Abstract
Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000) embodies and reinterprets Hamlet through its psychically wounded hero, whose short-term amnesia commits him to a pointless search for vengeance that makes him vulnerable and exposes him to moral hazard. Both this and Coppola’s film show their Hamlet figures in a tragic and darkening landscape; these films neutralize and refuse to glorify the revenge impulse—arguably, as Shakespeare does as well. Nolan in particular casts the entire revenge project into doubt through the device of temporal, narrative dislocation (the story is told, for the most part, backward). The film displays a remarkable structural doubling with Shakespeare’s play, embedding a metacommentary on its tale as Hamlet does with The Murder of Gonzago.
Isn’t storytelling always a search for origins, an account of one’s entanglements with the Law, an entry into the dialectic of tenderness and hate?
—Roland Barthes (In Bellour and Penley, 77)
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- 1.
Jonathan Nolan, “Memento Mori.” Italics in original. First published in Esquire, March 2001, at http://www.esquire.com/fiction/fiction/memento-mori-0301?click=main_sr. Also reprinted with commentary in John Desmond and Peter Hawkes, Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 137–51; quotation on p. 140. The director asserts that he wrote his script shortly after his brother mentioned an idea he had for the story; it may be the case, then, that Christopher Nolan was never aware of the story’s overt Hamlet recollections (Desmond and Hawkes, 149).
- 2.
All Shakespeare quotations come from G. Blakemore Evans, et al., The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
- 3.
Andy Klein, “Everything you wanted to know about Memento,” at http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/06/28/memento_analysis/index.html?pn=1 (2001: 4).
- 4.
The conflicting time schemes may be a nod to “Memento Mori,” which contains two narrative voices, one in second and one in third person. These are not, however, in temporal conflict.
- 5.
Klein, “Everything you wanted to know about Memento” (2001: 3).
- 6.
The time citations throughout are to the DVD of Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan (Newmarket/Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2001).
- 7.
The Jankis story highlights a problem in the logic of memorial reconstruction, in the process of short-term memory becoming permanent. When Leonard sees the tattoos of any post-amnesiacal event, he ought to say “what does that mean?”—with the exception of the one on his chest, partially identifying his wife’s killer. If he can keep no new information in his head for longer than about 15 minutes, the tattoos should not in fact help him.
- 8.
Memento, 2-disc edition, Newmarket Home Video, 2002.
- 9.
Ewan Fernie rightly argues that Hamlet regards Laertes and Pyrrhus “and the rest…as horrible anti-selves, who irresistibly repel him even while embarrassing him with their proficiency.” Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 128.
René Girard points out that Hamlet’s identifications here are backward—he ought to have said “by the image of his cause I see/The portraiture of mine,” but in Girard’s view, Hamlet cannot stand to see himself as anything other than original. See Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 279. Possibly; or, the fact that Hamlet reverses the identification means that his “anti-selves” spill dangerously over his mental fences.
- 10.
In a later “visual flashback,” we see Sammy Jankis, catatonic, in the mental institution; then, for the briefest moment, perhaps a single frame, Leonard sits there in Sammy’s place, just in case we missed the connection between them.
Freud discusses the double, in “The Uncanny,” as a narcissistic hedge against mortality (i.e., through the reproduction or multiplication of self-image); that second self can eventually be transformed, if the primitive narcissistic stage is properly surmounted, into an “uncanny harbinger of death” Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny,” in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963, 40–42). Marjorie Garber regards the doubles in Hamlet as versions of the repetition compulsion: see her Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 129. However, in Freudian terms, repetition must be a time-factored product of repression; doubling in Hamlet, on the contrary, can be neutral and schematic. Insofar as the first “Hamlet” we hear about in the play is not the prince but the dead king, and that king’s rival or double Fortinbras has a son, Fortinbras, who becomes young Hamlet’s displaced self, there is some rationale in seeing doubling as a return of the historically repressed. But the “twin” phenomenon in the play actually overwhelms the sense that individuation remains possible. Doubling becomes the norm in Denmark, particularization the exception: for example, we appreciate the stage business of the indistinguishable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but why then does even this pair need its own diplomatic double in Voltemand and Cornelius? The most positive spin to put on the doubling phenomenon is to say that for Hamlet, it could signal a salutary attempt, however deluded, at self-confrontation.
- 11.
Hamlet’s situational and characterological ambiguities, which seemed foundationally Oedipal to Freud, have also caused some critics to regard him in a different way—as the alienated detective participating in the ethos of film noir. Alan Sinyard made a connection with Olivier’s Hamlet as part of the noir tradition; see Sinyard, Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 7. Linda Charnes and Courtney Lehmann elaborate on the psychological and thematic complexes that fit Hamlet into the genre. Charnes regards him as the first film noir detective, Lehmann sees him as a noir director. See Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs (London: Routledge, 2006), 26–42; and Lehmann, Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002), 89–129. William G. Little, who also mentions the Oedipus-as-detective parallel, sees Leonard’s tattooing as “a guilt-ridden recreation, on his flesh, of [his wife’s] murder”: Little, “Surviving Memento.” Narrative 13:1 (Jan. 2005): 67–83; p. 75.
- 12.
J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative,” In Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 66–79; p. 73.
- 13.
Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” In Early Psychological Writings, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 249.
- 14.
The possibilities then remain antithetical: if Leonard has suffered a bout of hysterical as opposed to physical anterograde amnesia, it has been in response to something other than the home invasion and his wife’s rape and murder. Indeed, the question of whether Sammy’s debility is physical or psychological drives Leonard’s own account of his denial of insurance benefits, as Sammy “should be physically capable of making new memories.” Thus Leonard’s anterograde amnesia, by analogy, may be regarded as a self-confessed psychological injury. It would result from guilt, from his own Jankis-like responsibility for his wife’s coma and death—his failure to calibrate her insulin properly, perhaps, or to understand her own distance from him and his rage at her detachment. Or even his failure to see her suicidal grief at their distance from one another.
More darkly, his wife’s demise might have been precisely as he tells it in Jankis. Then, as registered in Sammy’s look of doubt or partial awareness before the final injection, Leonard tells a history with only the names changed: that would mean he owns enough consciousness to have known and participated in his wife’s experiment. Notably, the last injection Sammy gives his wife is in her upper right thigh, the exact spot Leonard recalls having injected, or maybe pinched, his wife. See also the possible diagnoses of Leonard as “a ‘victim’ of a hysterical amnesia resulting from the need to suppress a memory of a trauma and resulting in a continually-maintained bad faith”: Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read, “Memento: A Philosophical Investigation,” in Jerry Goodenough and Rupert Read, eds., Film As Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 72–93; p. 88. For a splendid, Hitchcockian exploration of this form of memory loss, see Mirage (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1964).
- 15.
Teddy tartly comments after Leonard’s protest: “Well, I guess I can only make you remember things you want to be true.” On Leonard’s marriage, see Little, “Surviving Memento,” 75–76.
- 16.
Noteworthy that in this pre-Ghost quotation he allows for Gertrude’s proper yet still voracious desire in the context of first marriage; later in the play, when Hamlet considers his mother’s longings, he confusedly and amusingly denies that she could “love,” for “at your age/The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble,/And waits upon the judgment” (3.4. 68–70). Since, as we are always reminded, an insufficient amount of time has passed since his father’s death for his mother to remarry, he must be upset by her sexuality mainly in the context of her second marriage.
- 17.
The book, identifiable from the first page, is Robert Graves, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1935, rpt. 1989), the sequel to the better-known I, Claudius. Though it is perhaps “to consider too curiously,” as Horatio says (5.1.199), the book is about a man who errs, though not wickedly; but when he discovers his wife’s many infidelities, he orders her death.
- 18.
Amnesia, the film impressively suggests, has everything to do with not being able to forget—though that seems a selective function. This moment can be glossed through Andrew Barnaby’s helpful commentary on the “distinction between memory and repetition that Freud will develop in Beyond the Pleasure Principle….[In] psychological terms remembering is not the opposite of forgetting; rather, remembering is the opposite of repeating…” Leonard mourns pathologically because of his broken memory; instead he repeats obsessively, works through routine and habit, and so stands as an example that “repetition displaces memory because the effect of repression is to prevent the patient from seeing the past as the past.” Andrew Barnaby, “Tardy Sons: Hamlet, Freud, and Filial Ambivalence,” Comparative Literature 65.2 (Spring 2013): 220–41; p. 226.
- 19.
Linda Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs (London: Routledge, 2006), 32. Charnes discusses the separation—between the ideal father of Hamlet’s memory and the hideous Ghost—in Žižekian (and Lacanian) terms, reading the noirish elements of the play as a legacy of paranoiac fantasy that is not, after all, so fantastical.
- 20.
Lehmann sees Hamlet as cinematically splicing revenge and memory in the act of sealing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s fate with his father’s signet: Shakespeare Remains, 122–23.
- 21.
Garber suggests that the heavy word “commandment,” with its Deuteronomic overtones, makes of Hamlet’s writing “already a copy, a substitution, a revision of an original that does not show its face in the text” (Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 153). For her view of Hamlet’s writing and its construction of his memory, see 148–53.
- 22.
Or, as Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. notes, “the forgetting that is to precede Hamlet’s inscription would destroy the contents of his memory”; Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 2005), 13. Sullivan writes about the importance of forgetfulness as a gauge or marker of subjectivity in the Renaissance (12–21). Leonard Shelby takes his entire selfhood from the complex amnesia that excuses and liberates not merely actions but other memorial lapses. Leonard’s anterograde forgetting covers for any other forgetting he wishes to do. For more on memory in the play, see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2017), 147–72; and Adam Max Cohen, “Hamlet as Emblem: The Ars Memoria and the Culture of the Play,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 3.1 (2003): 77–112.
- 23.
The most substantial document in Memento, Leonard’s copious police file, once had, according to Teddy, some dozen pages of material that Leonard discarded. The few glimpses of the file on screen show several redactions and blackouts, and so the file could be said both to advance the hero’s ailment and emblematize it.
- 24.
The backward tattoo thus darkly anticipates a comment Leonard makes at the very end of the film: “we all need mirrors to remind ourselves of who we are” (1:50:00). His comment is compelling in light of Freud’s notion of doubling (supra, n. 10) as a stay and guarantor of mortality. In “Memento Mori,” the tattoo on the hero’s chest says, arrestingly, “I raped and murdered your wife”; only later do we find that he inks a picture of the alleged murderer near the words, a picture that (presumably) does not look like the hero, though the possibility that this is a confession remains alive.
- 25.
This fact accords with the film’s general absence of establishing shots, which provide the viewer “with an initial visual orientation” that establishes “the interrelationship between the general setting and the detailed action in subsequent scenes.” S.v. “establishing shot,” in Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia: The Complete Guide to Film and the Film Industry, 7th edn. (NY: Harper Collins, 2012), 460. See also the fine exposition in Gustavo Mercado, The Filmmaker’s Eye: Learning (and Breaking) the Rules of Cinematic Composition (Burlington MA and Oxford: Focal P/Elsevier, 2011), 76–81.
- 26.
Manfred Jahn, Narratology: A guide to the theory of narrative (Cologne: U of Cologne, 2005): available at http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm#N5, N5.2.1. “Anachrony” is also defined by Gerard Genette as “the various types of discordance between the two orderings of story and narrative,” such as “when a narrative segment begins with an indication like ‘Three months earlier…’, [and] we must take into account both that this scene comes after in the narrative, and that it is supposed to have come before in the story.” Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1980), 35–6.
- 27.
Kathryn Prince, “Misremembering Hamlet at Elsinore,” in Paul Megna, Brid Philips, and R.S. White, eds., Hamlet and Emotions (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2019), 253–70; p. 261.
- 28.
The complexities here are multiple, but “relative” could also refer to Hamlet’s own relative, Claudius. “More relative” might also mean “more directly relating to (connected with) the circumstances,” as Harold Jenkins offers in his gloss at 2.2. 600; see Hamlet, ed. Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). But such readings substitute semantic strain for the rather obvious point that Hamlet has, deliberately or not, chosen the wrong word; “I’ll have the grounds more absolute than this” works perfectly well, and scans, too.
- 29.
Hamlet’s production of The Murder of Gonzago performs other business; it reconstructs the idealized marriage that Hamlet hopes his parents had, and it extracts confessions from the fictional Gertrude that her son has long longed to hear (“In second husband let me be accurs’d!/None wed the second but who kill’d the first”—3.2.179–80).
- 30.
We know that it is in particular Hamlet’s version of the crime (complete with “Lucianus”) that pesters Claudius because the dumb show preceding Gonzago—that is, the bare visual outline of “what happened”—famously has no effect on the king whatsoever.
- 31.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 16.
- 32.
Garret Stewart hints that Nolan’s next film after Memento, Insomnia (based on Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s 1997 film of the same name), partakes in the unannounced transcoding of Macbeth: “The unspoken ‘matrix’…in Nolan’s next film, Insomnia (2002), is perhaps the cultural given (and Shakespearean intertext) that ‘murder will out,’ visualized onscreen in an evidentiary trace of blood.” Stewart, Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), 65. While crediting the intuition here, I think Stewart—who makes some perceptive comments about the significance of the fixed photographic image in Nolan’s work (64–66)—could have been more expansive and precise about Insomnia’s connections to Shakespeare. Those include the title’s reverberations, the plot involving the murder of a close colleague, a relentlessly foggy mise-en-scène, the thematic element of child murder, the significance of “hap” or chance in both works, the hero’s Shakespearean name (Will), and finally the line that Nolan uses as a pun to structure his entire film—Macbeth’s terror that “blood will have blood,” or the permanent trace of sanguine matter that causes insomnia. The spectacularly nihilistic Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight (Warner Pictures, 2008) also bespeaks the director’s Shakespearean thoughts. Specifically, the mad criminal’s unfunny fury and clinical detachment from his own violence summons an Iago without specific racial or erotic compulsions. Nolan may have pulled this particular analogue from W.H. Auden’s great essay on Iago, “The Joker in the Pack,” from The Dyer’s Hand (1964). The film represents another collaboration with Jonathan Nolan, who receives top screenplay credit.
- 33.
See Derek Dunne, “‘Superfluous Death’ and the Mathematics of Revenge,” Journal of the Northern Renaissance 6 (2014): n.p., http://northernrenaissance.org
- 34.
A particularly sharp irony in the film finds Leonard setting up and murdering Teddy because of the latter’s critique of Leonard’s narrative (see p. 67). In Memento, the ominous ghost of the Jankis tale climaxes in the death of the only figure who could corroborate or debunk it, or shine light on its transparent, apparitional errors.
- 35.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 10–21. See also his speculations on “the disjointure of the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaneity of present time with itself” (24), which lines up neatly with the temporality of Nolan’s project and Leonard’s experience. For a discussion of Derrida’s interest in the ethical dimensions of Hamlet’s Ghost, see Christopher Prendergast, “Derrida’s Hamlet,” SubStance 106 vol. 34. 1 (2005): 44–47.
- 36.
Stewart, Framed Time, 64.
- 37.
On the phenomenology of interpreting Hamlet “backward,” see Terence Hawkes, “Telmah,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 310–332.
- 38.
Cited in Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction, and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007), 86.
- 39.
I take the term “chronoschism” from Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
- 40.
Harold Jenkins, ed. Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), 551–54.
- 41.
A.C. Bradley mentions that the matter of Hamlet’s age in the first quarto is quite different; there we find the Player King has been married 40 years; Yorick, who entertained the child Hamlet, was in the ground but a dozen (not 23); and has been there ever since old Hamlet overcame old Fortinbras. Thus “nothing whatever follows as to Hamlet’s age except that he is more than twelve!” Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Penguin Books, 1904; rpt. 1991), 373–75; p. 375.
- 42.
Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 236. Sternberg says such lacunae “…all result from a chronological twisting whereby the order of presentation does not conform to the order of occurrence. The sequence devised for the reader thus becomes discontinuous…and gap-filling consists exactly in restoring the continuity that the narrator broke. For all our attempts at restoration, however, the breaches remain ambiguous—and hypotheses multiple—as long as the narrator has not authoritatively closed them” (235–36).
- 43.
See Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1980), 235.
- 44.
Mrs. Jankis’s first injection is at 3:14 p.m., and she instantly sets her watch back to 3:00. A few seconds after Sammy settles back in his seat, she tells him “it’s time for my shot.” Strangely, her watch now shows 3:18, even though only those seconds of continuous diegetic time have passed. After injecting her a second time, he sits down as she rewinds the watch to 3:00 once more. She repeats her request, again only a few moments later, and he injects her a final time (at 1:26:40). “She went into a coma and never recovered. Sammy couldn’t understand, or explain what happened,” Leonard tells us (1:27:35).
- 45.
One vital feature of this quotation is the transition from “you” to “I”—from “You know the truth,” to “you feel angry, you don’t know why” to “Like Sammy. I could have done something like Sammy.” That motion, an implication of transgression relocated from the other to the self, is repeated in the license plate, as I discuss presently.
- 46.
David Bordwell does not think that Memento provides enough “redundancy” to let us know for certain if Leonard killed his own wife. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: U of California P, 2006), 81. As Stefano Ghislotti notes, Leonard’s flashbacks “lead the viewer to make uncertain or at least doubtful conclusions by the end of the film”—much as we are led by Hamlet’s perplexed memory to doubtful evaluations about him. Stefano Ghislotti, “Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film Form and Mnemonic Devices in Memento,” in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 87–106; p. 101.
- 47.
See Noel Carroll on the “erotetic,” or question-answer model of narration, with which Memento partly comports. Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 173.
- 48.
In observing this shift from number to (spoken) letter, I try to “attend to the more minute divisions inside phonetic-graphic signs” that Kamilla Elliott recommends for analysts of adaptational art; see Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 243.
The idea that “one” becomes “I” seems not only confessional; it also accords with Leonard’s peculiar brand of narcissism, his perpetual self-enclosure. His sense that mirrors “remind ourselves who we are” is certainly false; only other people can begin to do that. The mirror or doubling phenomenon, so vivid throughout Hamlet, appears in the juxtaposition of the last two letters of the license plate: “IU.”
- 49.
On “cryptomnesia,” see OED, online edition, def. a. and quotation from Frederic Myers’s Human Personality (1903): “submerged or subliminal memory of events forgotten by the supraliminal self.” The syndrome, not listed in the DSM IV, suggests a willful, almost-conscious amnesia. If Leonard can be so described, then his endurance of the many dangerous or uncomfortable circumstances he faces is nearly heroic, or at least, it is a calculus that regards knowledge to be more threatening than the real-world consequences of his “condition.” On this topic see also Hutchinson and Read, “Memento: A Philosophical Investigation.”
- 50.
Large sums of money, the closest thing in this genre to legacy, show up in a car trunk, not in banking records, lawyers’ offices, or official pronouncements of any kind.
- 51.
Nolan is careful not to name Leonard’s wife in the film. The impression of her anonymity means that she is a stranger to her husband; he never does exactly remember her.
- 52.
I owe this important reminder to Ariel Hainline (personal communication).
- 53.
“Possibly the replacement of linear time with circular or deconstructed time in postmodern theory and fiction is a manifestation of the fear of death, and these alternative narratives of time function to replace the religious narratives of immortality which have been discredited in a godless world.” Catherine Burgass, “A Brief Story of Postmodern Plot,” The Yearbook of English Studies, “Time and Narrative,” Vol. 30 (2000): 177–186; p. 182.
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Mallin, E.S. (2019). Out of Joint: Memento as Contemporary Hamlet. In: Reading Shakespeare in the Movies. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28898-3_2
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