SPOILERS
How do we find truth?
We build it upon certain, known, established facts. So it
seems as though the only way to get the whole picture of the truth is by corralling
different facts which surely will cohere neatly into a unified body of
knowledge.
That was the premise that Memento advertised to us. It’s a
movie about a man who suffers from short-term memory loss and who has to find
out about the events surrounding his wife’s murder. IMDb says so. Wikipedia
says so. It’s marketed as a sort of whodunit, and the audience patiently watches
Leonard’s journey as he writes down clues - “mementos” – to build a picture of the truth
from the ground-up.
In any good detective fiction, it’s normal to have
assumptions. You need to have assumptions to build a hypothetical scenario of
how the crime happened. But the danger lies in building an entire case around pre-assumptions, i.e. prior knowledge that you think are
certain and that you never questioned. From the beginning of the movie, we are
told that “Teddy is a liar”. We (Leonard and the audience) take it, we don’t
question it, we think it to be true. As the movie works its way forward in time,
which is itself an interesting narrative device, the statement that “Teddy is
not to be trusted” seems to align with what is happening. It has the appearance
of truth.
But at the very end of the movie, which is when the
chronological action actually starts, we see how this pre-assumption is totally
wrong. Turns out… Teddy isn’t a liar.
The basic premise that we’ve been operating on, is actually entirely false. Knowing
this, we then see how we’ve misinterpreted every other fact that we have
assimilated into our “truth” jigsaw puzzle. And the big irony is that by revealing
us events from the past, the movie is depicting the danger of building our
views based on past assumptions.
Even the way the movie is marketed is an example of this.
The summary shows that it’s a movie about the unreliability of memory. With
this “knowledge” given to them even before they watch the movie, the viewers
are lulled into thinking that the major problem in this detective story is
Leonard’s memory loss. We suspect that
his memory will be the “tragic flaw” that will lead him and the audience astray.
But we think because we know this (a pre-assumption), all we have to do to
anticipate this trap and steer clear of it. In the end, however, we see how we’ve
actually misread Teddy, Leonard - the entire movie - based on that one false
premise we never sought to challenge.