A Postmodern Approach to Christopher Nolan's Memento
...rant example of what it is to 'have certainty', while for the other person it is so elusive that 'hearing about pain' may exist as the primary model of what it is 'to have doubt'. Thus pain came unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.'(4) The first point that can be taken from her research on pain is that a level of inexpressibility exists in experiencing pain. With a close look at Scarry’s argument and recognizing Leonard's mental suffering which is combined with the emotional pain of his wife's death we see a particular certainty in Leonard's thought process. Despite his inability to create a larger purpose for his actions, the certainty of revenge is what pushes him to his actions and clears up all doubt he has sometimes and focuses his attention to his mission. These two above ideas can be applied to the protagonist as the results of treating and even studying him as an object, which will be discussed further. In postmodernism the reader’s ability to interpret the meaning is valued, often to the extent that the author is no longer seen as the final authority on what the work means. Radwin, a famous film scholar, points out that meaning is always discussable in a postmodernist work and that artists often organize their work to require, or at least encourage, the audience to discover the meanings themselves, coming to their own understandings of a piece, and, according to Weinbren, it can be said that “the burden of making relationships between the parts of a work has shifted from author to viewer.”(8). In addition, artists are each the one interface against their particular media and the medium is, in turn, an interface between the artist and the audience. The nature of the medium may determine when, where, and how the viewer may experience and interpret the artist's work. In the interview with Kaufman, Nolan explains about Memento: “I find it quite satisfying that people will come out of this film arguing about who the good guys are and who the bad guy is. Not because there isn't one, but because we are using an unreliable narrator.” This is not, however, exactly what Weinbren says about transferring the relationships from the director to the audience. In fact, Nolan claims a much greater responsibility upon the artist to consider how the viewer will encounter the work: “I feel like I've got three years to work on this thing and as a viewer you've got like two hours to watch it, so it ought to be functioning at some level of greater sophistication than you can absorb in one viewing.” Darke claims “the real pleasure of Memento lies in its openness to re-viewing and hence to interpretation” (“Mr. Memory”, p. 43). In fact, films such as Memento are full of (or we may say, filled with) signs that are impossible to comprehend at the same time. The viewer chooses some signs according to his own taste and interprets them as his wishes himself. There are some scenes in the film that neither come form the filmmaker’s personal concerns nor are to express any specific concept; everything depends on the moment at which the audience becomes involved in the film and on his understanding at the moment. The filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, escapes any pre-determined meaning while leading us toward our own uncertain judgments of the film. For example consider Sammy’s story. At first, it is just seems a simple intertextual story through which Leonard tries to show that his present situation is different with Sammy’s ;he has vengeance as the one goal for living and has the ability to organize and manage everything by his notes and photos to. But moving to the end of the film, we hear from Teddy (the corrupted police) that Sammy’s story is Leonard’s own life-story; that Leonard’s wife hasn’t died in the attack and it is Leonard who kills her with insulin and ends up in mental hospital. We also see Leonard’s momentary memory of being in the mental hospital instead of Sammy, but it vanishes quickly. What are we to trust? The corrupted angry policeman and Leonard’s fading memory or our knowledge that logically Leonard couldn’t have made up the story out of his own life after the attack simply because he is not able to remember anything from that moment? This is the time to choose, and it all depends on the scenes and signs you have picked out personally as reliable or at least less unreliable evidences. And of course, it is quite reasonable to choose according to your judgment and feeling about characters formed before by the signs that are picked up little by little; a tendency to believe Leonard or Teddy. And that is why different critics have answered the above question differently. Another case can be when Leonard tells of his Sammy injecting his wife with insulin, and we see these events. But, these shots are interrupted by those where we see Leonard repeating the action, injecting his wife. Such a moment opens up the idea that no one can ever understand their own lives or significance - that this can only be interpreted and reinterpreted by other people... The film's web site also adds a particular element of involvement in the narrative. The site offers an undated newspaper article and the person who searches in the site is in the place of Leonard, attempting to make sense of recent events. We choose how to search through the story and thus how many additional clues we may be able to find in the site. After searching through the site, though, it becomes apparent that the information it contains is limited. Moreover, the number of words hyperlinked to specified databases determines the number of paths to getting additional information about Leonard. After searching once, the user becomes aware of an algorithm, what Manovich calls “its hidden logic” (p. 222). The site offers two items of note. First, it shows a kind of awareness by the creator(s) that the story may provide different interpretations in different media with its non-linear form. Second, the different medium by which the viewer may come to understand the information helps the audience to analyze the artist's use of media to present a narrative. Leonard is revealed at the end of the film as the most unreliable of unreliable narrators. Our trust in the narrator and narrative vanishes very soon by deconstruction. Our starting realization of his affected psychological world gives us the logic of truth that is known in the narrative to be destroyed. Our sudden comprehension in the film's final sequence (the narrative opening) gives us a realization that Leonard's death drive is all-consuming and connected to the possibilities of narrative resolution. Leonard's desire at the end/beginning to pursue a new target in choosing Teddy and the reflection on how and whether to allow himself to do this reveals a deception at the heart of the filmic representation of his character and this again forces the spectator into action and re-action in order to comprehend the filmic affect. On the other hand, our protagonist works only on blind trust of his own handwriting in recorded clues, yet has no additional rational application of knowledge. His mind's database is broken. He represents, nonetheless, the arbitrariness of how unrelated information is given significance personally by its juxtaposition in the database -- the database, in essence, is reasoning itself. In fact, Leonard is engaged in his own 'investigation', guided by random items of separate information. His matrix of social interaction seems random to him -- and us, the viewers -- yet there is nothing random about his experience. He is caught in the middle of a drug deal arranged in the city's blind spots. Leonard's phone calls with a police officer -- society's agent of observation -- are only with one member of the drug battle (Teddy) who is using Leonard as a tool for different purposes. Leonard is ignorant of these circumstances and maintains a single focus: the revenge of his wife's brutal death. As long as he feels that his direction will fulfill this purpose, his suffering for justice push him forward through the network of material and social spaces toward the absurdity of his adventure; as Leonard's story appears complete in the audience's mind, it only becomes clear that, in his fragmented world, the enthusiasm for revenge is never satisfied. Indeed, when this is the only life purpose upon which Leonard can rely, he ensures he won't remember each murder by destroying the evidence and moving on to his next search for the murderer. In addition, he is left to rely upon the language games that constitute a basic form of social interaction, attempting to save his life from one moment to the next. The result is an interplay of tensions between the physical individual and the identity he tries to construct in a world of random-access information. As Cubitt explains, “Identity, gender, nation, are abstractions we have woven out of the endless flickering of community, derivations from the void which we drape, fold and knit about ourselves to keep us warm, and to stop our selves from leaking out . . . It is discourse that produces the self, a discourse hypostatized as an autonomous historical agent”(p 20). The danger here is to fall into a technological determinist position by which the computer would have a defined effect upon the individual or society as a whole. Rather, a dynamic interplay between the individual and the structured technology happens. Indeed, humans engage computers for a variety of tasks that we may, in turn, recognize as a 'computerization' of society. These may limit actions, just as Leonard's vague notes come to define his area of analysis. These data structures and algorithms only limit the actions of individuals, though, as long as people are willing to accept the superiority of computer-mechanized systems of knowledge. His handwriting and the messages each conveys are not reliable either. The database Leonard develops seems to provide clues toward established facts that may become evidence against the person who is responsible for the murder. The viewer sees that this is not the case. Each photo and note has more background than can be collected in a quick glance. Moreover, Leonard's own inability to comprehend his situation while still leaving clues indicating his own incorrect assumptions in searching for revenge emphasize the validity of his database and his entire quest. Thus in having diverse pieces of information available through the same interface, differences between values of information are not shown. As a result, if two ideas can be accessed and cross-referenced through the interface, they become related, regardless of their initial irrelevance to each other. Leonard collects 'clues' in an attempt to provide stability and direction for action in opposition to his suffering. The facts he collects receive equal consideration, though, they are given the acceptability when he trusts his handwriting as the indicator of truth. Faith is in the artifact, not the rationality (or lack of it) behind the item. When a clue is established as fact, Leonard has the information inscribed in a tattoo on his body. The pain for his loss is shown in a tangible piece of evidence, now made into flesh. While his pain cannot be articulated, the facts leading to a solution can at least be made real in writing. The grammar of the database's information becomes the body. By virtue of the information's place on the body, Leonard realizes the pain and comes closer to realizing an end to his task. But the viewers come to understand the futility in his drive. Anger blinds him to any suggestion that he might be wrong. His own interface -- his body -- cannot be trusted for its mental clues, nor for the relations it draws between facts inscribed in his flesh. In what is an appropriate description of the situation, Cubitt explains that the “text is substituted for the world, rendered into an object in its own right, and severed from a reality which it no longer describes but constructs” (p. 20). This happens, as shown in Leonard's blind trust, regardless of his database's validity. Another point to be considered is the postmodern approach toward the subject. In postmodernism, subject or let’s say the human, is considered as an object that can be studied and investigated, whose Psychological discrepancies are considered as natural. Despite the fact that in post modern idea individualism is accepted and emphasized in a new sense, it views human beings more as historical and social elements rather than one opposed and superior to the society, history and world. In fact, the postmodern individual, Leonard, is a scattered and multi-layered fact that is a complex of spirituality and materialism, civility and brutality, and power and weakness. Indeed, it more depends on the conditions he is situated in and factors which affect him. By the end of the film we notice that his wife’s murder has created an endless motivation for revenge that can not ever be satisfied, and this makes a murderer out of him while he thinks he is just taking revenge “because she deserves it.” He is studied as a social element who is in severe troubles because he can not he can not understand the logic of the world around, and thus is abused by other people. His body then functions as a key or instrument for the spectators struggling to make sense of what they are seeing as well. This is particularly clear in the tattoos written on Leonard's body. The body here becomes a signifier for both Leonard and the spectator of that which avoids Leonard's memory and his capacity for representation. This acts as a constant marker of the castratedness of the position occupied by Leonard in the film, a position that functions to emphasize the sense that knowledge and its related sense of mastery in the world is frequently absent in this narrative. The tattoos themselves seem to explain the failure of this mastery clearly ("Don't trust your weakness"; "Memory is treachery"; "Notes can be lost"). Through the tattoos and the film's play with them as mementoes of an event that can only be recalled frequently rather than accepted and assigned to the past, the body becomes the site of the failure of a notion of subjectivity that is based on mastery and ...