earticle

영어

In Christopher Nolan’s second feature film Memento, protagonist Leonard Shelby is unable to make new memories, and everything fades after 10 minutes due to his mental condition, anterograde amnesia. Despite his memory loss, Leonard continues his search to find a past he cannot remember and his investigation to catch the criminal who raped and killed his wife. Although easily classified as a film noir, specifically amnesia-noir, Memento, unlike classical film noir, refuses to have a hero who finally finds his way back to a forgotten past where the truth is hidden, sets the hero free from a false charge, or restores him to his ordinary life. Focusing on flashbacks and photographs, this paper examines memory and past in Memento and explores several questions regarding the role of memory in the murder investigation, the nature of amnesia in the film, how flashbacks construct the past, and how photographs are used to represent the past. These questions lead us to see the uncertainty pervading the film. Memento no longer entertains the audience with an adventure of a hero who retrieves his memories and catches a criminal. Instead, flashbacks and photographs in Memento undermine the clear demarcation of genuine remembrance and false memory, and they present the past as obscure and the memory as unreliable. Most of all, the ambiguity in the film reveals the illusory aspect of a hero’s subjectivity.