Memento

Andrew Kania

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415774741
• eBook ISBN: 9781135974978
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Within a short space of time, the film Memento has already been hailed as a modern classic. Memorably narrated in reverse, from the perspective of Leonard Shelby, the film's central character, it follows Leonard's chaotic and visceral quest to discover the identity of his wife's killer and avenge her murder, despite his inability to form new long-term memories.

This is the first book to explore and address the myriad philosophical questions raised by the film, concerning personal identity, free will, memory, knowledge, and action. It also explores problems in aesthetics raised by the film through its narrative structure, ontology, and genre. Beginning with a helpful introduction that places the film in context and maps out its complex structure, specially commissioned chapters examine the following topics:

• memory, emotion, and self-consciousness
• agency, free will, and responsibility
• personal identity
• narrative and popular cinema
• the film genre of neo-noir
• Memento and multimedia

Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Memento is essential reading for students interested in philosophy and film studies.

Chapter 1
MORAL MONSTER OR RESPONSIBLE PERSON? MEMENTO’S LEONARD AS A CASE STUDY IN DEFECTIVE AGENCY

Michael McKenna

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S psychological thriller Memento is an impressive cinematic achievement. Although many films can be used to illustrate philosophical ideas, few are intentionally philosophical. Memento is. In it, we are struck by several philosophical questions that the film is clearly designed to raise.¹ Before proceeding to a discussion of these questions, I shall begin with a brief comment on the film itself.

As is often observed, Memento is nearly impenetrable on first viewing. Even a straightforward, unambiguous interpretation of the film, supposing one could find one, involves an extremely complex plot. Add to that the duplicitous innuendos and other built-in ambiguities, and we are provided with resources to doubt an unambiguous rendering. Finally, present the entire storyline using the intricate temporal structure Nolan developed, and the net effect of Memento is simply baffling, at least the first time through it.

If Nolan’s efforts were merely self-indulgent showmanship, it would be easy to dismiss this film. Intriguing as it is, it would be a fair criticism to complain that the film demands too much of its viewers, and that a finely crafted story in the fashion of Hitchcock or Bertolucci easily trumps all Nolan’s smoke and mirrors. But in my estimation, this complaint is misguided. Those pressing it fail to see the genius in what Nolan has accomplished. In terms of its complexity, I would argue that Nolan’s Memento is similar to Faulkner’s masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. In both cases, the formal structure of the artwork—which no doubt completely overpowers its audience upon an initial encounter—provides a commentary on, or illustration of, the thematic subtext of the story. Only after revisiting the work can we come to see this, and in our revisiting we assign richer significance to the various pieces constituting the whole.

In Memento, Nolan has, in essence, demanded that his audience make use of mementos in order to follow his film. We, like Leonard, have to leave notes to ourselves to decipher the proper temporal order, think through the credibility of Leonard’s telling of the story of Sammy Jankis, scrutinize the veracity of Teddy’s revelations, understand the motives of characters such as Natalie, and so on. As we begin to question the stability of a single right interpretation of the film, we are led to reflect upon core philosophical themes in Memento, which turn on the nature of knowledge, mind, personal identity, and practical as well as distinctively moral agency.

Philosophical issues in Memento

Eventually I shall turn to an extended treatment of first practical and then moral agency. Here I wish to comment briefly on several other closely related issues.

Global skepticism

As the intelligent critic of Memento recognizes, Nolan has not given us enough textual evidence to settle what is to be taken for reality and what is not. Did Leonard kill his wife with an overdose of insulin, as Teddy alleges, or was it the assailant Leonard is seeking? How much of what we see is just a hallucination or, more innocuously, maybe a daydream, unfolding inside the confines of Leonard’s mind? Furthermore, how are we to sort through all of this, given the elaborate temporal ordering Nolan creates? Because of our uncertainty, we are placed in a position similar to Leonard’s. Thus, our relation to the film, like Leonard’s relation to the world he confronts, leaves us as Descartes found himself at the beginning of his second meditation, before he was able to convince himself that there was an external world. In this moment, he was uncertain as to how to interpret the status of his beliefs. He wrote:

So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown as a result of yesterday’s meditation that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top.

(1641:16)

If we take all of the ambiguous interpretive data seriously, the effect Nolan creates with Memento is analogous to that created by unresolved Cartesian global skepticism. Given the available evidence, there simply is no settled, proper interpretation of reality. As between competing and inconsistent interpretations, we are completely ill-equipped to settle on which, if any, is veridical.

Descartes attempted to argue his way out of his skeptical predicament, and as we cast about for anchors in the film to rule out some evidence and retain other pieces, we are attempting to do likewise. We start with certainties, the ones closest to home and least subject to doubt. (Descartes claimed to find his first certainty in the mere fact of his own thought.) With this in mind, recall the scene in which Leonard has a meltdown in front of Natalie, whereupon, in a moment of tenderness, she takes him to bed (P). In that scene, Leonard insists that there are certainties, such as knowing what it will feel like when he picks up an ashtray. The practical predicament for him, as cast in that scene, is whether there are enough crumbs of certainty scattered about to build a bridge to his past, and to his future. For Descartes, his solipsistic predicament was whether he had enough to build a bridge to knowledge outside of his own mind.

But is Leonard really involved in this struggle while sitting in Natalie’s living room? Or is he just insane, imagining the entire thing from an asylum? Just as Descartes in his early stage of skeptical doubt could interpret all of his experiences as consistent with veridical judgments about the world, or instead as fabrications fed to him by a demon, so we in watching the film can interpret what Nolan presents for us as consistent with Leonard actually out hunting down a killer, or instead as delusional daydreams fed to him by his own insanity. The uncertainty that Nolan engenders does a far better job of illustrating the Cartesian skeptical predicament than a film such as the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, in which the audience is easily clued into which interpretation is reality and which is an artifice.²

Self-knowledge, and knowledge of other minds

A striking fact about the human condition, at least in the normal case, is that there is a crucial asymmetry between knowledge of our own minds and knowledge of others’ minds. Admittedly, there is room for self-deception. Sometimes, maybe even often, people do not understand themselves nearly as well as they think they do. But the default assumption is that persons have a privileged relationship to their own beliefs about themselves. No doubt, the degree of credence that we ought to assign to their convictions varies depending on the beliefs in question. We regard people as completely authoritative about sincere pain reports, slightly less so about their visual impressions, less than that about what they claim to see, and so on. Once we get to things such as sexual preferences and how people really feel about their mothers, well, all bets are off. But along this spectrum, awareness of one’s own basic biography, at least in simple details, such as what one had for breakfast earlier in the day, or whether one cut the grass yesterday, are certainly regarded as beliefs about which one has a greater authoritative claim in comparison with third parties. My knowledge about what I had for breakfast this morning is more reliable than my knowledge of what you had for breakfast this morning. In the case of knowledge of my own history, I can consult my own “memory-record” of my experiences. But I do not have access to your experiences, to your memory-record. I have to infer knowledge of what you did without direct access to your mind.

The classical philosophical problem of knowledge of other minds is posed as a restricted kind of skepticism. Set aside the skeptical challenge that we do not know that there is an external world. Suppose that problem is solved; we do know there is an external world. A distinct problem is how we know there are other minds, and even if we do, how do we know the content of those other minds? Since we cannot have another’s thoughts or feelings, cannot experience her pains, and so on, all we can do is infer from her external behavior that she is having thoughts and experiences. But maybe she is not. Maybe she is a hollow zombie who just acts like we do when we have experiences. Or maybe she has them but, unlike in our case, there is no correlation between her conduct and her thought, so that no matter how she behaves, we are forever ignorant about what she is really feeling and thinking.

Although Leonard does not entertain full throttle skeptical doubts about knowledge of other minds, his relation to his own recent self is just like his relation to another person. He has to infer what he had previously thought without access to any memories that would give him a privileged basis for any beliefs he might form. In this way, Leonard stands diachronically to his own recent self as he does synchronically to another person. The primary Socratic edict is to know thyself. Now recall Teddy’s skeptical challenge to Leonard, “You don’t even know who you are” (H, 1:07:52). For Leonard, knowing himself will always involve gigantic obstacles, ones that will make it nearly impossible for him ever to figure out what to do, since this requires some appreciation of what he has done (a point I will explore in more detail later).

The extended mind

What constitutes a mind? Put differently, what constitutes a subject of mental states or processes? Many philosophers, myself included, are physicalists. We believe that minds are physically realized. There is a good bit of technical philosophical machinery required to get clear on what physicalism does and does not commit one to. Setting all of that out is far beyond the scope of this essay, but a central idea is something like this: This mind of mine, Michael McKenna’s mind, whatever it comes to, is dependent upon physical states and processes, and is, in some loose sense of “is,” a physical state or process. So, roughly, my mind is located where my brain is located, inside my cranium. As peculiar as it might seem, saying this much, committing to physicalism, does not amount to the stronger thesis that my mind is just a physical state or process, where the “just” suggests the idea that mental states and processes can be reduced to physical states and processes. To explain: Though I contend that my mind is a physical state or process, and that, for instance, my beliefs, desires, intentions, values, and so forth, are all physical, it does not follow that they are simply physical, or that they are “no more than” physical. It might be that, though they are physical, what makes them mental states is that they function in certain ways. So if my mind were, say, built out of some different material, or if a small part of my brain quit working and could be replaced by a silicon chip that would perform the functional tasks now performed by the operative grey matter in my brain, it would still be my mind. Hence, while my brain does duty for how in fact my mind is “realized,” it is possible (even if not now technologically realistic) that it could be realized by some other physical material. Nevertheless, on this view, when we point to my brain we point, for all practical purposes, to my mind. Stick my brain in a blender, reducing it to a frosty shake, and you do the same to my mind.

Given the assumption of physicalism, here is a striking puzzle brought out by Memento: If a mind is, in some sense, a physical system, then why assume that it is located only in the cranium, or under the skin? (Clark and Chalmers 1998) Why can’t it be extended outside of the skin to, for example, my computer, which retains articles I have written but have long since “forgotten?” Why is it not also extended to my weekly planner? What about snapshots of my father, long dead now? If this photo on my desk of him and me as a kid walking in the park sustains a memory of my time with him, why is it not part of my mind rather...

Table of contents

• Philosophers on Film
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributor biographies
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the director
• INTRODUCTION
• Scene tables
• Chapter 1 MORAL MONSTER OR RESPONSIBLE PERSON? MEMENTO’S LEONARD AS A CASE STUDY IN DEFECTIVE AGENCY
• Chapter 2 LEONARD’S SYSTEM: WHY DOESN’T IT WORK?
• Chapter 3 THE FEEL OF THE WORLD: EXOGRAMS, HABITS, AND THE CONFUSION OF TYPES OF MEMORY
• Chapter 4 THE VALUE OF MEMORY: REFLECTIONS ON MEMENTO
• Chapter 5 MEMENTO AND PERSONAL IDENTITY: DO WE HAVE IT BACKWARDS?
• Chapter 6 MEMENTO AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF COMPREHENDING MOTION PICTURE NARRATION
• Chapter 7 RECONFIGURING THE PAST: MEMENTO AND NEO-NOIR
• Chapter 8 WHAT IS MEMENTO? ONTOLOGY AND INTERPRETATION IN MAINSTREAM FILM
• Index
• Scene index