Leonard's Labor

“You know what? I think I'm gonna use you. I'm telling you now because I'll enjoy it so much more if I know that you could stop me if you weren't such a fucking freak!”

           

Leonard Shelby is a man stuck in a world of uncertainty, suffering from a full glass of paranoia and a thirst for revenge. In the film Memento (2000), Leonard Shelby is an ex-Insurance agent from San Francisco who is stranded in an undisclosed town searching for the man who took his life away. In this context, Leonard’s old life included a stable job, a wonderful wife, and a working memory. Now, his wife is dead, he is without a job, and he has a condition in which he can no longer maintain his short-term memory. He is covered in some “freaky tattoos” to help remind him of who he is, and who he is looking for to exact revenge upon.

            Throughout the film, Leonard interacts with individuals who in the beginning of the film appear to want to help Leonard catch the villain, but as time goes back, the audience realizes that each character have their own motivations to “help” Leonard, but are in fact exploiting Leonard by convincing a man with “a condition” to perform immoral and dangerous acts. All of which, as Marx analysis in the article “Estranged Labor” describes, gives Leonard an experience of estrangement from his fellow human beings. The cruel irony of Leonard’s estrangement is that due to his condition, Leonard cannot remember whether or not someone is using him rather than helping him. While he distrusts all of those around him, Leonard needs some form of help to find John G., and unfortunately his “help” is really a form of manipulation that places Leonard into awful situations that Leonard can never remember doing.

            In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx’s description of the dialectic process by which the worker’s labor and self become alienated is in fact similar to Leonard Shelby’s situation. If we can substitute the notion of a physical “act of production of labor” that the worker creates for the political economy as “Leonard’s efforts and investigations”, we will be able to see that, due to the nature of Leonard’s own illusory stories and Teddy and Natalie’s lies, Leonard is continuously giving more of himself away to “alien beings” who can control, and in some ways own, Leonard’s time as well as his efforts. If Leonard’s “object” or “product” is the vigilante mission that Leonard has developed for himself, it may become clearer that his relationship to Natalie, the manipulative bartender, and his relationship to Teddy, is relationships that Leonard has created for himself. These beings stand in the way of the truth of Leonard’s mission, and they capitalize on Leonard’s condition by directing him to perform arbitrary missions of violence.

            Nearly all of the violent acts Leonard performs do not benefit Leonard in any way but instead help someone else. Jimmy’s death is the idea of a bad cop who needs to “clean up the streets” and possibly gain a couple hundred thousand dollars, Dodd’s beating is a direct result of Natalie’s need for revenge, and as Teddy explains, Leonard has been repeating similar actions for a much longer time than Leonard can even try to imagine. There have been multiple John G.’s throughout the country, and there are bound to be many more. Leonard is a slave to his mission, but because he cannot form new memories, he will always be trying to exact revenge. His life will be nothing but revenge. If he were to try and forgive, or try to discover the truth behind his wife’s death, Leonard would have to completely disembody his illusions and investigations. His “products of labor” are a power beyond Leonard, because he is known as the man who will never stop searching for an illusion, Leonard is known as one who can be told to help anyone, so long as the person asking for help knows how to manipulate the term John G.. Leonard is too far down the rabbit hole to recognize that he has lost all realization of his own objectification. He is no longer a man, but instead is a never ceasing avenger.

            While Leonard is toyed with throughout the film, he is able to exact take some control over his manipulators by taking care of Teddy at the beginning of the film. The sad irony is that without Teddy, Leonard is going to be stuck searching for someone to take Teddy’s place. Leonard needs someone who has a working memory to direct him, for without the direction, Leonard’s life is going to become purposeless.