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:

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. 

Is Leonard Shelby a Time Traveler?

After watching Memento and reading Lewis’ The Paradoxes of Time Travel, an odd problem arises between the situation of Guy Pearce’s character, Leonard Shelby, and the situation of one-dimensional time travel as explained by Lewis.

            Leonard Shelby, the central figure of the film, has a peculiar situation. He is a man with no short-term memory; he must constantly take pictures of what he sees and tattoos himself as reminders and directions for what he needs to do and what to remember, and his internal dialogue and reaction to these notes is voiced throughout the film. Day by day he wakes up in his hotel room with more notes and pictures and tries to figure out what he is doing with his life and what he actually is trying to accomplish within his “system” of remembering. Leonard’s life is extremely abnormal to the situation of the actual time traveler. Leonard is stuck in the normal mans world of time, experienced as flowing unidirectionally, but only has a recollection of who he is and his past, but cannot make any new memories. Although he is a conscious, sentient human being, his perception of time is not that of the normal human being: although he has consciousness, his stream of consciousness has been interrupted, so although during each day he experiences time as a normal human being, having no connection to the past corrupts the perceived experiential nature of time that everyone else experiences. Leonard’s job, as he states it, is to get vengeance for his wife’s death, and says “the world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it? My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. My wife deserves vengeance, and it doesn’t make any difference whether I know about it.” Furthmore, Leonard points out that memories are worthless, it is only facts (what he has), that are important and actually make memories irreleveant, yet states that the man who killed his wife and caused his condition “took away his ability to live.”

            Lewis, when talking about the one-dimensional time travel, first explains the world as four-dimensional, with time being of the dimensions, where change is the qualitative difference between separate temporal parts of something. A time-traveler, has different stages of time, a “external time,” and “personal time” which is the time experienced solely by the time-traveller in opposition with external time. The unique situation of Leonard, problematic to Lewis’ definition of one-dimensional time travel, is that although Leonard does experience external time the same as everyone else, his personal time is always the same. A fair argument could be made that Leonard is a time-traveler solely on the merit that his stream of connected events and constant flow of time is broken. However, within Lewis’ argument, one must experience a qualitative change between different temporal stages to be a time traveler, and that which “doesn’t have temporal parts can’t change.” Although Leonard does change physically, only as a product as his tattoos/aging, he does not fundamentally change in any sort of function or capacity: his mental and physical states are the exact same every single morning when he wakes up.

            The questions this makes me pose then are: is Leonard Shelby an actual time traveler? Yes, he is traveling through time as a conscious human being, and his personal experience of time is vastly different than that of the external time experienced by others. Furthermore, although he meets this criterion of time travel as defined by Lewis, he does not meet the standard of qualitative change between different temporal parts, as he does not remember anything he experienced before he got his condition. His personal experience of time is in direct conflict with the definition of change proposed by Lewis. If you do think he is a time traveler based solely on his condition, do you think he could or could not be defined as a time traveler based on Lewis’ theory?

            On a different note, depending on whether or not you think Leonard is a time traveler, are his states about the ethical impacts of his vengeance acceptable? Does it really matter if he gets vengeance on his wife’s killer, if he cannot remember it? Is it morally wrong for him to commit an act of violence or take a life, knowing he will not remember it?
            Finally, did the man who caused his condition actually “take away his ability to live”? It is clear he is a living, conscious human-being, but lives a different life than everyone else. He still has every single human capacity aside from short term memory: he still has a continuous identity of self and recognition of his own life and existence. Has his ability to live really been taken away? I do not think so.