Memento

Memento
Directed by	Christopher Nolan
Produced by	Jennifer Todd Suzanne Todd
Written by	Jonathan Nolan (short story) Christopher Nolan (screenplay)
Starring	Guy Pearce Carrie-Anne Moss Joe Pantoliano
Music by	David Julyan
Cinematography	Wally Pfister
Editing by	Dody Dorn
Distributed by	Summit Entertainment
Release date(s)	December 15, 2000 (limited)
Running time	113 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	US$ 4.5 million
Gross revenue	United States: $25,544,867 Worldwide: $39,665,950

Memento is a 2000 psychological thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, adapted from his brother Jonathan's short story "Memento Mori". It stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a former insurance fraud investigator searching for the man he believes raped and killed his wife during a burglary. Leonard has anterograde amnesia, which he developed as a result of the severe head trauma during the attack on his wife. This renders his brain unable to store new memories. To cope with his condition, he maintains a system of notes, photographs, and tattoos to record information about himself and others, including his wife's killer. He is aided in his investigation by Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), neither of whom he can trust.

This feature is often used to show the distinction between plot and story. The film's events unfold in two separate, alternating narratives—one in color, and the other in black and white. The black and white sections are told in chronological order, showing Leonard conversing with an anonymous phone caller in a motel room. Leonard's investigation is depicted in five-minute color sequences that are in reverse chronological order. As each scene begins, Leonard has just lost his recent memories, leaving him unaware of where he is or what he was doing. The scene ends just after its events fade from his memory. By reversing the order, the spectator is unaware of the preceding events, just like Leonard. By the film's end, the two narratives converge in a single sequence that begins as black and white and fades into color.

Memento premiered on September 5, 2000 at the Venice Film Festival to critical acclaim and received a similar response when it was released in theaters on December 15, 2000. Critics especially praised its unique, nonlinear narrative structure and themes of memory, perception, grief, self-deception, and revenge. The film was successful at the box office and received numerous accolades, including Academy Award nominations for Original Screenplay and Editing.

Plot

Memento is presented in two alternating sequences of scenes; one set of scenes, filmed in black and white, progresses forward, while the second set of scenes are in color and presented in reverse order; the two sequences "meet" at the end of the film, thus overall describing one common story ^[1]. The plot is described below in chronological order (not in the order that scenes are shown in the film):

Leonard in his motel room

The main character of the story is Leonard Shelby, a man who has anterograde amnesia, causing him to lose his memories of recent events, unable to form new memories for himself. As the black-and-white narrative opens, he finds himself in a hotel room with instructions from himself to shave a portion of his body and tattoo information onto it, similar to numerous other tattoos he has. As he does this, he receives a phone call, and proceeds to tell the caller of what he remembers. Leonard was an insurance claims investigator, and was assigned the case of Sammy Jankis, a man who seemed to be experiencing anterograde amnesia. Leonard explains how Sammy's inability to even learn via conditioning makes him unable to allow Sammy to get compensation, expressing how he felt Sammy's condition could not be physical in nature, suggested his condition was simply psychological. Out of a mixture of grief and desire to know if her husband's condition was sincere, one day, Sammy's wife asked him for a shot of insulin every few minutes, pretending each one was her first. If her husband's condition were real, he would continue to give her insulin even though it would kill her. The overdose was fatal. Later, Leonard and his wife are attacked by two unknown assailants, causing his wife to die from strangulation while Leonard becomes afflicted with anterograde amnesia. Leonard has killed one of the attackers, but is now after the 2nd attacker. Keeping Sammy's case close in mind, he is using a system of Polaroid photographs and tattoos on his body to retain information that he needs, such as the second attacker is a "white male" with the first name of "John" and the last name starting with "G", and allowing him to function with his amnesia.

Leonard with a Polaroid photograph

During the call, Leonard realizes that his tattoos have told him never to answer the phone, and quickly tries to hang up; the caller insists that he is a cop and that he needs to meet with Leonard. Leonard meets Officer Gammell in the lobby, though Gammell insists that Leonard call him Teddy since he is undercover. Teddy reveals that a man named Jimmy Grantz is the second attacker and sends Leonard to a desolate building to meet and there Leonard kills Jimmy on Teddy's word, taking a photo of the scene. At this point, the two separate sequences in the movie overlap, as the photo of dead Jimmy develops. As Leonard leaves, Teddy tries to convince Leonard that he has conditioned himself to continue his quest for vengeance, having killed the "real" John G. a long time ago. Teddy also insists that Leonard is confusing elements of Sammy's story with his own, Sammy having been single and a con man trying to fraud the insurance company; Teddy asserts that Leonard's wife survived the attack and that Leonard later himself administered his wife's overdose of insulin after the onset of his amnesia. After hearing what Teddy states Leonard purposely destroys the photos indicating his quest is done, writes down "don't believe his lies" on Teddy's photograph and leaves a note to himself to get a tattoo with Teddy's license plate implicating him as his wife's murderer, even though his voiceover indicates he does not believe Teddy is the second attacker. He then leaves in Jimmy's car. As his amnesia sets in (in the final scene of the film, the rest of the story having already been shown in reverse order), he comes across a tattoo parlor and follows his instructions with regards to Teddy's license plate.

While looking for clues in his pockets, Leonard finds a note on a bar coaster that Natalie left for Jimmy. No longer knowing that he took Jimmy's clothes, Leonard believes the note was meant for him so he takes Jimmy's car (believing now that it is his car) and Leonard goes to meet Natalie at a bar. At the bar, he meets Natalie, Jimmy's girlfriend, who is initially hostile to Leonard wondering why Leonard is at the bar in Jimmy's car and wearing Jimmy's clothes. However, as Leonard explains his situation, Natalie realizes she can manipulate Leonard, turning him on a man named Dodd that she claims has been trying to harass her in order to get back at Jimmy. Leonard is able to track Dodd down and capture him; with Teddy's help, they force him to leave town. Again, Teddy attempts to warn Leonard of his dangerous quest, but Leonard refuses to listen based on his own comment scrawled on Teddy's photograph. Leonard returns to Natalie, and the two spend the night together, with Natalie promising to retrieve the driver's license of the car that his latest tattoo is registered to. They meet the next afternoon and she provides Leonard with the information as well as a desolate location in order to kill him. Leonard finds the information points to Teddy, whose real name is "John Edward Gammell", matching all the facts of the case based on his tattoos; his own warning on Teddy's picture affirms his suspicions. He takes Teddy to the deserted location that Natalie had given him (which is the same desolate building where he killed Jimmy), and shoots Teddy in the head. Leonard takes a picture of dead Teddy just like he took a picture of dead Jimmy. This scene is the opening scene of the movie behind the movie credits, and is the only scene in the movie that played in reverse.

Cast

• Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a former insurance fraud investigator searching for the man he believes raped and killed his wife during a burglary. Leonard has anterograde amnesia, initiated by severe head trauma during the attack on his wife. This renders his brain unable to store new memories into his long term memory. To cope with his condition, he maintains a system of notes, photographs, and tattoos to record information about himself and others, including his wife's killer.
• Carrie-Anne Moss as Natalie, Jimmy's girlfriend who first meets Leonard after he unwittingly kills Jimmy and puts on his clothes. She is worried about Jimmy, knowing that he was last going to meet a man named Teddy to purchase drugs. She realizes she can use Leonard and trick him into attacking a man named Dodd, who she claims has been harassing her for the money from Jimmy's drug deals. Once she learns Dodd is gone, she runs the plate for Leonard, putting in place the pieces Leonard needed to complete his setup of Teddy.
• Joe Pantoliano as "Teddy" (John Edward Gammell), killed at the start of the film, Teddy is a cop who is telling Leonard that his quest is over, but while Leonard continues his hunt is setting up Jimmy Grantz as Leonard's next victim.
• Jorja Fox as Leonard's Wife, whom he remembers having died after being brutally raped. It is suggested by Teddy that Leonard's wife was not killed by the attackers, but by an overdose of insulin administered by Leonard. This would mean that the incident, and scenes of her in the past, are shown in flashbacks which Leonard has misremembered, due to his condition, as a Sammy memory.
• Mark Boone Junior as Bert, a clerk at the motel where Leonard is staying.
• Stephen Tobolowsky as "Sammy" (Samuel R. Jankis) is a man who Leonard investigated when he seemed to experience anterograde amnesia, resulting in inability to create new memories. Leonard claims his investigation showed Sammy's condition was psychological, but Teddy indicates that Leonard demonstrated that Sammy was faking.
• Harriet Sansom Harris as Mrs. Jankis, Sammy's wife, who, Leonard claims after she is convinced he should be able to make a physical memory recovery and doesn't, has her husband overdose her insulin, killing her. Teddy says that Mrs. Jankis never existed, but that Leonard's memory of her is confused and that Leonard's wife was diabetic.
• Callum Keith Rennie as Dodd, a man who Natalie convinces Leonard to attack, on the grounds that he has been harassing her for money from her boyfriend's drug deals. Leonard forces him to leave town.
• Larry Holden as Jimmy Grantz, Natalie's boyfriend who Teddy convinces Leonard is his wife's killer. He had arrived with $200,000 that Teddy intended to take, and recognized him before he died.

Film Structure

The film's Fabula and sujet are very important in understanding the film. The sujet or the presentation of the film is structured with 2 timelines: one in color and one in black-and-white. The color sequences are alternated with black-and-white sequences. The black-and-white sequences are put together in the correct chronological order. The color ones, though shown forward (except for the very first one, which is shown in reverse) are ordered in reverse. Chronologically, the black-and-white sequences come first, the color sequences come next.

So while the film is often described as being "in reverse" this is not true. Using the numbering scheme suggested by Andy Klein in his Article for Salon magazine^[2] who took numbers from 1 to 22 for the black-and-white sequences and letters A-V for the color ones the plotting of the film as presented is: Opening Credits (shown "backwards"), 1, V, 2, U, 3, T, 4, S, ..., 22/A, Credits.

There is a smooth transition from the Black-and-White sequence 22 to color sequence A and it occurs during the development of a polaroid photograph.

The fabula of the film (the chronological order of the story) can be viewed as a "Hidden feature" on the 2-Disk Limited Edition Region2 DVD ^[3] and the 3-disk special Edition Region2 DVD^[4]. In this special feature the chapters of the film are put together into the chronological order and is shown: Ending Credits (run in reverse), 1, 2, 3, ..., 22, A, B, ..., V, then the Opening title run "backwards" to what was shown (the opening title sequence is ran in reverse during the actual film, so it is shown in the correct way in this version).

Stefano Ghislotti also has an article^[5] which discusses how Nolan provides the viewer with the clues necessary to decode sujet/plotline as we watch and help us understand the fabula/story from it.

Production

Development

In July 1996, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan took a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, as Christopher was relocating his home to the West Coast. During the drive, Jonathan pitched the story for the film to his brother, who responded enthusiastically to the idea.^[6] After they arrived in Los Angeles, Jonathan left for Washington, D.C., to finish college. Christopher repeatedly asked Jonathan to send him a first draft, and after a few months, Jonathan complied.^[7] Two months later, Christopher came up with the idea to tell the film backwards, and began to work on the screenplay. Jonathan wrote the short story simultaneously, and the brothers continued to correspond, sending each other subsequent revisions of their respective works.^[8]

Jonathan's short story, titled "Memento Mori", is radically different from Christopher's film, although it maintains the same essential elements. In Jonathan's version, Leonard is instead named Earl and is a patient at a mental institution.^[9] As in the film, his wife was killed by an anonymous man, and during the attack on his wife, Earl lost his short-term memory. Like Leonard, Earl leaves notes to himself and has tattoos with information about the killer. However, in the short story, Earl convinces himself through his own written notes to escape the mental institution and murder his wife's killer for revenge. Unlike the film, there is no ambiguity that Earl finds and kills the anonymous man.^[9]

In July 1997, Christopher's girlfriend Emma Thomas showed his screenplay to Aaron Ryder, an executive for Newmarket Films. Ryder said the script was, "perhaps the most innovative script I had ever seen,"^[10] and soon after, it was optioned by Newmarket and given a budget of $4.5 million.^[11] Pre-production lasted seven weeks, during which the main shooting location changed from Montreal, Canada to Los Angeles, California, to create a more realistic and noirish atmosphere for the film.^[12] The Travel Inn in Tujunga, California, was repainted and used as Leonard's and Dodd's motel rooms. Scenes in Sammy Jankis' house were shot in a suburban home close to Pasadena, while Natalie's house was located in Burbank.^[13] The crew planned to shoot the derelict building set (where Leonard kills Teddy and Jimmy) in a Spanish-styled brick building owned by a train company. However, one week before shooting began, the company placed several dozen train carriages outside the building, making the exterior unfilmable. Since the interior of the building had already been built as a set, a new location had to be found. An oil refinery near Long Beach was used instead, and the scene where Leonard burns his wife's possessions was filmed on the other side of the refinery.^[14]

Casting

Brad Pitt was initially slated to play the lead role of Leonard. Pitt was interested in the part, but passed due to scheduling conflicts.^[15] Other considered actors include Aaron Eckhart and Thomas Jane, but the role went to Guy Pearce, who impressed Nolan the most. Pearce was chosen partly for his "lack of celebrity" (after Pitt passed, the budget could not afford A-list stars), and his enthusiasm for the role, evidenced by a personal phone call Pearce made to Nolan to discuss the part.^[16]

After being impressed by Carrie-Anne Moss's performance in the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix, Jennifer Todd suggested her for the part of Natalie. While Mary McCormack lobbied for the role, Nolan decided to cast Moss as Natalie, saying, "She added an enormous amount to the role of Natalie that wasn't on the page."^[17] For the corrupt police officer Teddy, Moss suggested her co-star from The Matrix, Joe Pantoliano. Although there was a concern that Pantoliano might be too villainous for the part, he was still cast, and Nolan said he was surprised by the actor's subtlety in his performance.^[18]

The rest of the film's characters were quickly cast after the three main leads were established. Stephen Tobolowsky and Harriet Sansom Harris play Sammy Jankis and his wife, respectively. Mark Boone Junior landed the role of Burt, the motel clerk, because Jennifer Todd liked his "look and attitude" for the part (as a result he has re-appeared in minor roles in other productions by Nolan).^[19] Larry Holden plays Jimmy Grantz, a drug dealer and Natalie's boyfriend, while Callum Keith Rennie performs the part of Dodd, a greedy thug owed money by Jimmy. Rounding out the cast is Jorja Fox as Leonard's wife and Kimberly Campbell as the blonde prostitute.

Filming

Filming took place from September 7 to October 8, 1999,^[20] a 25-day shooting schedule. Pearce was on set every day during filming, although all three principal actors (including Pantoliano and Moss) only performed together the first day, shooting exterior sequences outside Natalie's house. All of Moss's scenes were completed in the first week,^[21] including follow-up scenes at Natalie's home, Ferdy's bar, and the restaurant where she meets Leonard for the final time.

Pantoliano returned to the set late in the second week to continue filming his scenes. On September 25, the crew shot the opening scene in which Leonard kills Teddy. Although the scene is in reverse motion, Nolan used forward-played sounds.^[22] For a shot of a shell casing flying upwards, the shell had to be dropped in front of the camera in forward motion, but it constantly rolled out of frame. Nolan was forced to blow the casing out of frame instead, but in the confusion, the crew shot it backwards.^[22] They then had to make an optical (a copy of the shot) and reverse the shot to make it go forward again. "That was the height of complexity in terms of the film," Nolan says. "An optical to make a backwards running shot forwards, and the forwards shot is a simulation of a backwards shot."^[23]

The next day, on September 26, Larry Holden returned to shoot the sequence where Leonard attacks Jimmy.^[24] After filming was completed five days later, Pearce's voice-overs were recorded. For the black-and-white scenes, Pearce was given free rein to improvise his narrative, allowing for a documentary feel.^[23]

Music

David Julyan composed the film's synthesized score. Julyan acknowledges several synthesized soundtracks that inspired him, such as Vangelis' Blade Runner and Hans Zimmer's The Thin Red Line.^[25] While composing the score, Julyan created different, distinct sounds to differentiate between the color and black-and-white scenes: "brooding and classical" themes in the former, and "oppressive and rumbly noise" in the latter.^[26] Since he describes the entire score as "Leonard's theme", Julyan says, "The emotion I was aiming at with my music was yearning and loss. But a sense of loss you feel but at the same time you don't know what it is you have lost, a sense of being adrift."^[27] Initially, Nolan wanted to use Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" during the end credits, but he was unable to secure the rights.^[28] Instead, David Bowie's "Something in the Air" is used, although another of Radiohead's songs, an extended version of "Treefingers", is included on the film's soundtrack.^[29]

Releases

The film gained substantial word-of-mouth press from the film festival circuit. It premiered at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation, and afterwards played at Deauville Festival of American Film and the Toronto Film Festival.^[30] With the publicity from these events, Memento did not have trouble finding foreign distributors, opening in more than 20 countries worldwide. Its promotion tour ended at the Sundance Film Festival, where it played in January 2001.^[31]

Finding American distributors proved more troublesome. Memento was screened for various studio heads (including Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein) in March 2000. Although most of the executives loved the film and praised Nolan's talent, all passed on distributing the picture, believing it was too confusing and would not attract a large audience.^[32] After famed independent film director Steven Soderbergh saw the film and learned it was not being distributed, he championed the film in interviews and public events,^[33] giving it even more publicity, although he did not secure a distributor. Newmarket, in a financially risky move, decided to distribute the film itself.^[32] After the first few weeks of distribution, Memento had reached more than 500 theaters and earned a domestic total of $25 million in its box-office run. The film's success was surprising to those who passed on the film, so much so that Weinstein realized his mistake and tried to buy the film from Newmarket.^[34]

Marketing

Jonathan Nolan designed the film's official website. As with the marketing strategy of The Blair Witch Project, the website was intended to provide further clues and hints to the story, while not providing any concrete information.^[35] After a short intro on the website, the viewer is shown a newspaper clipping detailing Leonard's murder of Teddy. Clicking on highlighted words in the article leads to more material describing the film, including Leonard's notes and photographs as well as police reports.^[36] The filmmakers employed another tactic by sending out Polaroid pictures to random people, depicting a bloody and shirtless Leonard pointing at an unmarked spot on his chest.^[37] Since Newmarket distributed the film themselves, Christopher Nolan edited the film's trailers himself.^[37] Sold to inexpensive cable-TV channels like Bravo and A&E, and websites such as Yahoo and MSN, the trailers were key to the film gaining widespread public notice.

Home media

The Special Edition DVD's menus are arranged as psychological tests. Highlighting certain objects will lead to special features.

Memento was released on DVD and VHS in the United States and Canada on September 4, 2001, and in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2002. It was later re-released in a limited edition DVD that features an audio commentary by Christopher Nolan, the original short story by Jonathan Nolan on which the film was based, and a Sundance Channel documentary on the making of the film.^[38] The DVD contains a hidden feature that allows the viewer to watch the film in chronological order.^[39]

The Limited Edition DVD is uniquely packaged to look like Leonard's case file from a mental institution, with notes scribbled by "doctors" and Leonard on the inside.^[39] The DVD menus are designed as a series of psychological tests; the viewer has to choose certain words, objects, and multiple choice answers to play the movie or access special features.^[39] Leonard's "notes" on the DVD case offer clues to navigating the DVD.

Memento was released in Blu-Ray format on August 15, 2006. This release lacks the special features contained on the Limited Edition DVD, but does include the audio commentary by director Christopher Nolan. The single-layer disc features an MPEG-2 1080p transfer and PCM 5.1 surround audio.

Reception

Memento was a box office success. During its opening weekend, it was released in only eleven theaters, but by week eleven it was distributed to more than 500 theaters.^[40] It grossed $25,544,867 in North America and $14,178,229 in foreign countries, making the film's total worldwide gross some $40 million as of August 2007.^[40] During its theatrical run, it did not place higher than eighth in the list of highest-grossing movies for a single weekend.^[41]

The film was nominated for Academy Awards in Original Screenplay and Editing, but did not win in either category.^[42] Because Jonathan Nolan's short story was not published before the film was released, it was nominated for Original Screenplay instead of Adapted Screenplay. It was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, but lost to The Believer. However, it won thirteen awards for Best Screenplay and five awards for Best Picture from various film critic associations and festivals, including the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.^[42] Christopher Nolan was nominated for three Best Director awards and was awarded one from the Independent Spirit Awards. Guy Pearce was accorded Best Actor from the San Diego Film Critics Society and the Las Vegas Film Critics Society.^[42]

Critical response

Memento received an enthusiastic response from critics, earning a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates professional critiques.^[43] Online film critic James Berardinelli gave the film four out of four stars, ranking it number one on his year-end Top Ten list and number sixty-one on his All-Time Top 100 films.^[44][45] In his review, he called it an "endlessly fascinating, wonderfully open-ended motion picture [that] will be remembered by many who see it as one of the best films of the year."^[46] Berardinelli praised the film's backwards narrative, saying that "what really distinguishes this film is its brilliant, innovative structure," and noted that Guy Pearce gives an "astounding...tight, and thoroughly convincing performance."^[46] William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes that Memento is a "delicious one-time treat", and emphasizes that director Christopher Nolan "not only makes Memento work as a non-linear puzzle film, but as a tense, atmospheric thriller."^[47] Rob Blackwelder noted that "Nolan has a crackerjack command over the intricacies of this story. He makes every single element of the film a clue to the larger picture...as the story edges back toward the origins of [Leonard's] quest."^[48]

However, not all critics were impressed with the film's structure. Marjorie Baumgarten decided that the film relied too much on the story's reverse chronology and wrote, "In forward progression, the narrative would garner little interest, thus making the reverse storytelling a filmmaker's conceit."^[49] Sean Burns of the Philadelphia Weekly commented that "For all its formal wizardry, Memento is ultimately an ice-cold feat of intellectual gamesmanship. Once the visceral thrill of the puzzle structure begins to wear off, there's nothing left to hang onto. The film itself fades like one of Leonard's temporary memories."^[50] While Roger Ebert gave the film a favorable three out of four stars, he did not think it warranted multiple viewings. After watching Memento twice, he concluded that "Greater understanding helped on the plot level, but didn't enrich the viewing experience. Confusion is the state we are intended to be in."^[51]

Scientific response

Many medical experts have cited Memento as one of the most realistic and accurate depictions of anterograde amnesia in any motion picture. Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch called Memento "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media,"^[52] while physician Esther M. Sternberg, Director of the Integrative Neural Immune Program at the National Institute of Mental Health identified the film as "close to a perfect exploration of the neurobiology of memory."^[53] Sternberg concludes: "This thought-provoking thriller is the kind of movie that keeps reverberating in the viewer's mind, and each iteration makes one examine preconceived notions in a different light. Memento is a movie for anyone interested in the workings of memory and, indeed, in what it is that makes our own reality."

Clinical neuropsychologist, Sallie Baxendale, writes^[54] in "Memories aren't made of this: amnesia at the movies": "The overwhelming majority of amnesic characters in films bear little relation to any neurological or psychiatric realities of memory loss... Apparently inspired partly by the neuropsychological studies of the famous patient HM (who developed severe anterograde memory impairment after neurosurgery to control his epileptic seizures) and the temporal lobe amnesic syndrome, the film documents the difficulties faced by Leonard, who develops a severe anterograde amnesia after an attack in which his wife is killed. Unlike in most films in this genre, this amnesic character retains his identity, has little retrograde amnesia, and shows several of the severe everyday memory difficulties associated with the disorder. The fragmented, almost mosaic quality to the sequence of scenes in the film also cleverly reflects the 'perpetual present' nature of the syndrome."

See also

• Anterograde amnesia
• Betrayal, Harold Pinter's 1983 film adaptation of his semi-autobiographical 1978 play Betrayal, is constructed in reverse-sequence order
• Clean Slate, a 1994 comedy film in which the main character has a similar medical condition
• 50 First Dates, a romantic comedy in which a character has a similar medical condition
• "The Betrayal", an episode from the sitcom Seinfeld (a pastiche of the Harold Pinter's film adaptation) which uses reverse chronology
• Episodic memory
• False memories
• Ghajini, a 2005 Tamil film – later remade in Hindi starring Aamir Khan, both directed by A. R. Murugadoss – has a storyline inspired by Memento^{[citation needed]}
• HM (patient)
• Long-term memory
• Peppermint Candy, a Korean film that also makes use of a backwards narrative
• Personal identity (philosophy)
• Short-term memory
• Working memory
• Novo

Notes

References

• Mottram, James. The Making of Memento. New York: Faber, 2002. ISBN 0571214886

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Memento (film)

• Memento Official website
• Memento at the Internet Movie Database
• Memento at Allmovie
• Memento at Rotten Tomatoes

• A detailed analysis of the film by Andy Klein at Salon.com
• Interview: Christopher Nolan by the Onion AV Club
• Review of Memento by the Onion AV Club
• Plot Holes: Memento, a musing on how certain discrepancies might be plot holes or of more significance, on Slate
• Memento and anterograde amnesia
• Metacritic: Memento
• Cinematographic analysis of Memento
• Blu-ray info, screenshots and review