Memento Put Nolan on the Map. Should it Have?
Guy Pierce in Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan. Image courtesy of Newmarket.
Cast your mind back to September 5th in the year 2000 for a moment, if you will. George W. Bush and Al Gore were in the homestretch of a presidential campaign season that would begin America on its journey into the dumps. I had just started my freshman year of high school. The attack on the World Trade Center was almost a year away, although some of the hijackers were already in the United States silently biding their time. Pets.com was in the process of winding its business down, despite having spent $1.2 million on a Super Bowl spot just a few months earlier. And it was the month when Christopher Nolan made his society debut to the world.
I know that technically his first feature was Following, which did well on the festival circuit considering it cost less money to make than a used Honda Accord. But I have watched this film and if there is any hint of Nolan’s coming star power and industry dominance, it is only obvious in retrospect. Memento was the film that announced him as a real visionary auteur. A trend-setter, and a man who thinks and breathes in non-linear narratives. Apparently drawn on an idea from his brother Jonathan, it was Christopher Nolan who breathed life into this film.
Memento stars Guy Pierce as a troubled man trying to solve the murder of his wife despite suffering from amnesia. He tattoos clues on his body and takes photos in order to keep a record of his investigation, and tries to piece together events based on the fleeting memories and clues he leaves for and on himself. It is a pretty damn good hook. The film is most famous, of course, for its structure. It is told in reverse chronological order. This narrative structure works brilliantly for this particular story, because it unmoors the viewer in time and allows us to experience the narrative in the same disjointed way that the protagonist does. It’s a brilliant way to structure the narrative - and it’s done with very careful attention to detail and consummate skill so even though we start at the end, the end which is actually the beginning still packs some terrific twists.
The film was a huge hit, and it put Nolan on the map big time. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 2017 Congress placed it in the National Film Registry which is where all the good films go to live in case there is an apocalypse and the survivors have to try and piece our shattered culture back together one non-linear indie hit at a time. I suppose if you wanted to, you could dig quite deep into Memento and analyze what it says about time and reality and how our perceptions of both are shaped not by objective truth but by subjective interpretation. But for me, Memento is most noteworthy for its technical achievements. The idea of this story, and the way the narrative is structured, are rather superb feats of filmmaking.
They also hold the seeds to understanding all of Christopher (and Jonathan) Nolan’s subsequent filmography. Neither one of these brothers has ever met a linear narrative that they liked. Why is this happening in sequential order, they no doubt wondered while watching Doctor Zhivago. Sometimes, in a film like The Prestige, this narrative approach makes sense. It complements and enhances the story they are telling, which is about the way magicians withhold information in order to make the reveal more dramatic and entertaining. It makes sense to play fast and loose with time when you tell such a story, because the story is all about manipulating viewers and expectations.
But other times - most of the time really - the film he is trying to make does not cry out for a non-linear narrative (see: Dunkirk). I believe that the success of Memento and its temporal shenanigans have had a lasting impact on the work of Christopher Nolan. I think it is the seed of his approach to cinema - to wrap somewhat interesting ideas up in a sleek veneer of style and narrative complexity and parade them around like a masterpiece. Like Elon Musk, a great blustering swathe of the world has fallen for this shtick.
Memento is surely one of Nolan’s better films, and that is largely I think because the narrative approach fit the material. In the next post, I will discuss how this preference for visual and structural complexity over substance helped give his Dark Knight trilogy an unearned air of genius and depth.
