Who was the killer in Christopher Nolan movie ‘Memento’?
Memento was an early offering from Christopher Nolan, a project which brought him to the attention of mainstream Hollywood. The feature is a storytelling marvel whose unique structure is an unprecedented achievement that really has to be seen to be believed, starring the likes of Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano and more
Memento is a complex film, even by Nolan’s standards. However, like many of his movies, everything starts falling into place once you understand the structure. In the case of Memento, the story is simply told backwards. There are black and white sequences chronologically moving forward in time while the colour sequences are moving backwards. They then meet towards the end when black and white becomes colour.
There are many reasons why Nolan may have chosen to tell the story in this way. For one thing, it puts us in the mind of the character we’re following, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), who has no short-term memory. At the beginning of every scene, we’re playing catch up, trying to work out what’s going on, just as he is. Every scene feels separated due to the way the story is told, as if every sequence is its own short film, but there is a strong narrative that holds the plot together. Leonard is looking for his wife’s killer in every scene; that’s all he wants.
Even after watching the movie, you may still be asking who the killer actually was. To answer this, we should start at the beginning, which of course, is the end. Nolan’s film opens with a murder when Leonard kills Teddy (Joe Pantoliano). If we look at most mystery thrillers, they normally start with a killing, and then we go on a journey to find out who the perpetrator is. Here, we know who committed the crime. From this point, we go backwards in time to find out why, making Memento less of a ‘Whodunit’ and more of a ‘Whydunit’.
Over the course of the film, we find out more about the victim Teddy, who surprisingly was friends with Leonard. In a dramatic exchange towards the end of the movie, we learn that Teddy is a corrupt cop using Leonard to kill criminals by leading him to believe they are his wife’s killer. He, in fact, has already killed the man who broke into his house, only he’s forgotten. Who was this man? We never find out. However, this is not the most important piece of information revealed here. Nolan wants us to focus on the revelation that Leonard’s wife survived the attack.
What happened to her then? We are told by Teddy that the story of Sammy Jankis, the telling of which takes up most of the black-and-white scenes, is actually Leonard’s story. He remembers it as Sammy’s story instead of his own to spare himself from the pain of the truth. The reality is that he accidentally killed his own wife due to an insulin overdose.
If you follow all of that, the conclusion you come to is that the killer is, in fact, Leonard. While nothing in this film is 100% confirmed, with Leonard himself being an unreliable narrator, we can take this as fact for two reasons. Firstly, we are told this information by Teddy, who knows full well that Leonard will forget it in five minutes. He doesn’t benefit from this information coming to light. On the contrary, it leads to his downfall when Leonard decides he will no longer be used and leaves himself clues that point to Teddy. Secondly, Nolan’s films are full of questions. Usually, the whole first half is devoted to posing interesting problems. However, he does always answer them, as ambiguous as those solutions might seem. Look hard enough, and there is always an answer.
This is the beauty of the way Nolan makes movies, especially Memento. He rewards your interest and time by giving you the sensation of solving the puzzle, allowing you to become a detective yourself. He doesn’t expect you to work too hard either, as all of the pieces needed to see the full picture are given. You just have to put them together. Much like a mirror showing the meaning of Leonard’s backward tattoos, the story will unfold before you if you know where to look.
