The character development of Leonard Shelby in Memento is greatly affected by the decision to format the movie in a non-linear, or non-chronological, way. As the movie begins, the viewer sympathizes with Leonard and his condition: anterograde amnesia, which is the loss of the ability to remember recent events, or short term memory. This sympathy is increased when the audience learns that Leonard is on a mission to find and kill the man who raped and murdered his wife, and who caused him to lose his memory during the attack by hitting him and knocking him unconscious. At this point the viewer completely understands Leonard’s motives and desires, and wants to see his issues resolved and the killer taken care of.
However, as the movie progresses, the format begins to unravel and brings the numerous issues to the forefront. We see that the people Leonard chooses to trust, Teddy and Natalie, are not who they appear to be, and Leonard can never know it because of his condition. Natalie is presented as a woman who is able to help identify Leonard’s killer, and who may even be interested in him romantically. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear that she has her own ulterior motives for “helping” him, and it begins to dawn on the viewer that she might know more about him than we do at this particular time, as the audience is aware that the events are disjointed and not in chronological order. Still, we believe in Leonard’s presumed innocence, and that his goal is steadfast and valiant. Teddy, too, is not all that he seems to be. It is unclear why Leonard even talks to him, as he has written “Do not believe his lies,” on one of the polaroids he carries around of people as a way to remember them. Nevertheless, Teddy genuinely seems to want to help Leonard find his wife’s killer, for reasons that are not revealed until the very end, where the climax completely alters the way the audience views Leonard.
When Teddy reveals that he is an undercover cop who was assigned to Leonard’s wife’s case years before, everything begins to fall into place for the viewer. Teddy shows Leonard that he has actually killed his wife’s rapist before, and that she did not die as a result of the attack, but was actually the wife in the story of Sammy Jankis: a man with the same condition as Leonard who accidentally kills his diabetic wife by giving her too much insulin, at her request, without realizing that he had just given her a shot minutes before. He is Sammy Jankis, and refuses to accept this reality, so he creates new scenarios in which he gets to investigate his wife’s murder and be a hero each time, with each new death. Leonard refuses to accept this reality, so he deliberately marks Teddy as his new target with well placed clues that he will not remember having placed himself.
This one event changes the entire perception that the audience has of Leonard. For the whole movie, we are on his side, sympathizing with his plight and hoping that he finds resolution in any way that he can. After the end of the movie, we see that Leonard’s intentions are not at all altruistic. He does not want to accept the fact that he accidentally killed his wife, or live with his condition in a meaningless existence, so he gives himself an objective to live out his days solving while both consciously and subconsciously absolving himself of his crime. Leonard’s entire character completely shifts with the knowledge of his intentional wrongdoings, and this shocking ending would not have been able to be achieved without the use of this format. Had the audience seen the events chronologically, we would have known from the get-go that Leonard was doing this for his own personal gain, and our opinion of him would have been polluted with this information. Not knowing Leonard’s full back story enabled the viewer to blindly accept the façade that we were being presented with, and the destruction of this construction of reality is what really drove home the phenomenal way that Leonard was developed using non-linear progression.
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