Momento “Look, memory can change the shape of a room, the color of a car; and memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation; they’re not a record. They’re irrelevant if you have the facts.” This is a quote taken from the 2001 film, Momento. The film follows a man named Leonard Shelby. Shelby has experienced the brutal rape and murder of his wife, which has left him with anterograde amnesia, which means Lenny is incapable of making new memories. The film follows Shelby as he endures on a long and confusing journey to find his wife’s murderer, which is still fresh in his brain because he cannot create new memories.
To help Leonard overcome his disability, he tattoos himself with “facts” and takes Polaroid pictures of those who…show more content… However, Lenny tends to not trust people and continues to rely on his notes, but how reliable can those notes really be? As we see towards the end of the movie, Lenny writes the note to himself that Teddy is a killer, Lenny writes this note to himself purely out of anger because of what Teddy has said to him at that very moment. How doe Lenny know that any of his notes to himself are correct? Lenny has no way of knowing if the notes he leaves for himself are true or not. Lenny leaves himself notes not only to have recollection of what happened, but also because Lenny can tell the notes are in his handwriting, which means no one is trying to change what happened. When in reality, Lenny is trying to change what happened. This raises trust as another major philosophical idea of Momento. When Teddy relays the information to Lenny that he is the killer of his wife, how can he trust that Teddy is telling the truth? Teddy has lied to Lenny about a lot of things. However, throughout the movie Teddy is the only thing that remains consistent in Lenny’s life, so in a sense, Lenny holds on to that consistency. It is the only thing Lenny has in his confusing