The movie, "Memento," is about a man who suffers anterograde amnesia, who is also trying to find the man who killed his wife. The movie moves backward through the plot rather than moving forward. The ending is very unexpected, similar to how the entire movie was unpredictable. It is a movie that I would recommend for anyone who wants to watch a movie that you have to pay attention to every small detail, and which makes you seriously think about the plot. "Memento" was very suspenseful, and if it did not win any awards, then it should have.
The biggest psychological theme in the movie is memory. This is to be expected, since the protagonist is a man who cannot make new memories. The movie shows this theme in the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, as he tries to make sense of the events and people around him that he cannot remember. Shelby takes pictures of different people he meets, as well the places the he visits. He then writes notes either on the bottom of them or on the back. Whether he sees something or someone that he cannot recognize, he takes one of those photos out of his pocket and looks at them. He reads the notes he has written about the person or places to let him know if that person is trustworthy or if the place that he is in is safe. He even tattoos notes on his body so that he can remember things that he considers important. In the move, Shelby tells about how he does not actually need memory, because memories are based on opinion. A memory can be distorted by the emotions which the person who remembers feels.
Shelby cannot remember anything since his wife’s murder. Shelby states that as long as he has a system, he can function in the world just as well as he could if he had a short term memory. He appears to be extremely confident in his system, maybe even a bit too confident. The people around him all use the fact that he can not remember anything to their advantage. “Teddy," the character who claims to be his friend throughout the entire movie, his real name is John Gamble, and he has been using Shelby to kill people over the course of a year. He makes Shelby think that each person that he is killing is the one who killed his wife. Gamble makes Shelby into a serial killer without him even knowing it. We do not exactly know why Gamble is tricking Shelby into murdering all of these people. Gamble was a cop, and the man that he has Shelby murder was involved in a drug trafficking, so maybe Gamble is using Shelby to take the law into his own his hand. Natalie is using Shelby to take out her drug-dealing boyfriend. Even the clerk at the hotel that Shelby stays at using Shelby’s lack of memory to get more money out of him and basically cheat him out of at least one hundred dollars. There is not a main character in this movie who does not manipulate Shelby in some way for their own benefit.
This movie shows how society takes advantage and abuses those who are mentally ill. It displays society as cold and heartless. According this movie, people see mental illness as something to exploit and use to their own benefit. This movie does not promote justice for mentally ill. It does not promote justice at all.
The plot of the story is resolved before the movie even begins. Shelby killed the man who killed his wife over a year ago. He just cannot remember it. He has killed more people since then that he cannot remember either. Nothing in this film makes the main character’s issue any better. In fact, the main character is turned into a mass murderer by someone who was meant to protect him.
The worse part of this is that he is an innocent man. He is only looking to avenge his wife’s murder, since the police did not. He just wants justice for the woman that he loved. While killing someone in any way is deplorable, it is less horrible than killing people you do not even know. The people he killed could have been innocent as well. He is the true victim of this story.
