notes on Memento

 Is this film not a brilliant analogy of class-consciousness in the Western world since the 1980s: the individual awakes after a traumatic incident, unable to recall anything but watery memories of the distant past, unable to stitch its steps through the modern world into any coherent narrative or sense?

How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?

The film undoubtedly develops the post-modern questioning of truth – we can’t even trust our own memories, so how can we claim anything at all to be true? But the plot, which hinges around some untold, practically forgotten accident, something you know is there in touching distance but you just can’t quite grasp, presents to us a pertinent truth of modern society. We do feel as though something is missing. Despite our materials, comfort and money, we have felt as though things don’t quite add up to make us whole. We feel empty, we feel battered, we feel cogs in some grand, faceless machine, but we don’t have a fucking clue as to who, why or what.

You feel angry, you don’t know why…you feel guilty, you don’t know why

The individual as a tool for manipulation. We see Lenny be played by Natalie, who provokes him into violence before watching him stab around alone in confusion from afar. We see the detective twist, shift and rip Lenny’s own ideas into whatever pattern or collage he likes. Is this not modern marketing, and its unrelenting fetish for nudging and swamping the human mind in corporate buzzwords and codes? Is this not modern democracy, forsaking nuance and detail for headline TRUTH and cajoling mass-opinion of a defeated public into some convenient position?

They asked me if I’d met a guy who doesn’t remember anything, even his own name…I tell him I meet a lot of guys like that around here

My favourite part of the film arrives when we see visions of a healthy Lenny, comfortable in career job and career suit walking a helpless woman into the crosshairs by ‘proving’ that her husband is not physically ill. This can be read in a number of ways – it could merely be Lenny’s projection of his own guilt at the death of his wife onto his conscious memory, or it could be a legitimate memory which now haunts Lenny after he too lost something precious and irreplaceable in his own life. 

The true value of the running of this ‘memory’, however, is in its dissolution of the alleged contours of modern class. We see a middle-class ‘yuppie’ strut about his stuff, ploughing vulnerable, older people into the mud without a regard for anything other than his own, crafted notions of ‘ability’ and ‘justice’. We see the old couple in virtual agony: the wife is pushed to suicide, the husband a ghost, drowning in endless circles of question-answer-forget as he sits inside a nursing home. And then we see Lenny himself be caught up in the traps of his own minefield. The game has caught him up. Either he fucked up in the world, or the world fucked him. He’s vulnerable. And there’s nothing left to catch him now. No one left to save him, no ‘truth’ left to hold onto.  Only circles for him to play  in, endlessly chasing fires only hinted at by momentary glimpses of rising smoke in the far distance, as he wonders around some forgotten town with nothing but a corrupt police detective and murky underworld figures to guide him through. In modern Western capitalism, with its penchant for destroying the New-Deal notion of a Great Society, the gradual cooling of the job market and its emerging desire to replace human labour with technology, what else is this scene but a nod to one vital truth – that if things carry on as they are, eventually, all of us are fucked.