Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Memento
2000 · Christopher Nolan · Memento on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice that each scene begins with you already lost. (structure)
The color scenes run backward, so each one ends exactly where the previous one started. You arrive with no idea how Leonard got there. A black-and-white strand runs forward alongside it.
Payoff: You are not told about his condition. You are put inside it, scene after scene, for two hours.
Watch the Polaroid fade instead of develop. (camera)
Nolan runs the footage backward so the picture drains out of the square and leaves blank paper in Leonard's hand. It is a practical effect, and it happens in the first minutes.
Payoff: An image builds and erases itself in one gesture, which is what the film does with the past. In the reading: Crystalline description. The reading calls this a crystalline description: an image that creates its own object and erases it at once.
Look at the tattoos, the notes and the Polaroids. (setting)
Wally Pfister photographs Leonard's torso as text to be read, and the camera keeps returning to handwriting, margins and the backs of photographs. These objects are the only continuity anyone here has.
Payoff: Every piece of evidence in this film is something a person wrote down, which means somebody chose it. In the reading: The readable image (lectosign). The reading calls these lectosigns: images that have to be read rather than simply looked at.
Notice the hard shadows in the black-and-white scenes. (light)
The motel strand is lit like noir, with Leonard alone between a lamp and a telephone. The color scenes stay flat, desaturated and sunlit across parking lots, diners and motel forecourts.
Payoff: Two looks keep the two strands apart, so you always know which clock you are currently on.
Watch Pearce's face at the start of a scene. (performance)
Pearce plays the reset every time: a beat of blankness, then the system kicks in and he reads the room off his own notes. He holds one man together across scenes you meet out of order.
Payoff: His consistency is what lets you track him emotionally when the chronology gives you nothing to hold.
Once you have seen it
Watch which note Leonard chooses to write down. (structure)
The notes and the tattoos promise an objective record. Every one of them was written by a man with a reason. At the hinge you learn what he decided to leave himself to wake into.
Payoff: He does not record the truth. He manufactures one he can live inside, and then forgets doing it. In the reading: The forger (le faussaire). The reading calls him a forger: a man who produces his own truth instead of finding it.
Watch where the black and white tips into color. (structure)
The forward strand and the backward strand meet at one point, and the film changes stock inside a single scene. Everything you had assembled reorganizes itself around that join.
Payoff: The film hands you a hinge rather than an answer, and the man at the center cannot keep what he learns.
Listen to the Sammy Jankis story every time it returns. (sound)
Leonard tells it as a case from his insurance years. Stephen Tobolowsky plays Sammy as a parallel to Leonard's own condition. The story arrives in pieces across the black-and-white phone calls.
Payoff: It is the key left in plain sight, and it changes meaning completely once you know where it came from.
Carry this in: You know only what Leonard knows. Watch what gets written down, and ask who decided to write it.