Memento

Wow! I just watched the film Memento (2000) and I have to say that it is one of the better films that I have seen recently (certainly beats that crude and unfunny Team America). It's the story of a man called Leonard, who is trying to find the man who murdered his wife. Except, he suffers from short-term memory loss and can't remember how he is trying to find him. He is unable to form new memories of events that occurred after the death of his wife. So he can't for example remember why he entered into a restaurant, which room is his at the motel etc. But he can remember how to write.

The amazing thing about this film is Leonard's "system". To deal with everyday tasks he goes about writing down key events, and takes pictures of people that he needs to remember. He goes as far as to have facts that he has learned tattooed to his body. But there are several key rules. Firstly: only trust your own handwriting. Secondly: really important things should be written on the body rather than on napkins. So his body is covered in clues and sayings: "memory is treachery", "consider the source" and "John G raped my wife". These texts are Leonard's world and without the texts, or the pens to write them, he is lost. So when someone wants to manipulate him, all they have to do is take the pens and the memory is obliterated. It is this potential for manipulation that is the fundamental nagging doubt in Leonard's mind, and he has to convince himself that there is a world outside of his brain:

I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember it. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed the world's still there. Do I believe...?

The film has extra significance for me. It was through a commentary of this film that I came to understand a fundamental concept in the academic world: that of Derrida's "deconstruction" approach to texts. The link between the film and the theory is the central importance of text in communicating our experience of the world. So like Leonard we all need little crib notes to make our way. This was summarised by Derrida in his famous saying: "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("there is nothing outside the text").

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously argued that language 'got in the way' of human attempts to describe the world. It is a lens that stands between us and the world, and is therefore a (admittedly slight) distortion of true experience. Therefore, when language was invented we lost a bit of real nature and instead have to interpret the world. But Derrida differed here. He argued that people read all of the time, but they do not interpret, that is they do not look beyond the text to examine its meanings, but instead see a text as some sort of transparency that we can supposedly see as genuine. Rousseau assumes that Leonard is a freak and that we are normal. Derrida instead sees texts everywhere, none of which are currently recognised as things that require interpretation. If I lift up a cup, this action is mediated by my interpretation of the things as "a cup", with this interpretation informed by context, history, experience - an entire set of presuppositions. It is the all-conquering nature of this idea that I think resonates through the film, and the texts that Leonard needs are therefore only slightly more material versions of the texts that we use everyday.

What a film!

Blygt.