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 a note, a tattoo or a photograph, so Leonard can only know what is written. 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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: You know only what Leonard knows. Watch what gets written down, and what each note says.