering, I find this scene to reaffirm my belief from my first viewing that Natalie is his wife.
• “Memories can be distorted” - in diner with Teddy. I’m noticing a lot more references this time through to Lenny stating that memory can’t be trusted, that it’s better to trust recorded observations than your own recollection. This suddenly strikes me - this time through - as ironic. I’m starting to think that I should distrust Lenny’s memory of his wife being killed. I’m getting a message that he’s placing too much faith in his own memory, despite his insistence that memories can’t be trusted.
• Natalie offers to help find John G. - is she setting up Teddy? No, it’s really his licence. I had a brief thought here that Natalie may have faked the DMV licence information to deliberately implicate Teddy, but then I quickly realised that the licence number really is Teddy’s. So that theory lasted only a few seconds.
• Needle bit - he says Mrs Jankis didn’t realise you can’t force someone to remember. More irony. This is when Lenny is describing Sammy Jankis’s story to the guy on the phone in the b/w scene where he’s preparing the needle to tattoo himself. I’d missed the significance on the first viewing, but this time Lenny’s comment hits hard. He’s saying that you can’t force someone to remember - which could easily apply to Natalie being unable to force Lenny to remember that she is his wife.
  Equally, it could apply to the fact that Lenny can’t remember killing his wife himself with insulin, although at this point I wasn’t thinking about that possibility too much.
• Police report - Lenny has it. Here’s where I realised my recollection error about how the police report came into the story.
• Concludes he’s a dealer because car had money in it. Okay, this explains the plot point about how Lenny knew John G. was a drug dealer. In my first viewing, I was not absorbing a lot of these small details.
• When Natalie returns and says Dodd beat her: Getting v. confused about Natalie and Teddy - do they know each other or not? She mentions Teddy. It was unclear in my first viewing whether Natalie and Teddy knew each other or not, and it’s getting murkier, if anything.
• She deliberately hid all the pens! So Lenny can’t remember he hit her. Aha! I didn’t notice that the first time. Prior to insulting Lenny and provoking him to hit her, she hides all the pens so he can’t write himself a note to remind him of it later. Interesting.
• “Remember Sammy Jankis” in Natalie’s house prompts flash to syringe - insulin? When Lenny sees the words on his hand he has a sudden flash to an image of someone tapping a syringe. Is this merely an indication of his memory of Sammy killing his wife, or is it a hint that Lenny’s memory is incorrect, and he injected his own wife with insulin? Throughout this viewing
  of the film, I’ve been thinking about where the narrative is going. With the b/w scenes being intercut, I realise we’re converging towards the moment when b/w changes to colour - which is right after Lenny kills Jimmy. It suddenly dawns on me that that’s around the point where Teddy tells Lenny that he killed his own wife with insulin, but has transferred that memory on to Sammy Jankis. Realisation strikes like a hammer, and I know what the film is working towards. The climax point is where Teddy tells Lenny that! The structure of the film is set up to deliver that as the startling revelation. And all of a sudden things start to fall into place. The film is designed to shock you at the end with this revelation and make the viewer think that Lenny killed his own wife and doesn’t remember it. This now overshadows my theory that Natalie is his wife. It’s clear that the goal of the film maker was to convince the audience at the end of the film that Lenny killed his own wife. But it’s extremely interesting that when watching it in chronological order I didn’t get that feeling very strongly at all. It just sounded like another one of Teddy’s wild stories at that time, and wasn’t developed further in the chronology, so it faded from importance. Presenting it at the end of the film… wow, killer blow.
• Licence tattoo - don’t realise this time it is Teddy. Interesting! This time when Lenny is getting the tattoo of the licence number and Lenny pops his head into the tattoo parlour, the viewer has not seen the part where Lenny records the number. So it seems less dramatic than in the chronological order, where the viewer is gasping in case Teddy sees what the tattoo is.
• “Just write Teddy” - conceals Gammell name from Lenny. When Lenny takes Teddy’s photo, he tells him to just write “Teddy” on it, which effectively conceals from Lenny later on that Teddy’s real name is John Gammell. In my original chronological viewing, this seemed a fair enough thing, since he was a cop and probably didn’t want his real name on the photo. But in this version, it seems much more sinister, as though Teddy is very deliberately misleading Lenny’s attention away from his real name.
• Jimmy is looking for Teddy - Jimmy knows Lenny. When Jimmy enters the building he says he is looking for Teddy. Now why would that be so? It didn’t raise any big questions on first viewing, but now it does. And when Jimmy sees Lenny, he recognises him - so clearly they’ve met before. Hmmm. Again, not something I worried about on first viewing, but that now seem like nagging details that I need to puzzle over.
• Why does he take Jimmy’s clothes and car? When I typed up my first impressions, I thought I must have missed some reason why Lenny took Jimmy’s clothes and car. But on second viewing, I still don’t see a reason, despite looking for it. Confusing.
• Jimmy said Sammy because he knows Lenny as Sammy. This is very interesting. It occurred to me suddenly after Jimmy uttered the name “Sammy” as he died. The first time, it just made no sense, but now, knowing where the film is going, it suddenly hits me like a ton of bricks. Maybe Lenny is Sammy. It fits. Jimmy said he knew Lenny, but never said his name, until now?
• Teddy has cop ID. Okay, this is confusing. In my first viewing, the impression I got was that Teddy was a cop, until a point where I “learnt” that he wasn’t a cop, and was just pretending to be one. But I’d forgotten that he’d shown a police ID. Now that I see this, I wonder how did I get the idea that he wasn’t really a cop? I’m going to have to watch the film again to see where that came from the first time.
• Wife survived the assault. Oh my. Somehow, on my first viewing, during this part where Teddy tells Lenny that he killed his wife himself, I missed the statement that Teddy made that his wife had survived the assault. I had wondered how the insulin thing could have worked in, given such a strong memory of an attack and murder. It hadn’t occurred to me that his wife had simply survived it and that he hadn’t realised or remembered it. All of a sudden the pieces fall into place. It’s abundantly clear that the conclusion the viewer is meant to reach is that Lenny’s wife survived the attack, Lenny suffered brain damage and thought his wife was dead, and could no longer remember being with her, and had killed her with insulin in the manner attributed to Sammy Jankis.
• Yeah, he deliberately lets himself forget the story. He lies to himself to make himself happy. And then the denouement, in which Lenny sets up Teddy as the next John G., to satisfy his insane lust for revenge. It’s a fitting end to the film in this ordering.

The Second Conclusion

I’m astounded at how different my perception of this film is after the second viewing. The whole idea that Lenny killed his wife himself never really hit home the first time, because it appeared midway through the film and I simply wrote it off as another one of what seemed to be many unreliable stories that Teddy told. That opened the door to alternative explanations, including the one that really took hold of me: that Natalie was his wife.

I realise now that the Natalie theory has too many holes in it to stand up properly, but it had seemed so convincing at the time, particularly given the development of the scenes between Lenny and Natalie towards the end of the chronology, when I was looking for the giveaway clues as to what was going on.

The original ordering also makes Lenny seem much more ruthless, as it emphasises his conscious decision to set Teddy up as the next in a series of “John G.”s. In the chronological ordering, Lenny comes across as a more sympathetic character, who is likely being manipulated by the people around him. The horror of him setting up Teddy is lost in the middle of the film, and the focus is put on his killing of Teddy, which made me seriously consider the possibility that Teddy is the one who killed his wife, and that the final act of the story was justice being done.

In the end, I see why the film was structured the way it was. The revelation that Lenny (probably) killed his own wife is the climactic moment and properly belongs at the end of the film. Having said that, I don’t think my enjoyment of the film suffered in any way from seeing first in chronological order. If anything, it made that moment of realisation all the more shocking and powerful, as I’d actually known it all along but hadn’t really believed it the first time. I think this experiment was valuable and a good experience, and I’m very glad I did it.

Now I have to go watch the film again to pick up the fragments I missed on the first two viewings.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under David Morgan-Mar, Forensic Analysis, M, Thriller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.