The way narrative is embedded in time is a fascinating subject, and one with which storytellers have experimented in many interesting ways. Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow tried to tell a life-story backwards, from death to birth, and it made powerful reading, but what the book really proves is that you can’t actually tell a story backwards. It just won’t make sense; language itself needs to move forwards.Basically, what Amis had to do was to go back a bit, then tell a segment forwards, then go back again, so the narrative proceeded in something of a zigzag fashion.
The issue of amnesia is also a fruitful area for storytellers, because memory is so important to motivation and the development of character. Flashbacks — significant segments of a character’s memory — are often used to fill in subtext and back-story, using the past to illuminate behaviour in the present. When a character has no memory, the meaning of his actions is ambiguous, to us and to him. A technique used successfully by several authors is to portray someone with amnesia who then goes on, or goes back, to discover who and what he is and what he has gone through.
It is quite a challenge, though, to tell a story of any kind from the perspective of a character who keeps forgetting who he is and what he has been up to — such a creature must have a very unstable sense of self, for a start. The brilliant fantasist Gene Wolfe tried it in a projected quartet of novels set in ancient Greece; his protagonist has to start afresh on his autobiographical scroll each morning, having inadvertently dumped all the information accrued over the preceding day. But the result was so perplexing to readers that Wolfe wrote only two of the four planned novels before abandoning the project.
Christopher Nolan’s superb film Memento takes on the dual challenge of telling a story in reverse (or in zigzag) and telling it through a character who has lost his memory. That is, this man is suffering from short-term memory loss — he can recall the traumatic event at which his life ceased, as it were, to go forwards, but he can’t remember what happened to him five minutes ago.
This man is Leonard Shelby, played with enormous skill and intensity by a feral Guy Pearce, whom you will recall from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and LA Confidential (which had as complex a storyline as Memento). Shelby is out for revenge on the man or men who brought tragedy to him and his wife and, in the same moment, erased his memory bank.
Trouble is, keeping track of things is difficult for a man whose mental hard drive gets wiped every few minutes, who “can’t feel time”. So Shelby has hit upon a novel solution: write everything down, take Polaroids of everyone, and if necessary have the really important things tattooed on your body. He is quintessentially a man of words, with the odd picture thrown in, but what do these notes to himself mean if he can’t provide the connective tissue?
The narrative starts with a gruesome murder, then backtracks to give us the events leading up to it, reversing again and again to prior moments and giving us a little more of Shelby’s fractured narrative each time. The form mimicks Shelby’s state, pulling us inexorably into his weird world, making us puzzle with him through his own actions and the events that have had such a devastating impact on his life. This makes the film both immensely compelling to watch and a trenchant study in human motivation, the status of knowledge and the meaning of actions. What is morality, what is responsibility, without memory?
One emerges from Memento with a slightly skewed vision of reality that takes a while to correct itself. The movie requires concentration — you may not be able to work it all out on a first viewing, especially since the filmmakers leave some room for alternative interpretations. But then it’s easily good enough to see more than once.