MEMENTO: You Are NOT Who You Are, You Are Who You Think You Are.

Jeff's coworker Jeremy was talking about this movie, which made Jeff quite curious about it. So he found the movie and we were watching it together last weekend.

At the very beginning I thought I had already watched this movie years ago. There are several movies embedded a similar themes - the main character forgot who he was and what he was doing, but he prepared himself lots of hints when he still had the memory (before he lost it) so that he could go on doing what he planned to do even though he didn't remember what had happened. But it turned out that Memento is one of the movies that I haven't seen before.

So Lenard (Guy Pearce) is a man, suffering from short-term memory loss (a condition according to him), uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife. The whole story was told backward - the director shot the whole movie in the right time sequence, then cut the movie into clips no longer than 10-15 minutes. The movie was then re-organized in a way that the beginning scene of the first clip was the end of the second one, The beginning scene of the second clip was the end of the third one, and so on so forth. Watching the movie is a process of building up assumptions, drawing conclusions, discarding previous conclusions, building up new assumptions and drawing new conclusions just to be discarded 15 minutes later. It is interesting that the audience become more and more confused as the they collect more and more facts.

Quotes of Leonard Shelby: "So where are you? You're in some motel room. You just - you just wake up and you're in - in a motel room. There's the key. It feels like maybe it's just the first time you've been there, but perhaps you've been there for a week, three months. It's - it's kind of hard to say. I don't - I don't know. It's just an anonymous room."

So what's the point of the movie? Jeff said that the movie is trying to tell us that a personal identity is actually supported by his/her memory. I couldn't agree on Jeff's idea more. Just some further insights: people's memory is not reliable, due to emotional reasons, people tend to "alter" their memories - sometime they select the part they would like to remember, sometimes they distort the facts, sometimes they combine different scenarios into one, etc. Yes, you are not who you are, you are who you think you are.

Another movie - Final Cut helps us to think about the function of memory as well, but, my memory is not that accurate...