Narrative structure of 'Memento'

The definition of narrative, according to film theorists Bordwell and Thompson is “a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship occuring in time” and in most mainstream television and film this means that the events are happening one after another in the natural chronological order that occurs in real life. However, in Memento, a 2000 psychological thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, the story plays with the audience expectations of a conventional, chronological narrative.

The film follows the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, as he tries to track down and kill the man that murdered his wife. However, the thing that makes Memento different from most noir thrillers is that the hero suffers with a condition called anterograde amnesia, which is the inability to form new memories due to a past trauma. As he is gathering information on his wife’s murderer, he has a intricate system of photographs, notes and tattoos to document the information that he can not remember.

This twist on the genre is further enhanced by the fact that the main arc of the story is told in a sequence that occurs in a way that as one scene ends, the next takes place before the previous one, as to explain what lead to the events beforehand. To link the events together, the end of each scene ends with what opened the previous scene. This is an example of an anachronic narrative for it is not told in an order that we see in real life and some scenes are are repeated and overlapped as to provide context for what came before it. For example, when we see Leonard wake up in Natalie’s bed at the start of a scene, the next shows how he got there there the night before. This can be a disorientating - and arguably tedious - way to have a story told to you, but I think the purpose of choosing an unconventional narrative structure such as this for Memento was to put the audience in the mind of Leonard and try to make them feel his day to day confusion, putting us in the shoes of someone with a condition like amnesia.

The theory of binary opposition is the idea that having two opposite ideas in a narrative drives it forward. An example of binary opposites in Memento is the contrast between going forward and backward in time. The narrative of this film is split into two separate timelines, one going in reverse chronological order and one going forwards in time, alternating between colour and greyscale to communicate to the audience that time is working differently in these scenes. In between the plot that seems to start and stop at crucial moments, we get to see a phone conversation that Leonard is having with unknown caller. These scenes are important because they give us information on the protagonist’s past. During these scenes he also recalls a fellow anterograde amnesiac, Sammy Jankis and there are also flashbacks of him eventually giving his wife an overdose of insulin and putting her into a fatal coma.

The film subverts the traditional structure of a narrative, such as what Todorov suggests in his equilibrium theory. He said that the basic structure of all narratives is that there is a equilibrium, a disturbance to the equilibrium and then when this disturbance is solved there is a new equilibrium. However, in Memento the beginning of the film is the end equilibrium - Leonard killing Teddy under the impression that he is his wife’s killer - and the rest of the film is explaining how he got to that point, showing us clips in a reverse chronological order. This leads us to the end of the film, which is the beginning equilibrium, which shows us the origins of his investigation. In a way, the film follows Todorov’s theory of narrative structure, just not in the order that is expected, for the events are ordered in reverse.

As for the the characters in this film, it is difficult to put them into the categories that Vladimir Propp suggested in his theory of character archetypes. His theory proposes that there are six character types that all characters in a narrative fall into: the hero, the heroine, the princess, the villain, the donor or mentor and the helper. However, we can say that protagonist Leonard fits into the hero category because, although we can not say that his acts throughout the film where always moral, his intentions of the where for justice for his wife. He did not kill Teddy out of malice, but to avenge his murdered wife. Initially, we would think that the character of Natalie is the princess for based on first impressions she seems typical of this role - she was vulnerable and the hero was protecting her. However, we later find out that her motive in befriending Leonard was not to help him, but to manipulate him into protecting her and getting revenge on Dodd.

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