Every Christopher Nolan Movie Is Still Memento
The revenge thriller remains the quintessential Nolan text.
“A director makes only one movie in his life,” posited legendary filmmaker Jean Renoir. “Then, he breaks it up and makes it again.” Few directors exemplify this cycle of spirited reinvention as well as Christopher Nolan. With respect to his scraggly (yet Criterion canonized!) debut, Following, the director who now stands at the pinnacle of cinema has spent the last quarter-century refashioning his breakthrough, Memento.
The obvious hallmarks of Nolan’s works are present here, from the memeable (another dead wife) to the memorable (inventive screenwriting gambits with time). But the reverberations prove more profound than these obvious signifiers. Memento provides a Rosetta Stone to decode deeper meaning within his larger-scale efforts, offering a window into the complex paradoxes that add thematic weight to his intricately plotted stories.
Nolan’s films often jump from a familiar genre archetype. In Memento, Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby recalls the weary antiheroes of film noir, but his filmography is full of familiar figures ranging from superheroes to great men of history. These offer necessary anchors in works that purposefully disorient viewers by playing around with chronology in narrative, even going so far here as to invert the standard principles of cause-and-effect — a concept he repeated to some confusion in Tenet.
These mission-driven protagonists all strive toward a clearly defined goal. Leonard’s is to find and murder the mysterious “John G,” whom he believed to have assaulted and murdered his wife. But the real quest for the leading man (yes, always men) in Nolan’s work lies less in getting what they want, be it revenge against an enemy in Memento, victory over a rival in The Prestige, or humanity’s salvation in Interstellar. These external validators occlude their internal yearning to find such existential needs truth, peace, and absolution — often embodied by an elusive home (Inception, Dunkirk) or personified as a loved one (The Dark Knight, Interstellar).
Nolan’s heroes obsess over the idea that their actions matter. “It’s not what I am, but what I do that defines me,” his interpretation of Batman declares in a neat summation of their unifying philosophy. Yet Nolan usually reveals the characters’ belief that they can achieve their way out of any conundrum as a delusion. Such is the promise — and fantasy — of classical storytelling models that Nolan’s writing consistently undermines in his tweaking of narrative time. Effort does not always guarantee output.
Leonard Shelby’s obsessive quest set the blueprint for every Nolan movie that would follow.
In Memento, Leonard fights against his trauma-induced amnesia to hunt down his wife’s murderer, although the limitations of his mind consistently thwart him. Without the capacity to retain new information, he finds himself at the mercy of notes scrawled on Polaroids and tattooed on his body to make sense of the world. In place of memories that reflect the consequences of his actions, he relies on a real-time story to understand his circumstances.
Nolan forces his audience, like Leonard, to decipher their experience of events instead of accepting the conditions of reality as given. Memento’s hairpin narrative structure, which intercuts two converging instances of finding a “John G” to avenge, masterfully masks a shift in the storytelling’s subjectivity. In both instances, the closer Leonard gets to locating his target, the less self-assured he becomes.
Knowledge offers no guarantees of enlightenment in Nolan’s films. Certainty is impossible to obtain because time and perspective are relative. The objective reality they seek does not exist, so the best these heroes can do is find their role in actively constructing their own life’s narrative. Even if it involves some level of lying, as Leonard’s journey in Memento does, the story can stand in for truth once they commit to it. Nolan’s body of work demonstrates that storytelling is not just the provenance of people like him who do it to earn a living.
It belongs to Oppenheimer and Strauss, each trying to spin the narrative and save their names from becoming footnotes in history. It belongs to The Protagonist of Tenet, wresting control of the timeline from the Algorithm by asserting his centrality in the story. It belongs to the soldiers who evacuated the beaches of Dunkirk, telling themselves that surviving was enough to power through the rest of a grueling battle. It belongs to Cooper, trusting that he was destined to be Murph’s “ghost” to communicate with her across dimensions. It belongs to Dom Cobb, abandoning his spinning top to enjoy a reunion with some version of his children. It belongs to Bruce Wayne, sacrificing Batman’s safety to make a martyr out of Harvey Dent. It belongs to the magicians of The Prestige, each willing to assume alter egos in the service of their stagecraft until they can will their illusion into being.
And it originally belonged to Leonard, lying to himself about his righteousness to get through the day. Memento might mark the most extreme and evocative instance of this thread running through Nolan’s filmography. The filmmaker gives half of the film over to Leonard recounting the saga of Sammy Jenkis, a fabulation Leonard invents as a means to process his personal tragedy. Storytelling is not a luxury good for Nolan; it’s a necessary capacity for human survival.
“Who has a story about Odysseus, huh?” asks Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus in the first footage released from Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. Much about his take on the epic poem remains unknown months before release, but the centrality of storytelling will almost certainly be a key component. Nolan’s Odysseus would make for a natural reincarnation of Leonard Shelby, yet another figure who is more a product of narrativization (especially pronounced in the ancient Greek tradition of oral culture) than the culmination of his deeds.
