Memento

I watched this knowing the premise. I knew the memory disorder, I knew the backwards narrative. I had started watching it at a friends house and didn’t get to finish it so i already had an idea of what the movie was going to be like and thought I knew how it was going to go but I found myself shocked by how the story unfolded. I learned about anterograde amnesia during my freshman year psychology class—how the brain can protect you by breaking you, how you can live without forming new memories. But Memento showed me something else: that sometimes, we don’t forget because we can’t remember. We forget because we choose to. And that’s what gutted me. Lenny constructs his world out of Polaroids and tattoos, desperately trying to chase a truth he once had and now can’t face. The twist—that his wife survived the attack, that it was he who gave her insulin, that Sammy Jenkins was a story he told himself to avoid guilt—isn’t just shocking. It’s devastating. Because it means every clue he leaves, every reminder he gives himself, is a lie he wants to believe. It reminded me of Severance—where people literally sever their memories to protect themselves from pain. A work self who doesn’t remember the grief of losing a spouse. An outie who doesn’t remember the moral compromises made during the day. In both stories, the characters create emotional echo chambers, worlds where certain truths can’t touch them. But at what cost? What does it mean to be ethically complicit in your own forgetting? If your grief is unbearable, are you wrong for wanting relief? If remembering ruins you, does forgetting make you free, or just empty? Lenny is a man in mourning who rewrites his own story to avoid the ending. In Severance, the “innie” is a person born to suffer so the “outie” doesn’t have to. Memento is about the burden of memory. Severance is about the burden of choice. Both ask: If you could sever the pain from your past, would you? And in an ethical sense— should you?