MEMENTO

MEMENTO – 2000

Uno-Mement-Woa!  

Memento is an awesomely confusing movie – which is awesome – because confusing can be good!  I have rewatched Memento three times and rewound the ending three times more and have resisted the urge to pop on the Youtube – Memento Explained (but I might do it for fun when I am done here).

Guy Pierce is the star of Memento and he has short term memory problems – so he takes Polaroid pictures as instant mementos to help him remember.  Pierce is flanked by two supporting actors – Carie Ann Moss and Joe Pantoliano (both of Matrix lore).  It doesn’t take long to take curious as to the dynamic between these three.  Are Moss and Pantoliano playing Pierce, attempting to profit off of his memory loss, or are they being patient and loving with a longtime friend – helping him on the crusade to find the man who raped and killed his wife – or at least was my inkling.  Or maybe it's not an either-or and it could be both – depending on how you look at it – kinda like those 90’s pixelated posters that appear as cubes until you obscure your eyes just right to allow for a Statue of Liberty to rise out of the geometrics.  Or maybe it’s D – none of the above and who cares!?  

What do we fashion to get out of movies, books, art?  Does it really matter how the movie ends or is the process of watching more important – yup.  Yup as in both – but for me the latter holds more water.  Some heady cat of history at one point said – to make philosophy intelligible is to commit suicide to the art.  To make something too simple is to kill philosophy?  Then this guy went on to write really confusing books in German.  But if you are up for the challenge and you dwell with the text, the text can dwell with you and one begins to become like the other.  If you engage, at base your brain gets mental gymnastics and your soul doses of discipline.  Maybe the same thing is going on here with Nolan and Pierce and Memento?!  Whether I get it or not – I won’t soon forget the watching – and my brain and soul thank Memento for the trip.  That said, for now I am good with my relationship with Memento – and don’t even feel the urge anymore to watch the YouTube explanation.  I am ok with my own ignorance about the ending, if the journey sticks with me.  

Yet to know Nolan’s secret . . . . . wouldn’t it be kinda cool at cocktail parties to tote it around like a date primed to impress with this savvy, sophisticated deduction!?  Although that’s kinda akin to how Socrates described sophists – or people who use big words and speech to impress.  Rather than the ending or grasping for full understanding – I’d say what is cooler is what the movie/book/art does to you throughout its telling – and there is no metric for this impression, no box for this take-away.  The movie silently becomes a part of you, like a pinch of salt, unseen, unmeasured – but felt.  

The football player in the off-season curls, sprints, diets, rests, studies, sacrifices, disciplines so that come fall he will help his team succeed – yet when he scores the touchdown, which ingredient gets the credit?  Like a pinch of salt becomes the casserole, all the off-season work becomes the in-season player — and just like I’d much rather have casserole for dinner than salt – yet casserole with no salt makes Billy a dull-boy – when you add up all the ingredients that go into a winning touchdown there manifests something whose total is greater than the sum of its parts.  All the work has become the player – and that is what Memento is like for me – and forthat matter, anything you give yourself up to will become you.  There was once a movie called Death Becomes Her, and if death can become, so can life – and “mize-well” be your life.  The universe desires a balance – choose the right side of the sea-saw and by doing the right things, overtime, the right thing will manifest – seemingly, confoundingly, divinely – a manifestation greater than the sum of its parts – with that extra ingredient that turns all math problems on their head – the thing that it greater than the sum – faith, love, god-world.  

1+1 = 3

Thank you Memento – thank you Christopher Nolan for doing you and allowing me to do me and this opportunity to write.  I don’t know if this exercise has upped my IQ – but my EQ is another story.  That’s “emotional quotient” with “quotient” coming from Latin, “how many,” yet with emotion we drop the many for “how much.”  So in gratitude and faith I arrest my case confident in the belief that the “take-way” that everyone searches for is the thing that cannot be measured – that thing that gets you to 3 – and that is cool! 🤓