Memento Narrative

While Memento presents many changes to narrative – being none linear – it still uses its most commonly used trait which is almost essential to the understanding of the film: Cause and Effect. Although the film runs in reverse with three different narratives it still relies heavily on this convention to tell its story:

“We make sense of a narrative, then, by identifying its events and linking them by cause and effect, time and space.”

(Bordwell/Thompson, Film Art: Narrative as a Formal System, p76)

The narrative in Memento is highly confusing and clever as it runs its path in reverse, scenes stopping abruptly before the narrative jumps backwards in time to show us what happened before the preceding scene in order to inform us of why this happened. This challenges the audience's expectation as it shows us the effect and then the cause. Even simple things such as Leonard shaving his leg (cause) allows people to understand that it precedes what we have already seen as we have already seen the tattoos of facts that cover his thighs (effect). There are also two other running narratives, which appear in Black & White. These are used to allow the character to be explored in much more depth. Thus Bordwell and Thompson’s assertions that we use cause and effect, time and space to help understand the narrative is entirely correct as we need to connect what is happening now and what has happened in preceding scenes. Without the use of Cause and Effect, all narratives would lose the capability of being understood.

The use of the narrative being out of sequence (effect leads to the cause) is also critical to the film as it affects the way I which the audience view Leonard. If the film had been shown in chronological order then the audience would have known that he has killed an uncertain number of people and also seen the amount of abuse he gets from characters and situations much earlier.

“The first-person narrative point of view only gives the reader access to the narrator’s perspective of the events […] It is important to understand that all information presented in this narrative mode is filtered through the narrator’s perspective and might not be entirely reliable.”

(Kate Prudchenko, Demand Media, http://classroom.synonym.com/analysis-effects-first-person-narrative-point-1783.html)  

The idea that memory and perspective is unreliable is an important part of the film and is what eventually leads to the death of Teddy as Leonard tricks himself into thinking that Teddy caused the death of his wife. However the flow of narrative is more prominent in Memento as it affects the way that characters are viewed. At the start of the film, the audience views Teddy with great distrust, as we believe that he is the one who ruined Leonard’s life. However by the end we are unsure whether it was Teddy who killed his wife, causing us to pity him. Leonard himself is affected by the flow of narrative. Had the film been shown in chronological order, Leonard’s character would have been seen in a bitter light as we see him consciously mark Teddy out as his next target to bring purpose to his life.