Christopher Nolan s Memento Movie Analysis - 903 Words

The movie that I decided to examine is Christopher Nolan’s Memento. The movie was set in a backwards chronological order meaning that the movies storyline was moving backwards so the sequence of events were backwards as well. The movie starts with Leonard, portrayed by Guy Pearce, shaking an instant photo but the image blurs instead of developing into the actual shot; confirming the reverse storyline. Leonard reveals that he is suffering from a medical condition due to an injury that prevents his brain from developing new memories and allows him to retain only 10-15 minutes of his memories. However, Leonard is not suffering from amnesia because he can recall memories from the past, including the origins of his condition. Leonard’s wife was being raped in their home and when he tried to interfere, the assailants dealt a blow to his head and damaged a part of his brain while leaving his wife dead, assumingly. This relates to the concept of memory formation and how humans retrieve, store, and create memories. The brain responds to a certain eternal event we get something that is called sensory memory that brief and extremely short term. The brain then encodes the sensory memory into explicit short term memory that then may be encoded to explicit long term memory. Leonard’s memory is not encoded well after his assault damaged his brain and hence he cannot form long term memory while his short term memory keeps refreshing. As the plot reverses, Leonard’s way of functioning in