… not to be confused with the Go See MEMENTO! thread. If you haven’t seen the movie and want more information to decide, read that thread and some of its links. Believe me, this is a movie you don’t want to know too much about before you see it.
But in this here thread we are gonna discuss some of the finer plot points, so this is your last warning! If you haven’t seen the movie and you read any farther, your movie-going experience will be greatly diminished!
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So, about Sammy and Mrs. Sammy …
This was pretty confusing. There was no Mrs. Sammy in real life? Leonard made her up as a stand-in for his own wife? (And was anyone else bothered that that poor woman was never named?) So then there IS at least one memory he was able to form after the attack, albeit in code. So his condition isn’t entirely physical? But he can remember through conditioning, which is supposedly the difference between a physical and a psychosomatic version of this disorder. I’m not even sure what my question is, but this movie is a real mind-bender, and I’d love to hear other Dopers’ thoughts.
My take on it was that the story Leonard tells of Sammy and Mrs. Sammy is really the story of Leonard and his own wife. In actuality, Leonards’ wife is the one who couldn’t deal with her husband’s brain injury. Leonard’s wife is the one who administered him the insulin test, and Leonard’s wife is the one who died from insulin shock. Sammy just got jumbled into the mix of memories because of the similar conditions.
I had a hard time figuring out why Leonard decides to put himself on the trail of Officer Gammell. Is it because he wants to give himself something to do, to make his life meaningful?
I didn’t quite catch exactly what happened in the end. So when teddy tells him all that stuff about like his wife being alive, just not being able to live with his condition, and that there is no Sammy, is that all true, or is Teddy just messin with him? Cause Teddy says that he’s a police officer, but then he uses Lenny to just kill people…can we trust Teddy?
How does he go to the bar wher Natalie works, anyways? Does Natlaie know that Lenny killed Jimmy, so she sends Dodd after him?
Another real bummer, is that I walked in the movie like 5 min into it, the first thing i saw was Lenny with a gun to Teddy’s head. What happened before that? I got sooo many questions, but damn did I love that movie!
My take on things was that, as Natalie said earlier (or later?) in the movie, Teddy was a crooked cop. He wanted Jimmy dead so he could get the money from the deal Jimmy had going with Dodd.
Teddy had a soft spot for Leonard, and so helped Leonard avenge his wife. But Leonard didn’t remember avenging his wife, so Teddy has been arranging for Leonard to keep avenging her, over and over, to suit his purposes.
Presumably Teddy is a vice cop and he has Leonard kill drug dealers for him, then takes their money or drugs for himself. Teddy doesn’t do the killings himself because Leonard, the man with brain damage, is a better fall guy if things go wrong.
Teddy’s fatal mistake was to taunt Leonard to the point that Leonard wrote “Don’t believe his lies” on his Polaroid of Teddy. That allowed Natalie to manipulate Leonard into killing Teddy.
Natalie thought Teddy killed her boyfriend Jimmy, because he was the last person she knew he was going to meet with before he disappeared.
I’m still not sure I understand the whole thing with Dodd.
Unresolved questions:
If Leonard can’t form new memories, how does he know he has his “condition?” It’s the first thing he tells everyone he meets.
When he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing, he reaches into his pocket for his Polaroids and notes for reminders. Fine. But how does he know the Polaroids are there? This is a man who rubs at his “Remember Sammy Jankis” tattoo every time he sees it. He can’t remember he has reminder tattoos, but he can remember he’s carrying Polaroids in his pockets?
Mind you, these are just nitpicks. I suspended my disbelief with regard to them very easily. The story would have been much more difficult to tell if the director hadn’t let those two by.
Actually, I don’t think there was a Sammy at all–merely a mental construct to somehow account for Leonard’s ability to remember something (the insulin incident) after the accident. Everything we see Sammy go through Leonard does “remember”, but is so bent on logic that he doesn’t believe it could be a memory of himself, because he does have this unchangeable “condition”. I’m sure there are some holes in this theory, but one compelling instance is that when we see Sammy sitting in the institution, there is a flashcut when someone walks between him and the camera and we see someone that looks like Leonard sitting in the chair. I’ve only seen the film once, but that flashcut led me to guess early on that there was no “Sammy” at all.
I think deep down Leonard knows that Teddy is telling the truth, but he also knows that the only way to get any real closure is to eliminate him–that way he’ll have the “evidence” he needs (the photo we see in the film’s first shot) without anyone there to remind him of the “facts”.
Leonard goes to the bar because Jimmy’s jacket (which he’s wearing) has the coaster in the pocket. I think Natalie knows something’s up since Leonard is wearing Jimmy’s jacket and driving his car, but I’m not sure she had any contact with Dodd–didn’t Dodd first see Leonard in Jimmy’s car on the road? If so, then he knows something’s up since Lenny has his car and clothes. In this case, Natalie may want Dodd out of the way and uses Leonard to find him & get rid of him, as opposed to sending Dodd after Leonard. Not sure…
The first shot is that of a Polaroid slowly fading (the film running in reverse). We see the picture insert itself into the camera, the gun jump into Leonard’s hand, the shell casing float up into the gun, and Teddy jump back up from his “fall”. We hear Teddy yell out and the gun shot. Then the first B&W segment happens, so it sounds like you came in at the second memory “phase.”
I think that’s where the whole conditioning thing comes in–by knowing that he must keep the same items in the same pockets all the time, the whole process of going through his pockets becomes instinctive, or second nature. This isn’t unreasonable to assume if it has been over a year that he’s been going through this process, certainly enough time to condition himself to behave this way.
Well he does wake up not knowing where he is and does remember the accident (“last thing”). This, of course, reinforces the idea that there was some sort of incarnation of Sammy because he uses this as a point-of-reference, unless, like I stated earlier, explaining his “condition” is also a conditioned response, ingrained after doing it dozens of times a day for months and months. Hmm…
One of the things I like best is several references to Hitchcock’s Psycho:
[ul]
[li] For the duration of the movie, there’s a corpse in the “basement”[/li][li] Someone asserts that our “hero” is harmless, when he in fact is a serial killer (of sorts)[/li][li] Someone’s in the shower when an attacker strikes[/li][li] Our “hero” doesn’t realize that there is a fortune’s worth of money in the truck of a car[/li][/ul]
I’m sure there are more. Enjoyed Memento a lot and will definitely see it again.
Something else about the movie that I just recalled, everyonce in a while, usually during a very tense moment, there is a flash of (I think) the scene where he is just looking at his wife through the plastic. I assume this to be him recalling flashes of that time. However, later on in the movie, it shows the same scene, but this time we see that his wife blinks. What is the significance of these scenes, and are we sure that Teddy is telling the truth, that his wife is still alive and that she just disowned him? Becuse the blinking would lead to the fact that she was alive.
However, I for one don’t trust Teddy, considering that he admits that he uses Lenny. Also I think that they (the producers) want you to not trust Teddy, ad try to accomplish this by lots of little things, like when Teddy calls Leonard “Lenny” and we know from before that he doens’t like this name.
Another thing, in the end it shows the flashback of him with his wife, when he has tatoos all over his body. At this point, does he have the big tatoo across his chest that says “John G raped and murdered my wife”? Because if not, that would also lead us to believe that the wife is still alive, and that he was trying to search out the guy before, whe he was still with his wife.
I agree, because he repeatedly talks about how routine and habit makes his life possible, and how he can condition himself through these methods. However, he says that this is unlike Sammy. How does that work, if there is no Sammy?
I also liked Carrie Anne Moss and the other guy from the Marix (I forget the name, played Cypher in the Martix, Teddy in Momento, y’allknow who I’m talking about), I felt like it was some kind of reunion!
Up until this scene we’ve taken Leonard’s word for it that his wife was raped and murdered. The flash of the wife blinking shows that she survived the attack, and what Teddy is saying (that she later arranged her own death at Leonard’s hand) is true.
I think Teddy is telling the truth, for the same reason Natalie did (will?) earlier (later?): It doesn’t matter cuz he won’t remember!
I also think there was a Sammy, but he didn’t have a wife.
I have seen this movie twice now and I feel I understand it a lot better than after just one viewing.
The absolute key point of the movie is when Lenard and Teddy are in the coffee shop and Leonard is saying how memory is unreliable and facts are what are important. This is the setup for the story Teddy tells, which I beleive, because Leonard uses for his motivation simply his memory, which he himself should question as being unreliable.
Why do I beleive Teddy? First, he has no reason to lie, because Leonard will forget it. Also if he were to lie, why would he tell as story like that? Why would he basically tell Leonard that he has it all wrong? Why would he tll Leonard he is the perfect killer? I also think the facts back it up, i.e. the police reports with the blacked out sections. The “coincidence” of the two men having the same rare memory condition. In fact, it is not clear Leonard’s condition is not psychological, maybe triggerd by the fact he had been investigating the conditon in the con-man Jankis.
Also, I do not think Natalie was setting up Teddy. Think about it, it is a simple line or action here…Leonard writes down the license plate number, Natalie gets the license plate number info from the DMV, it’s Teddy. He kills Teddy. She didn’t have to do anything to provoke that. Some might say she faked the Driver’s license,but the name James Gammel seems to be his real name, and how would she know that?
Granted, there is possibly a whole lot more going on between Natalie and Teddy. But I think what is interesting is that we tend to sometimes avoid an Occam’s razor type explanation because of our subjectivity and unrelaible memory.
Wait wait wait, Sammy really was a con-man? How do we know this?
I was actualy thinking that Natalie tried to set up Leonard. 1. She sent him after Dodd, but hy would she want him killed? He wasn’t the one that beat her, Leonard was the one that hit her. 2. She says that she told Dodd about the car. It was Jimmy’s car. She must have known it was Jimmy’s car, cause she knocked on the window and thought he was Jimmy. Therefore, I think that she sent Dodd to kill Leonar because she knew that he was the one that killed him (because he was wearing Jimmy’s suit and driving his car). Does this make any sense?
I totally need to go see this movie again, it was damn sweet.
If you check out the Flash-portion of http://www.otnemem.com, there are several important background clues to Leonard’s past, including that he is an escapee from a mental institution (supporting my whole Sammy-is-Leonard memory of that one shot of him in the chair)
At the website, you see that while in the institution, Leonard has gotten into the habit (more conditioning) of writing several journals in which he talks to himself in the second person, implying that he is assuming another personality–this personality is one that has convinced Leonard about the cover-up and taunts him about not having finished what has started (re: “avenging” his wife). Perhaps he feels guilty about not having overcome his “condition” and has projected this failure on this fictional “Sammy”, whose “mistakes” Leonard can now learn from. It’s not unreasonable to think that, even though he has no memory of all the tests that he might have gone through as “Sammy”, he could’ve discovered this later (possibly from Teddy, who is well aware of Leonard’s history). Not a perfect answer, but I still have seen the film only once…
FTR, I too believe that Teddy is telling the truth to/about Leonard.
More Memento/Psycho similarities:
[list]
[li] A good deal of the action takes place in a run-down fleabag motel[/li][li] Both feature top-billed actors who are killed off relatively early in the proceedings[/li] Both protagonists spend some time in a mental institution (though we don’t know this about Leonard from the film)
One important problem with this, though, is that she does help Leonard with tracing that license plate–something she didn’t have to do and something that probably wasn’t particularly easy. I think it’s safe to say there’s no way she could know Teddy’s involvement in Jimmy’s death, so her declaration to Leonard that she got that info for him because he helped her with her problem was on the level. Now how did he help her, except in taking out Dodd? It’s quite possible she knew that Leonard may be facing certain death in confronting Dodd, but what does she have to lose in using him? That Leonard actually does take care of him means she owes Leonard one, which is why she does the DMV favor.
I think it’s established that Jankis (if he did exist at all) was authentic. What con is worth the life of his wife and a future of institutionalization? Leonard even admits that what he took to be mild recognition in Sammy’s eyes was just the fabrication of a man doing his best to assimilate into a context he doesn’t remember.
Brief side note: It’s interesting with all the emphasis on evidence as truth-teller and the differentiation of what is perceived vs. real that the cast includes Carrie Anne-Moss and Joe Pantoliano (both of The Matrix) and Jorja Fox (who’s on TV’s C.S.I.)
Well we only know about Sammy from two subjective sources, Leonard’s account and Teddy’s. Teddy says that Sammy had no wife, he was a con-man. Leonard was the one who was married, who’s wife had diabetes. By the end of the film nothing is firmly established on this, but since I beleived Teddy at the end of the film (which is actually near the beginning of the movies timeline) I beleived Jankis was a con-man and that Leonard was the one no one believed.
How does Leonard know that the man he’s searching for is named John G. or Jimmy G.?
I think one of the crucial questions of the movie, which each viewer has to answer for himself, is which kind of “amnesia” does Leonard have? He keeps insisting that he’s different from Sammy, and that Sammy’s was either psychological or fake. But Leonard’s amnesia seems to be selective, depending on what he wants to remember. (For instance, he remembers that Polaroids have to be burned.)
Tretiak, I remember Teddy saying Sammy had no wife, but not that he was a con man.
Incidentally, did anyone else notice who the actress playing Sammy’s wife was? She’s the same woman who play’s Frasier’s predatory agent, Bebe, on Frasier. It’s cool to see her in such a different role.
Yes, ArchiveGuy, that’s pretty neat about the overlapping casts of The Matrix and Memento (but CSI is a reach). Both are essentially movies about epistemology: How do we know what we know? And how do we know it’s true?
Fiver, her name is Harriet Sansom Harris, and like you I was happy to see her get a chance to do something different. She’s an interesting actor.
Besides Matrix and Psycho I was reminded of Urbania, another artsy film from about a year ago. It also unfolds non-chronologically and deals with a man seeking revenge for a murdered lover. It also sorta feels like this one, the same what-is-real displacement, which I guess is related to grief.
Fiver, like you I was happy to see Bebe get a chance to do something different. She’s an interesting actor. And your mentioning her prompted me to finally look up her name; it’s Harriet Sansom Harris.
Besides Matrix and Psycho I was reminded of Urbania, another artsy film from about a year ago. It also unfolds non-chronologically and deals with a man seeking revenge for a murdered lover. It also sorta feels like this one, the same what-is-real displacement, which I guess is related to grief.
Since seeing this movie, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of seeing a version that goes forward through time rather than backwards. I finally broke down and downloaded the movie from an IRC channel (I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong since I’ve already paid to see the movie). Using Microsoft’s freebee video editing software, I created my forwards through time version; just finished in fact. I will be giggling like a schoolgirl at work tomorrow as I contemplate the incredible insights I will glean when watching my handiwork.
After you watch it, get back to us, and tell us if it totally helped, or if it totally spoiled the whole movie. When I first read your post, I was about to say Send me one!!!, but now that I think about it, I think that I would rather see it the “normal” way a coule of times first, but then I would definatly like to see it. I just get the feeling that the movie would really loose something shown in a progressive order, but I could just be stupid…
