Nolan Countdown Part 2 - Memento

Hello everyone and welcome to Some Like It Scott's latest limited series: Nolan Countdown. Each week in the lead up to Christopher Nolan's latest film, Tenet, the two Scotts and countdown special guest, Jay Habib, will be working their way through Christopher Nolan's full filmography in chronological order, starting from his humble beginnings making "budget" films like Following and Memento, all the way to his most recent days making mega-blockbusters like his Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. This time, Jay Habib has actually seen these films (quite a few of them, quite a few times actually), but there will be fresh takes, crazy theories, and deep conversations about one of the most interesting auteur filmmakers of this generation all along the way. Join us each week!

 

On part 2 of the countdown, Scott, Scott, and Jay revisit (or in one Scott's case, visit for the first time) the film that put Christopher Nolan well and truly on the map as a director: Memento. Released two years after his debut outing, Memento shows Nolan in a slightly more refined light, telling the neo-noir psychological thriller story of Guy Pearce's Leonard, a man who has anterograde amnesia (a.k.a., short-term memory loss) and is unable to form any new memories after the traumatic head injury he received while trying to fend off several home intruders, who ultimately rape and murder his wife. After the loss of his wife and his short-term memory, Leonard devotes his life to finding the man responsible, the ambiguous "John G", and tracks his own progress by leaving reminders and notes to himself in the form of tattoos and scraps of paper. Memento is more than just your run-of-the-mill psychological thriller though, as Nolan chooses to tell the story in the form of two dueling narratives: a black-and-white one that progresses forward through time from the start of the film and one in color that moves backward from its end, ultimately meeting in the middle for a well and truly grand finale. The countdown trio give their detailed thoughts on Guy Pearce's lead performance, the morally ambiguous characters Nolan crafts, and how well Nolan's storytelling and themes actually hold up when all is said and done.