Momento and Baudrillard

In Christopher Nolan's Memento, a man named Leonard seeks to discover the identity of a man who raped and killed his wife. His search is complicated by the fact that he has no short-term memory as a result of the trauma from the rape and murder of his wife. Leonard is seen constantly attempting to piece together facts surrounding his wife's death while at the same time trying to figure out where he is, why he is there, and even who he is every few minutes. In an attempt to remind himself of these answers, Leonard uses photographs of people and places with notes on attached to them that contain information about peoples names, how and why he knows someone, and anything else that could prove useful in helping himself remember clues about the murder. This storyline sets up a perfect postmodern experience in which evidence and perceptions of that evidence are constantly analyzed to reconstruct a sense of what is “real”. In the film, Leonard is constantly reconstructing the events and causes of his personal history with the photographs, notes, and messages that he leaves himself to better understand reality. Also, the viewer and the protagonist of the film are placed in the same position. Like Leonard, the viewer witnesses the present while also attempts to reconstruct the events that have led up to that moment with clues that mirror the ones used by Leonard. This creates a parallel experience between the protagonist and the viewer that allows for the viewer to feel like Leonard, constantly interpreting and making assumptions based on broken pieces of evidence and being lost in a world that lacks clarity and meaning. This gets at Baudrillard’s idea that we can create an ordered and coherent narrative out of a fragmented field of events and causes and that this idea in itself calls into question our capacity to understand events and their causes as they “really” are.