Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is
this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this
moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying—and you have to keep
trying—eventually you will come across the next item on your list. – Jonathan
Nolan, “Memento Mori”
Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori,”
published in Esquire in 2001, and Christopher Nolan’s Memento,
released in 2000, blend a black, jagged sense of humor with sobering thematic meditations
on time, memory, knowledge, and grief. Focusing on a man suffering from short
term memory loss, or anterograde amnesia, they present a character adrift in
space, time, and experience, whose life is a waking kaleidoscopic nightmare of
conflicting details, an endless repetition of first encounters and first
impressions. He describes it as waking up, experiencing the same confusion and
disorientation we all do when we get out of bed in the morning, but for him it
happens roughly every ten minutes. While “Memento Mori” is all internal,
capturing Earl’s setting, thoughts and actions without the introduction of any
other characters or dialogue, the movie Memento, an aggressively
nonlinear riddle tangled up in a dizzying, elegant spiral structure that moves
backwards, forwards, and sideways, sometimes at the same time, takes the basic idea of the story and
develops it into a feature length film, expanding and changing it to fit the
requirements of the medium while maintaining the same darkly comic tone and
general idea and backstory.
***This is a comparative essay and it contains spoilers.
***This is a comparative essay and it contains spoilers.
