Escaping Time: Changing the Past Through Memory

An impressive feat of both plotline and narrative technique alike, Memento crosses many boundaries normally imposed by linear methods of storytelling. By showing the story both going forward through time and in reverse (and eventually meeting in the middle), director Chris Nolan is able to take the viewer’s attention from the climax of the film (Teddy being shot) and instead make the most interesting and impressive part of the movie a piece of information that would have usually been included in the story’s exposition.

                Aside from its accomplishments in the film technique arena, Memento’s plotline provides a “real life” example of the concepts discussed in Chisholm and Taylor’s work “Making Things to Have Happened.” While during Memento the viewer quickly comprehends Leonard Shelby’s condition and his inability to remember most of his immediate actions, the viewer (along with Leonard) understands that time and cause and effect are still operating in a normal, apparently one-dimensional fashion. Leonard even goes as far as to point out that while he may not remember his actions, this doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant, and in fact to all people outside of himself his actions will carry a lasting, memorable effect. In the same fashion, any actions he takes in the future will not affect the outcomes already in the past.

                However, Chisholm and Taylor point out that while this view of the world in which cause necessitates effect is dominantly accepted by humans, it may very well be possible that actions taken now have the ability to affect the past, at least in the theoretical sense. If we consider an original cause creating an effect, and then that effect in turn having a second effect, one would usually view this in a linear, purely causal fashion. However, if we assume that the second effect was a direct result of the first, this allows us to believe that second effect would not exist without the first effect happening as well. By this viewpoint, it becomes easy to imagine that making the second effect to happen would in turn necessitate the existence of the first. However, due to an infinite variety of the “conditions” that cause effects, identifying this relationship is easier said than done.

                Luckily, Leonard Shelby has a more elegant solution to “making things to have happened” a reality, at least for himself. A man ravaged by grief, Leonard’s only consolation is in his quest to find the man that raped and murdered his wife. Unfortunately for Leonard, as we find out towards the end of the film, the only problem with making this quest his life goal is that such a quest doesn’t exist – his wife was never murdered in the first place.

                Not a man to be bothered by the limits of reality, and already a man living in a reality made mostly of information he gathers from photos, notes, and tattoos, Leonard essentially creates the faked maze of his wife’s murder and then uses his inability to remember the immediate past as a way to actually enter the very puzzle he’d created for himself. A true manifestation of Chisholm and Taylor’s idea of “making things to have happened” through actions taken in the present, Leonard is able (for the purposes of his own perception) to willingly create previous events and facts that will give his life meaning in the future. As the viewer learns at the end of the film, Leonard’s murder of Teddy was a setup – one that he set up himself.

                While Memento poses interesting questions about the life of someone with anterograde amnesia, it also draws interesting conclusions about our perception of time. Leonard mentions that “time doesn’t affect him” as his lack of memory doesn’t let him recall whether his wife “died” three months ago or three years ago. In this sense, Leonard has escaped time, and it’s through this escape that he’s able to “alter” his past as mentioned above.

                Just as Leonard can, for all intents and purposes, change the past through his current actions and then not realize having done so, it’s possible that we, too, have the ability to change the past through our current activities. After all, our memories are the only record we have of the past (taking into account that if the past was changed then all documentation/evidence of the past would have changed as well), and as Leonard’s extreme case points out, memory is unreliable. Who is to say that time, cause and effect aren’t connected in a much more “three dimensional” fashion than we perceive them to be, and that our perception of linear time and direct cause and effect is merely just the limit of our memories?

If you’re into having your mind further boggled, this video does a great job of intuitively explaining dimensions both within and outside of our perception: