Memento

“i’ve probably done this before. i’ve probably burned truckloads of your stuff. i can't remember to forget you.” at its core, memento is a story about grief. even with leonard’s consistency and routines, he is still capable of thinking his wife is alive if the other side of his bed is warm. he chooses to believe his wife was raped and killed rather than to face the truth: he’s the one responsible for her death. he didn’t mean to, of course, but as he said about sammy jankis (himself), he is physically capable of making new memories. leonard should have been able to pass his wife’s final test and stop giving her so many doses of insulin. grief is much easier when there is a scapegoat, and it is too painful to have it be yourself. so he pretends his wife died when she was raped. through his consistency and routines, leonard is able to completely convince himself of this narrative. after killing the REAL john g, leonard forces himself to forget. prior to this watch, i thought he had done this in fear that if he remembered killing john g, his other memories would come flooding back, including the real reason for his wife’s death. after, when he started killing random people he thought were john g, i figured he wiped his own memory because of the guilt he felt from killing innocent people. after all, leonard shelby is not a killer, that’s what makes him so good at it. while i don’t completely disagree with my former thoughts, i now think leonard made himself forget because he did not want to pick up the pieces left behind by his wife’s absence. regardless of how he remembered her death, she was still gone and he no longer had any sort of life to get back to. by giving himself a task (seeking vengeance), leonard became too busy to focus on his grief, postponing it. he does this again and again, spending his life chasing after random men named ‘john g’ because he is so frightened of being left alone with his thoughts and his grief. leonard shelby will never heal. his mind will keep making him forget, no matter how many times he is told the truth. he does not want to heal.