Memento questions (if you haven’t seen this, you really ought to rent it, IMHO):
That’s …‘Memento’.
Argh…
It seems Jimmy (the drug dealer) did know lenny because he jokingly called him “memory man” when they met at the abandoned grainery(?).
DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES
Sorry, couldn’t resist! 
Hmmmmm…interesting…but…
I assumed he already had the Polaroid camera (that pic was a polariod),
Who took it? The police (teddy?) at the crime scene?,
And, would he really be smiling right after (he was still covered in blood) his wife died?
uhh…she did die didn’t she?
from what I understood, his wife survived the attack, and really died from an insulin overdose
Teddy took the polaroid at the scene shortly after Lenny killed the guy, which is why Teddy has it and not Lenny. He was the cop who helped track down the killer in the first place, and set up Lenny with a chance to kill him. From then on, Teddy had been setting up drug dealers as “John G.” and having Lenny murder them while Teddy stole the drug money. The vast majority of Lenny’s investigation has actually been Teddy’s using Lenny as a puppet serial killer.
Leonard’s wife did die, but not in the attack. Two or three times we see her blink or move after the attack is over. We see the scene in which Leonard is pinching her thigh briefly flash to an injection with the same type of needle as in the “Sammy Jankis” story. We see a brief flash of an insulin injection being prepared while Leonard is relaxing on Natalie’s couch, and another flash of memory (in the diner) that shows Lenny’s wife from the waist up, but in the same pose as the pinch/injection scene. We also have the scene of Sammy in the mental institution that flashes to Lenny and back. Add these to what Teddy tells him at the end, and you have your answer.
Lenny’s wife survived the attack. She was the wife with diabetes, and Lenny killed her with an insulin overdose. After Lenny killed his wife, he was hospitalized in the mental institution. Eventually he escaped, and Teddy started using him to off drug dealers and steal their loot. Lenny is the one who removed the 12 pages and blacked out important parts of the file, because those things would have told him that the attacker had been killed himself.
Most of the story Lenny tells about Sammy Jankis is really about Lenny himself, but has been jumbled together in his mind due to the similarity of his condition to the one that Sammy either had or was faking. It’s a defense mechanism similar to the one Hawkeye uses in the last episode of MASH.
The whole thing is somewhat similar to an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. A young woman is raped. Her husband, enraged, goes out driving with her to try to find the man. She sees the rapist on the street and points him out, screaming “He’s the one!” Husband stops the car, confronts the man, and beats him to death in an alley. He returns to the car, satisfied at having avenged his wife. The wife points out a new man, and says he’s the one. Then another man. Then another one. Give the man retrograde amnesia so that he kills over and over, and you have the basic outline of “Memento”.
If you read the tats on him (I have the DVD and freeze frame is great) you see some stuff like don’t trust your memories.
He tells Teddy how eye witness testimoney is rather faulty.
So the ‘memories’ of his wife with the insulin and pinching don’t mean anything. You can’t trust memory.
Some questions.
How does Lenny know that he has a condition? If he can’t make new memories how does he remember that he has a condition? Sammy didn’t seem to know that something was wrong with him so why does Lenny?
Number Six,
Thanks for checking back in. Some of my thoughts.
I think Teddy blacked out the lines to keep Lenny from I.D.ing him. We hear Lenny say he worked with the police in his line of work, thus the connection with Teddy, Lenny and Lenny’s wife pryor to the wifes rape/murder (social functions?). Plus he got the report from Teddy. I think Teddy was the ‘second’ man. We know he lies because he identifies himself variously as a cop, a snitch, a friend and not at all (A cop on the phone) knowing Lenny would not remember.
The wife lives a while. How long we don’t know. Maybe just long enough to blink a few times. Teddy, trying to throw Lenny off trail, makes him doubt himself for a moment, but the last we see is the pinch, not the needle.
Teddy definately set up Jimmy for the money. But Natalie did not know Teddy when she first met Lenny. Nor did she know the “cop who came by” was (this guy who turns out to be) Teddy.
Despite the similarities to the AH episode, and MASH, I think this story is different.
One quirky thing, towards the end we see (in flashback?) Lenny in bed with his wife - with tattoos.
warmgun, don’t feel bad if you still feel puzzled by the movie. It’s not that you missed anything, it’s that there is not enough information given in the movie to allow you to draw a definate conclusion about…well…a lot of things.
As for the question Zebra raised as to how Lenny knew he had a memory condition, some would argue that this is either a huge plot hole or a sign that he didn’t really suffer from the condition at all, but my explanation is that the “Remember Sammy Jankis” tattoo was a sufficient reminder.
The Memento SPOILERS! Thread
Don’t know if you saw this already or not…I think I like JoeyHemlock’s interpretation.
Sammy DID sort of notice it (from what you could tell) but it seems to me you’d know you had the condition. Remember, Leonard CAN remember his whole life right up to the night of the attack. After that everything is nothing, except for the last three minutes. He knows he forgets everything after three minutes, and he knows that’s different from the first 30 years of his life, so it seems to me it would be obvious.
He doesn’t have to remember he has a condition; he knows he has it, because it’s obvious to his own perception. If he’d been born with it he’d have no way of knowing, but he wasn’t, and he can still remember what his memory worked like when he didn’t have it.
Did anyone else find the whole concept terrifying? I did not sleep well after watching “Memento.”
Lenny has all his memories from before the attack. If he had connections with Teddy before the attack, he would remember him. He doesn’t. He id’s Teddy from the photo each time. Teddy may have blacked out the lines to keep Lenny from knowing that the case had been solved so that he would be a better pawn for killing and stealing from drug dealers. I think it’s Lenny who did the coverup because of the coverup he sets up at the end, when he frames Teddy.
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He lies throughout most of the movie for the purpose of recovering the Jag with the $200,000 in the trunk. He has no motive to lie in the warehouse scene when he tells Lenny about how Catherine died.
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The pinch scene flashes momentarily to the needle then back. So he either pinched her or injected her. Consider the memory flash at the mental institution, with exactly the same format: from Sammy to Lenny to Sammy again. We know from the web site, which is canon, that Lenny spent time in an institution, so the middle part of that flash is a repressed true memory, and Sammy in the institution is a manufactured one. Compare this to the pinch scene: pinch, injection, pinch. Again, the true memory would seem to be the injection, and the pinch a manufactured cover. Were there no further evidence, this would be questionable, but there are two more pieces. The first is when Lenny is relaxing on Natalie’s couch, he has a momentary memory flash of preparing an insulin injection. The second is what Teddy tells him at the warehouse. These are all consistent and point to the same conclusion: Catherine was diabetic and Lenny injected her. Combine this with the story Lenny tells about Sammy’s wife, knowing that it was really Lenny who spent time in the institution and not Sammy, and we can safely conclude that it is Catherine who was killed by an insulin overdose.
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Yep. Teddy set up Jimmy to steal the money, and to have Leonard kill him. Teddy has been using Leonard to do this for a long time. Check out the newspaper article on the web site or dvd–click on “pictures”. There are several other pictures there along with Teddy’s. Leonard has apparently killed “John G.” many times before and probably will again.
I don’t know whether Natalie knew Teddy or not, but I suspect not. I do see a nice parallel between the scene where she tells him she’s going to set him up and how she’s going to do it, and she can do this because he won’t remember. The motel clerk does the same thing. These two scenes set up the climax, where Teddy tells Leonard about how his wife really died. Natalie tells him the truth, the motel clerk tells him the truth, and Teddy tells him the truth because they can do so without fear of recriminations. Finally, Leonard sets himself up to think Teddy is the one, because he needs hunting his wife’s killer to give his life purpose.
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Absolutely. I mention the MASH episode to illustrate a parallel. Hawkeye substitues a chicken for the child on the bus to block the painful memory. Lenny substitutes the pinch for the injection, Sammy for himself, and Sammy’s stay in the institution to cover painful realities.
I mention the AHP parallel to illustrate that Lenny is repeatedly killing his wife’s attacker, just as the wife in that episode is repeatedly accusing attackers. Of course its a different story, I just like picking out references to other stories. There are several references to psycho here, too.
And most notably, with a tatoo saying “I Did It!” in the blank area Natalie asks about, and which he is pointing to in the Polaroid Teddy gives him. It’s a fantasy Lenny is having of having caught the killer and finally been happy with his wife. We know this because he never has said tatoo, and because he has killed at least once that we know of without any tatoos. His first kill would have been the second man.
If you look at the newpaper article, you find that Lenny kept two journals at the institution, one a secret journal. In it, he tells himself that he needs a better system of keeping important notes–the tatoos. Since he went to the institution after his wife died, he at no time had tatoos while his wife was alive. It’s a fantasy, and one that seems to indicate that he believes, at least momentarily, that his wife was alive at some point while he was hunting her attacker.
All by themselves they would be untrustworthy, but certainly not meaningless. The filmmakers put them there for a reason. You have to look for other evidence elsewhere in the movie to decifer what it means. There is other evidence to indicate that the injection is the true memory with the pinch acting as a cover.
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The tatoo “remember Sammy Jankis” tells him. He knows about the condition from the Sammy Jankis case, and, waking up with no memory and seeing the tatoo, he puts two and two together. Also, he has been telling the story over and over again several times a day for months. He has, through repetition, developed a kind of instinctive memory that the tatoo and his knowledge of Sammy’s condition help him remember.
Also, there are hints that his condition may be psychosomatic. Remember the story about how Sammy is physically capable of making new memories? This again, may be about Leonard, who would thus actually be capable of making new memories but has psychologically convinced himself that he can’t. Thus, certain things that he does over and over again would begin to seep through to his consciousness. In the newpaper article, he beceomes more and more suspicious of the doctors treating him, which may indicate that there is some small residual memory being made. It might also indicate the effects of the second journal. In the end, I don’t think it matters much one way or the other.
Well, let’s be reasonable about the Web site; it’s not “canon.” This isn’t a religion. 
For the purposes of a movie, only what happens between the credits matters, although the Web site gives some ideas as to what might explain the movie.
That said, having the insulin story really about Leonard and his wife makes no sense at all unless we conclude that Leonard is actually suffering from a psychological trauma, not a physical one, as he explained Sammy Jenkis was. If that’s the case, then it makes sense that Leonard’s using “Sammy” as a psychological cover for himself. But if Leonard is actually suffering from a physical trauma, it’s impossible, since he could not have formed a memory of injecting his wife into a diabetic coma and would have nothing to cover up.
It makes sense to me that Leonard’s trauma is psychological, though it makes it a lot harder to explain other aspects of the movie. WAS there a Sammy Jenkis at all? Or was he a fictional character Leonard’s therapists had him learn about and tell the story of, over and over, until it seeped into his memory as a story he could use to identify his own state?
Canon, in this context, refers to anything that is considered to be part of the “official” story. The web site, as you said, provides some information that supports what is already in the movie, much as was done with “The Blair Witch Project”
Leonard’s Sammy Jankis story concludes that Sammy’s disease is psychological, not physical, so if the story is really about Leonard, this would seem to indicate the Leonard’s condition is psychological also. The story also strongly reminds us that not physical doesn’t mean not real. A psychological (or psychosomatic, if you prefer) condition could have the same etiology as a physical one, but might not be quite so ablsolute.
I don’t think this makes it harder to explain the rest. Whether Sammy was real isn’t the point, (though I think he was), the big revelation is that the major parts of “Sammy’s” story–diabetic wife killed by husbands’ insulin injection–are really Leonard’s. This works if Sammy was a con man faking the condition, as Teddy says and I believe, or a defense mechanism of Leonard’s mind, as Joe Pantoliano has said.
The sneaky part is that we find out at the end that we have been rooting for a psychotic serial killer, who we now know is (or will soon be) a cop killer. As bad as all the rest of the characters were, and there’s really nobody here that could be considered a “good guy”, Leonard is by far the most dangerous, especially now that he doesn’t have Teddy to sic him on drug dealers.
I think the only things that can be considered part of the official story are things that actually appear on the screen. The webpage may offer some interesting insight into the director’s intent, but if he wanted it to be “canon” he should have put it in the movie.
I disagree, but only a little. The movie is certainly the primary source, and anything on the website that contradicts the screen should be considered false. But those parts that support what is on the screen can fairly be considered supporting detail for what we see on screen.
In any case, most of it was in the movie, in the form of Teddy’s speech regarding whose wife had diabetes and was killed by her husband. The web site–the official web site–merely supplies some additional detail and further confirmation of most of Teddy’s story. To put it all into the movie would have made for some very clunky exposition.