Iron Man 3 (2013)

Oversized, overstuffed, and occasionally overwhelming, Iron Man 3 plays out like a collage of impressive, explosive set pieces, special effects, and sardonic one-liners. The third installment of the series, this is a mega blockbuster at the crossroads of two hugely successful franchises of the Disney-Marvel massive entertainment empire. Already a hulking box-office behemoth, Shane Black’s movie is unique in an often sullen summer superhero-packed cinematic climate for its brilliant, self-aware, self-effacing humor.

Iron Man 3 offers an astute study of a relationship, wrapped up in images of red hot fire people and armies of iron knights, molten steel and heaps of burning rubble in a computer-generated fantasy in which the laws of physics are merely theoretical. The film at times seems like a screwball comedy trapped in the body of a superhero action movie. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) trades barbs with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), his former assistant turned girlfriend and CEO of his company, with a kind of old-school Hollywood wise-cracking chemistry.

"I Can’t Remember to Forget You": The Nolan Brothers’ “Memento Mori” and Memento

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.