Christopher Nolan’s 2000 psychological thriller noir Memento takes the themes of memory and identity to new heights. The protagonist Leonard is faced with short-term memory loss and is forced to record information about himself through tattoos and Polaroid pictures. These “mementos” are his only source of identity of his life after his head injury and are what he uses in order to fend off twists on the noir character types of the femme fatale and rogue cop. However, what bothered me and hindered Leonard’s ability to make sense of his life was the fact that his tattoos lost context every time he lost memory.
Tattoos often carry an anecdote along with them. They act as symbols of an experience, memory, or passion that a person felt so strongly about that they decided to have etched on their skin for eternity. A symbol of a bird appears to an oblivious outsider as simply a bird and no more. Upon inquiry however, it takes on meaning individually symbolic to each person. The tattoo corresponds to memories and this is where Leonard’s are flawed. While tattoos have explicit meaning, their intrinsic value lies in their contextual meaning.
Leonard has many tattoos listed on his body as facts. Initially, the viewer takes these facts to be absolute truth. As Leonard repeatedly loses his memory, he forgets the context in which he discovered the “facts” of his tattoos. His acceptance of these facts leads the viewer to accept these facts as well. Later, it becomes apparent that some of these tattoos were false. At the end of the film, through a series of flashbacks, the viewer learns that Leonard got angry with Teddy for using him to kill other people and made a note telling himself to get Teddy’s license plate tattooed as a fact in the case. Because Leonard forgets his memories, he later had no context for this fact and believed the license plate number to be that of the authentic killer. The lack of context for Leonard’s license plate tattoo contributed to a false search for Leonard’s wife’s killer for Leonard and the audience.
At the beginning of the film, one of Leonard’s “fact” tattoos said that his wife’s killer was a drug dealer. As the audience slowly gains more information through flashbacks, as well as more context for Leonard’s tattoos, it becomes apparent that his wife’s killer may not necessarily be a drug dealer. The police report that Leonard had only said that his wife’s killer had drugs within his car at the time of the murder. Leonard, just before creating his tattoo, answers the phone and talks to Teddy, a police officer who was feeding him a false trail to murder a drug dealer he was after. Due to his conversation with Teddy, Leonard is convinced that his wife was murdered by a drug dealer, and changes his notes to reflect this theory. Although this was just a theory fed to him by a police officer who was using him, this information was headed by the word “Fact” in his tattoo. Leonard forgets the context of the information and his certainty of the murderer’s status convinces the viewer as well.
One of the most confusing parts of the film was the role of Sammy Jankins. During Leonard’s phone call with Teddy, he recounts the tale of an accountant after a severe injury to his hippocampus. Leonard was previously an insurance investigator, and was sent to verify Sammy Jankins’ inability to form new memories for the insurance provider. After observing Sammy for quite some time, Leonard was able to argue for the insurance provider that Sammy’s injury was mental, rather than physical, and therefore should receive less coverage. This planted doubt within Sammy’s wife as to the true nature of Sammy’s injury, and his diabetic wife died from an insulin overdose during her refusal to accept that Sammy could not remember the insulin dose he had given her only one minute prior. Sammy’s story is a tragic one that the audience accepts as truth as soon as Leonard tells it. Leonard has a small tattoo on his hand reading, “Remember Sammy Jankins,” yet, without proper context, Leonard’s memories of the events become subject to question. At the end of the film, Teddy confronts Leonard and tells him that all of his memories of Sammy Jankins were actually of himself. He says that Sammy actually had no wife. Leonard’s inability to remember whether or not his wife was diabetic calls into question every “fact” of Leonard’s pre-accident life that the audience had previously taken for granted. Although the tattoo says “Remember Sammy Jankins,” its lack of context later creates questions as to what exactly it is about Sammy Jankins’ story that we are to remember.
Leonard’s tattoos offer false leads which he and the audience are forced to base all of our analysis and understanding of the film’s narrative story. Since the film’s voice over and flash back is in the perspective of Leonard, it causes the viewer to be trapped in the same confusion that Leonard is forced to go through every five minutes of his life. It leaves the viewer holding on to information that is presumed the truth just because it is written down or tattooed. These tattoos without context must be taken at face value and only through the context of the flashbacks do we find that they are not as black and white as they appear.
Jasper Golfer 
Charles,
This is an excellent post on the subject of Leonard’s tattoos in Christopher Nolan’s Memento. In the film, the tattoos function as a sort of substitute or surrogate memory for Leonard. That is, he cannot make new memories, so he instead “remembers” things by tattooing them onto his body. (As he says at one point, this is akin to writing a note on our hand so we remember to do something.) However, as you point out, these tattoos–along with the various written notes Leonard makes throughout the film–are highly unreliable, just as, as Leonard says to Teddy at one point, memories are unreliable. The irony is that Leonard knows that we can’t trust memories, and yet he accords his notes and tattoos the status of “facts.”
This is perhaps most evident in the final scene of the film, which you describe nicely. Here we see Leonard write the words “Don’t believe his lies” on the back of Teddy’s photo. So many of Leonard’s actions in the film hinge on him seeing and using those words, and yet we find out, at the end, that Leonard has only put the note there out of anger and frustration. We also, as you say, see him determine to set up Teddy, which leads to him getting the license plate tattoo, which also is false. RE. the Sammy Jenkis tattoo, some critics have speculated that this is false as well, a tattoo designed to condition Leonard to forget his own culpability in his wife’s death and instead transfer that act onto Sammy.
I look forward to continuing the discussion on Friday.
Great post!
MT
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