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The most fascinating part of Memento is that the main character, Leonard, built up his whole world as a puzzle based on unquestionable tattoo “facts” and the “hints” in his own handwriting. And the main “player” needs to rediscover the true story and revenge for the loss of his love. Since Leonard has no short-term memories, he decided to trust only himself and the information he previously left to himself. Although Leonard has tried his best to question everything and establish his belief very carefully, we all know the story behind the scene is ridiculous, sad and tragic. This micro essay focuses on analyzing the reasons why Leonard’s actions failed his motivations through a Cartesian and Humean lens.

The biggest goal of Leonard in the movie has always been to kill the second murderer that raped and murdered his wife. What Leonard trusted the most was his love for his wife, and the anger and pain of losing her; with his last piece of memory before he was shot at the crime scene, those seemed to be the most solid facts in this movie. But in the end his wife’s death was revealed: that she had survived from the incident, but she sacrificed her life trying to awaken Leonard’s lost memories; as well as the fact that Leonard had already avenged the crime, and he really should be partially responsible for his wife’s death. Although everything else except that his wife was not murdered ( and the fake license plate) was proven to be real and trustworthy, with the “life goal” being off track, it became a totally different story. Descartes has claimed that in order to establish a true understanding of the world, people need to carefully question the fundamental principles that their perception of the world is built upon. Leonard’s life became tragic after the incident because his entire world was built on the desire to avenge his wife’s death, which is self-sustainable at all. He would, and he in fact did in the end, encounter the problem that Descarte had raised, that questioning the fundamental beliefs had collapsed his world. Therefore Leonard questioned everything and everyone that he had encountered and experienced, and did everything he could to avoid questioning the “fact” that his wife was raped and murdered and he’s living for revenge. He had to force himself to stay angry to never forget the purpose of his life -- her revenge, so that even without memories he could still know for sure that he was living for a reason. However, just as Hume had said, how could we establish any facts or truth, if the fundamentals are unreliable and unjustified ? As a result, the efforts he had put in to seek the truth had taken him farther and farther away from the truth he was seeking. His life is tragic because he’s forever trapped in an endless cycle of puzzles he made for himself.

Memento had also shown that the knowledge that people can acquire is in a form of “impressions of sense” , but not necessarily facts. According to Hume, all impressions are clear and precise, and ideas copied from them also need to be clear and precise without leaving vague or dark spots. Since impressions by nature contain tons of information that is more than our memory can handle, we need to be very careful in extracting ideas from the impressions. This might not seem to be important at the moment, because the impressions have more than enough information to support the “truth at the experienced moment”. But to store the ideas as clear and precise as possible into memory, it requires us to analyze the key information in the impression and fit the extracted ideas into the existing idea set in our memory, to make sure all the ideas are well-supported by previous supported experiences. In the movie, Leonard’s condition(he has no short-term memory) made the analyzing step exceptionally difficult, although his impressions were just as clear and precise as normal humans (if not more, since he was intentionally paying much more attention to details). However, while we can learn by extracting impressions into pieces of images and connections in memory, Leonard was only capable of extracting impressions into a single picture and pieces of words, which leaves too much space for imagination to fill,

and only very few imaginations will moderately reflect the experienced facts. And since Leonard’s “ideas'' were based on physical evidence, his ideas can be easily manipulated by simply changing those evidence. In the movie, he washed off the “I’ve done it!” tattoo, burned the evidence picture that he had successfully conduced murder and he made false infomation as undoubtable facts by making it a tattoo on his body. And yet almost every single action that Leonard had done was considered to be reasonable, under the conditions he was given and the information that he had. We know Leonard’s actions were not reasonable because we were capable of acquiring and processing information that’s thousands-times more to see that those actions were not reasonable in a big picture. But assuming someday we could process and reproduce impressions much more accurately than what we can now, would we consider our current knowledge set accurate enough to be facts?

(Irrelevant but it’s so interesting to think of the statement : “being certain relates to choosing to act morally”. In Memento Lenny did all the immoral things(kidnap Dodd, and decided not to trust Teddy and potentially to kill him (in his mind revenge means justice so killing Jimmy and Teddy technically shouldn’t be placed in this category)) when he’s relatively uncertain about the situation. )

Tianran Cui