Fragments of Memory Memento (2000) Drama/Suspense/Thriller/Crime United States
Text / Black Meow
People complain about burning their brains, but they like to be burned, so as to prove that their brains are not broken, so that they are like Lenny in the movies - the brain is obviously broken, but it can live out the meaning of life, even if this meaning is as absurd and frightening as a hen giving birth to a dinosaur.
A movie, if you pass by it like a passerby, it is the side of your sinking boat, a thousand sails have passed; if you stay, sacrifice hundreds of millions of brain cells for a "so-so", but you may be stuck in the mud in "don't know why", and love and hate lost in a Nolan forest - the fog of philosophy, the mist of psychology, the ingenious axe chiseling work... That feeling is like a very romantic relationship, sour, sweet and bitter and spicy to understand alone, no one to share.
Just like a casual thing in life, the conclusion you come to may be very different from others, everyone's experience, knowledge, personality, angle, and even the local mood at that time are involved, how can it be uniform? The more complex things are, the more divided they are.
Some people also say that this movie is not complicated, ten minutes to tell clear things, around two hours, purely literary and artistic youth costume thirteen - a man, his wife was raped and killed, his own brain trauma, suffering from short-term memory loss, in order to find the meaning of living, he constantly forgot and updated the "ten minutes of life", tirelessly doing the amazing cause of revenge for his wife - this description is not exaggerated, he is more like a short-lived ephemeral spliced together to form a broken collection, but experience the take-off of the dragon. If there is no goal and nothing to do, he is a stagnant animal with a stagnant mind and a sleeping consciousness, or a walking dead, eating and drinking, and dying.
Yes, ten minutes can tell the story of a man's revenge, and even more, such as the difficulty of revenge, the killing of people who are used, the use of others, and the life of a firmer self... And so on, but ten minutes is hard to tell the truth behind a sick subject, a false meaning of life, and the illusion it presents to the audience.
Here's a key point: our perspective is all the perspective of the protagonist Lenny. He has amnesia, are we also following the amnesia? He "speaks with evidence" like a self-proclaimed detective, but how does the evidence he earns in his short life (10 minutes) — tattoos, notes, photographs, instant hearsay — connect with the 10 minutes that continue to pass? How does the "truth" piled up by fragments form a complete and immaculate chain of evidence? How do momentary memories, impure memories swayed by complex psychology, guide action?
When the "truth" is lost and "true", the difference is a millimeter, the fallacy is thousands of miles, the motive can be very simple, but the action can be very evil, which may be the truth that the movie wants to tell us.
Given that Lenny is a patient (a brain-injured disease, not mentally involved first), we should trust the police report that Lenny's wife died of rape and murder, which is the basis for solving the whole suspense.
More than once Lenny flashed back to the scene of the attack in his mind, and the fact that his wife blinked alive under a plastic sheet did not indicate that the wife had been alive all the time, and that it was normal to die after he fainted, before the police arrived. His two flashback memories, but the scenes are not the same, is his memory biased, or is he "writing" or "tampering" with the memory? It is worth the audience's deep thinking. The words tattooed on his chest proved that he admitted the fact that "his wife died of rape and murder".
Here's what we see with his "suspicious memories," or the spiritual world he leads us into—
Lenny always tells people about Sammy cheating on short-term memory loss, and in his comments about Sammy's condition, Sammy's wife tries Sammy in despair, resulting in a drug overdose and death.
When Lenny killed Jimmy, Jimmy looked at Lenny and called out to Sammy.
A fleeting image— Sammy's face sitting in a wheelchair in a nursing home— instantly transformed into Lenny's face.
Teddy said Sammy has no wife. Teddy didn't seem to have to lie about it.
These points have completely confused the audience. Lenny is Sammy, but Lenny has a wife and diabetes. The replacement of that face reminds me of the replacement of Norman's face with his mother Norma in Bates Inn, which can be called a split personality textbook, and Norman calls himself Norma, and people will tell Norman that your mother has a son, which does not affect Norman's continued to be a mother Norma without sons.
So, Sammy does have someone, no wife, Lenny's personality splits, he thinks of himself as Sammy, Sammy didn't get a needle to kill his wife, it was Lenny who killed his wife in his imagination as Sammy, and he told this story when he saw people - telling a person without a wife who killed his wife, is it not a disease? So everybody knows he's sick, everybody knows he became Sammy when he's sick, Teddy knows it, Jimmy knows it.
And the truth is that his wife died of rape and murder, he can not accept this fact, imagining another way of death related to his wife, the self-blame and remorse in this can not be expressed - blame himself for negligence, failed to protect his wife, just like killing her with his own hands, and the amnesia can not control himself (killing his wife), so that his self-blame has an impotent excuse, this extreme ambivalence led to a split personality, and he was also admitted to a nursing home as a mental patient.
So, Lenny was not only mentally injured (trauma when he fell to the ground, not amnesia due to injury), but also mentally ill. We identified Lenny as a mental patient, and all doubts were solved. Where is there any amnesia? He simply borrowed Sammy's amnesia and imposed a reasonable excuse on his actions, otherwise Teddy wouldn't have said the phrase "you only remember what you want to remember."
I had thought a lot about inertia, about the meaning of life, about memory and personality... However, regarding the plot, there are always a few contradictions that cannot be justified. When I finally understood that this was a world of the mentally ill, all philosophical thinking was useless. How many viewers are wandering around in the mysterious circles just because they are really far away from the world of the mentally ill.
This 25-day film "Memory Fragments" carried forward the successful experience of the debut film "Follow", and was cut into 45 fragments, 1-22 for black and white flashback playback, 23-45 for color flashback playback, interspersed, that is, 45, 1, 44, 2, 43, 3, 42, 4... 25、21、24、22、23 。
The memory fragments are not the memory fragments of Lenny, the mentally ill man in the movie, but a bunch of dominoes that Nolan sprinkled to the audience, and he looked down at the thousands of lineups of thousands of viewers, heartbroken, and intoxicated.
The narcissistic Nolan will play the audience not lightly.
Memory Fragments Memento (2000) Genre: Drama / Mystery / Thriller / Crime United States