Faruk Pasic
Position Paper: Memento
November 7, 2007
In the article “Vengeance,
the Powers of the False, and The Time-Image in Christopher Nolan’s Memento”
Diran Lyons uses the film theory of Gilles Deleuze in order to examine the character of Leonard Shelby. Lyons
begins by establishing the structure of Memento as one of inversion of
time, in which effects precede their causes.Â
The “[e]ffects reside nearer in temporal
proximity in the recollection of the suffering.” (Lyons 128)Â
This time inversion calls upon Deleuzian
theory and its notion of the time-image, a fusing of the pastness
of the image and the presentness of its viewing. In the words of David N. Rodowick,
the time-image is “one that fluctuates between actual and virtual, that records
or deals with memory, confuses mental and physical time, actual and virtual…” (Totaro) Thus, the
image becomes a simultaneous regression and progression in time and space. (Lyons 128)Â One can see this idea reflected not only in
the narrative structure of NolanÂ’s film, in which the viewerÂ’s image of Leonard
is created by the juxtaposition of temporally regressing and progressing
sequences, but also in the photographs that Leonard shoots, which strictly
speaking represent the past but at the same time construct LeonardÂ’s
present. This kind of construction of
the present, however, is problematic for Lyons
because it creates “a playground for a Deleuzian
universe of falsehood,” in which the Ego ≠Ego. (Lyons 129)Â
According to Lyons,
the key scene in Memento is LeonardÂ’s memory of the attack on him and
his wife, during which one of the perpetrators thrusts LeonardÂ’s head against a
mirror, thus fracturing it into countless pieces. This scene is emblematic of the obliteration
of LeonardÂ’s self as a whole and represents his inability to retain his ego. (Lyons 131)Â Because he has lost this whole, Leonard has
to piece it together from the fractured pieces that remain, substituting these
smaller details for larger concepts in a metonymical fashion. Again, this metonymy does not only function
on the narrative level, in which Leonard might or might not be swapping the
image of Sammy Jankis with his own, but also in the
construction of LeonardÂ’s own character which he constructs using fragmentary
tattoos on his body and Polaroid photographs.Â
“The film thus becomes an epic instance of subtlety in substitution,
quid pro quo, not merely past to present to future in exchange for the reverse
but also a bringing to light of the entropic change in Shelby as induced by his eroding long-term
recollection.” (Lyons
131)
Â
William G. Little’s “Surviving Memento” discusses the
film from a psychoanalytical angle by examining the complexities of surviving
trauma. Little begins his argument by
claiming that the film places the viewer in LeonardÂ’s position by recreating
his trauma: it overthrows any sense of continuity and coherence—the more we try
to find out what happened, the more uncertain we become about the facts. The film therefore exhibits marks of
traumatic experience. More specifically,
it displays symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifest
themselves in the subjectÂ’s compulsion to repeat and replay the trauma. (Little
68) In the words of Freud: “What causes
trauma, then, is a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat
but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time.” (Little 69) Little describes trauma as a “dis-appointment,” the subjects
inability to appoint to the experience a place in a meaningful narrative.
(Little 69)Â The subject attempts to
construct a narrative in order to “re-present” the original experience, often
utilizing souvenirs or mementos of the original event in order to do so.
(Little 69)Â Mementos thus become a
symptom of trauma. These mementos,
however, are only metonymic in character because they can only evoke or
resonate to an experience—they cannot be entirely equivalent to it. (Little 70)Â
Little uses the example of the fort-da
game of FreudÂ’s grandson, in which the child recreates the disappearance of his
mother in a game of hiding and revealing by substituting his toy for his
mother. Due to an increasing amount of
substitution in LeonardÂ’s case, however, the experience of the event is
increasingly mediated and abstracted, “the lived relation of the body to the
phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and
presence.” (Little 76) Mementos create a
false sense of the ‘authentic’ experience, which in reality becomes both “elusive
and allusive.” (Little 76) They become
part of a process of distancing, in which the memory of the body is replaced by
the memory of the object. (Little 77)Â
Ideally, a memento has authenticity as its referent, but it is precisely
this belief in the authenticity of the memento which causes LeonardÂ’s downfall
in the end.
Â
Although
they approach the film from two different perspectives, both Lyons and Little
describe Leonard Shelby’s thinking process as metonymical. While for Lyons time is a process of perpetual
fracture, in which Leonard desperately tries to reconstruct the whole of his
shattered ego by means of fragmented information, Little
argues that it is precisely the photographs, tattoos, and his wifeÂ’s
possessions that perpetuate the experience of LeonardÂ’s traumatic event and
prevent him from overcoming this dis-appointment. The role of Leonard’s photographs thus seems
to go in two opposite directions. The
question becomes: What kind of authenticity do his photographs have? It seems that they could be able to serve the
function of reconstructing Leonard’s ego were it not for Leonard. He corrupts the photos himself—he modifies
any objectivity that they might exhibit by adding his own captions, e.g., thereby
subverting his goal of reconstructing a coherent narrative. Is it therefore the photographs themselves
that lack authenticity or is it really Leonard Shelby who lacks it?
Â
Â
Works Cited:
Little, William G. “Surviving Memento.”Â
Narrative 13.1 (Jan. 2005): 67-83.
Lyons, Diran. “Vengeance,
the Powers of the False, and the Time-Image in Christopher Nolan’s Memento.” Angelaki
11.1 (Apr. 2006): 127-35.
Totaro, Donato. “Gilles DeleuzeÂ’s Bergsonian Film Project: Part 2.” OFF Screen. 31 Mar. 1999.Â
<http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze2.html>