The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Christopher Nolan · a film · 2000 · 113 minutes · from a story by Jonathan Nolan · the theatrical cut
Mode
Noir of an amnesiac investigator, told in reverse; a puzzle the viewer assembles scene by scene
Mythos
The investigator who is himself the agent of the crime; the man who cannot drink from memory and so repeats; the labour restarted by choice; the law written on the body
Phase
A few days in one town, the colour strand run from its end to its beginning, the black-and-white strand run forward, the two meeting at the film’s chronological middle
Presentation
Feature film, about 113 minutes, in English; colour sequences in reverse order, black-and-white sequences in forward order, cut alternately
Register
Cool, quick and anxious; dry comedy at a motel desk to grief and murder in one level tone
Scale
One man’s knowledge, the few people who use it, and the rooms and roads between them
Governing Proposition
A man who can form no new memories hunts his wife’s killer with Polaroids, notes and tattoos, and the film is told backwards so that the viewer, like him, begins every scene without its cause. The wager is that a self is the story it chooses to keep, and that a man will forge his own records to keep the purpose grief requires.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a hand holding a Polaroid. The image in it is of a dead man, and as the hand shakes it the image fades instead of developing, until the paper is blank. Then the killing itself plays backwards: blood runs back up a wall, a shell casing returns to the gun, and the dead man, Teddy, comes back to life a moment before he is shot. The first thing the film shows is its own law. Everything that follows will be given in reverse, and every scene will arrive before its cause.
The man who fired is Leonard Shelby, played by Guy Pearce. Since the night his wife was attacked he can form no new memories; he knows who he was until that night, and after it everything slips within minutes. He keeps his purpose in Polaroids with notes written on them, and in tattoos: the facts he has decided are true are written on his body, some of them backwards, to be read in a mirror. The man he hunts is the one he believes attacked and killed her. The people around him are Natalie, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, and Teddy, played by Joe Pantoliano, and each seems at first to be what the next scene shows they are not.
Christopher Nolan wrote and directed the film from a story by his brother Jonathan Nolan, “Memento Mori”, published in Esquire in 2001, after the film. Wally Pfister photographed it, Dody Dorn edited it, Patti Podesta designed it and David Julyan wrote the music; Suzanne and Jennifer Todd produced it. It had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2000, and Newmarket released it in the United States in March 2001. It was nominated for the Academy Awards for Original Screenplay and Film Editing.
Movement II
The colour sequences run in reverse order, each ending where the one shown before it began, often with a short overlap, so that the viewer sees a moment twice, once as an ending and once as a beginning. Between them come sequences in black and white that run forward: Leonard in a motel room, on the telephone, telling the story of a man called Sammy Jankis. The two strands are cut alternately, and the viewer holds two clocks at once, one running back and one running on.
The reverse strand puts the viewer where Leonard is. In one sequence he is running between parked cars, and he does not know why. His voice-over reasons it out: “I’m chasing this guy”. But the evidence could be read the other way, and he cannot tell whether he is chasing or being chased. The scene is a joke and a demonstration at once: a man without memory has to read his own situation from what is in front of him, and he can read it wrong. The chase, and the business with a man called Dodd around it, is the film’s loosest material, more thriller than necessity.
At the motel desk, the clerk, Burt, admits that he has rented Leonard two rooms, since Leonard will not remember the first. It is played for comedy, and it is the film’s law in miniature. Everyone who knows his condition uses it. The clerk takes a little money from it; others will take more.
Movement III
Natalie is first seen as an ally, a bruised woman in Leonard’s car. Then a sequence shown later in the film, and earlier in time, shows how the bruise was made. She hides every pen in her house, so that he cannot write anything down. She insults him and his wife until he strikes her. Then she goes out to her car and waits, and after a time she comes back in, bruised, and he no longer remembers why.
Carrie-Anne Moss plays the waiting in one long take, and in it Natalie turns from victim to user. The viewer, who met her bruised and grateful and trusted her because Leonard did, now has to take back that trust, and the film has done to the viewer what Natalie has done to Leonard. The form is the knowledge: trust follows the notes, and the notes can be made by anyone who knows how they will be read.
The same reversal falls on Teddy. In the first sequences he is a man Leonard has written off: the note on his Polaroid warns against him. As the film runs backwards Teddy grows into the one figure who knows what Leonard is, a policeman who has used him, and perhaps the one man who has told him the truth. On every return Natalie’s looks read differently once her purpose is known, and the Polaroids rhyme across the strands.
Movement IV
In the black-and-white strand Leonard tells the story he tells everyone. Before the assault he was an insurance claims investigator, and one of his cases was Sammy Jankis, a man who, like Leonard now, could form no new memories. Leonard denied the claim. Sammy’s wife asks her husband for her insulin injection, and asks again, and again, and each time he gives it, as if for the first time.
It is the film’s one scene of plain pity, and it is told as a cautionary tale, Leonard’s proof that he is not Sammy and that his own system works. In the motel bathroom, at the same time, he shaves his thigh to tattoo a new fact there and finds a fact already written. The body is his record, and it is the only one he cannot lose.
At the end of the forward strand, the black and white turns to colour. Leonard has killed a man, Jimmy Grantz, in a derelict building, and as he waits a Polaroid of the body develops in his hand: the image comes up, and colour comes up with it. The two strands meet here, at the film’s chronological middle. The scene that follows is the last shown and the first in time, so the film ends at its cause.
Movement V
Teddy arrives at the derelict building, and in the last sequence he gives his account. Leonard’s wife survived the assault. Sammy Jankis had no wife, and the story of the injections, if Teddy is right, is Leonard’s own. The revenge Leonard pursues was carried out long ago, and he has forgotten it, and Teddy, a policeman, has used him since, most lately to kill Jimmy, a drug dealer. Whether Teddy tells the truth the film does not settle. What it shows is what Leonard does with what he has been told.
He burns the evidence. He takes down Teddy’s licence plate and writes it as a fact, so that his future self will find in Teddy the man he hunts. On Teddy’s Polaroid he writes “Don’t believe his lies”. The purpose is renewed by forgery, and the forger is the man who will obey it. The opening of the film, the fading Polaroid and the gun, is this act carried to its end.
Then he drives. With his eyes closed at the wheel he says in voice-over that he must believe in a world outside his own mind. Then he asks, “where was I?” The labour starts again. The film that was told backwards to make the viewer share his condition ends by making plain that the condition has been chosen.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and most of it resists the subtractive test. Each colour sequence supplies the cause the viewer lacks for the one before: why Leonard has a bruised woman in his car, why a man is tied in a closet, why he is running and cannot tell whether he chases or is chased. The black-and-white strand is required too, since it carries the Sammy Jankis story the ending overturns and is the forward clock the reverse strand must meet. Planted objects pay: tattoos, a licence plate, a burned book and hairbrush, insulin. What gives: the telephone exposition runs longer than its work, the motel clerk’s comedy of two rooms is played twice, the Dodd material is more chase than necessity, and the overlaps, structural as they are, spend minutes.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a self is the story it chooses to keep, and a man will forge his own records to keep a purpose that grief requires. The last sequence gives it in an act. Told that the revenge was done long ago, Leonard burns the evidence, writes a plate down as a fact and marks a photograph with a warning against the man who told him. Memory is shown as a tool more than a store, and revenge as a need that outlives its object. What holds it here is the means. The condition is built as a thought experiment, an amnesiac in a puzzle, and the truth arrives as a conceptual turn rather than a world observed: grief, marriage and violence are shown through their mechanism and rarely through their weight.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The register is cool, quick and anxious, and elevation is rare. When it comes it is vertigo, not grandeur: a Polaroid fading in the opening, blood running back up a wall and a shell casing returning to the gun; the black-and-white turning to colour as a photograph develops; Sammy’s wife asking for injection after injection, the film’s one scene of plain pity; Leonard shaving his thigh to tattoo a fact and finding one already there. The close rises, with Leonard’s eyes shut at the wheel. David Julyan’s synthesised score holds a level ache and rarely lifts. What holds the axis low among the twelve is frequency: height is reached two or three times, and the rest is procedure under strain, absorbing and never elevated.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The myth is shaped more than inhabited. The Oedipal inquiry is there and does work: an investigator seeks the man who destroyed his house and may be the agent of the crime himself. Lethe is the hero’s condition: he cannot drink from memory, and so he repeats. The revenge that has no end is a labour he chooses to restart, and the law tattooed backwards on his skin, to be read in a mirror, is a figure of real depth. The particular stays particular: a motel, a Jaguar, a bar, a derelict building. What holds it here: the archetypes are worked as the logic of a puzzle, the wife is an image rather than a person, and the myth’s weight falls on its shape far more than on its human cost.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is the film noir of the amnesiac and the femme fatale, from the 1940s on, and the fractured chronology of 1990s independent cinema, Pulp Fiction (1994) above all; in other forms, Pinter’s Betrayal (1978) told an affair backwards and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) ran a life in reverse. The departure is real. Reverse chronology is not a frame but a perceptual condition the viewer is made to share, braided with a forward strand so that the two meet and the meeting changes both. The stake was real for its scale: a second feature on a small budget with no studio behind it, in a structure that risked incoherence. What holds it below the gate: the turn is in structure, inside a genre kept whole, and its means had precedents.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses almost everything it knows. Told forward, it is a revenge thriller with a twist, and Teddy’s use of Leonard and Leonard’s self-deception are facts reported. Told backwards, the viewer begins each scene as Leonard does, without its cause, and judges Natalie and then Teddy on evidence the next sequence revokes. The form is the instrument of the knowledge that memory is a set of notes and that trust follows the notes. The forward strand completes the design: the one place time runs straight, it carries the lie that the meeting of the strands exposes, and the last scene shown is the first in time, so the film ends at its cause. What holds it below the top: the device also manufactures suspense, and some of its yield is the pleasure of the puzzle.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Twenty-six years of return are evidence, and the questions stay open: whether Teddy tells the truth at the end; whether Leonard’s wife survived, and whether Sammy’s story is Leonard’s own; how much of Leonard’s condition is choice. Writing on personal identity has taken the film as a case, and rebuilding its chronology has become a standard exercise. It yields on return: Natalie’s every look reads differently once her purpose is known, and the Polaroids rhyme across the strands. What holds it here is that much of the return is solution. Once the order is rebuilt and the ending’s claims weighed, the surface is largely spent, and the questions that remain are open by design more than by depth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 2000s and the late 1990s it drew on, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film made subjective time the governing structure of a feature and showed that an audience would assemble a story backwards for itself; it is the purest case of the puzzle film of the turn of the century, beside The Sixth Sense, Fight Club and Mulholland Drive. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: an independent success that ran for months in American cinemas, two Academy Award nominations, a model for the nonlinear thriller in film and television, and a place in the teaching of screenwriting. The limit stands: the reach runs largely through one director’s later films and a genre’s habits, and the force reordered narrative more than it changed what film could do.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-six years since Venice in 2000. The form survives whole in its one released cut; a chronological re-edit issued later on home video is a curiosity beside it and takes nothing from it. Presence is continuous and wide for a film of its scale: home video in every format, television, revival screenings, steady use in teaching and a place in popular reference, carried further by its director’s fame. That fame is presence, not proof, and is credited no further than its share. The surface ages little: Polaroids, motels and the absence of mobile telephones read as the film’s world, since Leonard’s condition needs objects, and the photography is plain rather than fashionable. The figure is the usual one for the span, short of the widest.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Read to the anchors every desk shares, with the invention of the structure credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight where the form lives. Dody Dorn’s cutting keeps two strands and dozens of overlapping joins legible, each sequence’s last moment placed to land as the next one’s first; the screenplay pays every note, tattoo and photograph. Guy Pearce plays a man always at the start of a scene, polite, competent and blank, with grief at the edges; Carrie-Anne Moss turns Natalie from victim to user in one long take of waiting; Joe Pantoliano makes Teddy both untrustworthy and the one honest man. The charges hold the figure: Wally Pfister’s colour photography is serviceable rather than expressive, the Dodd chase is loosely staged, and the telephone exposition is flat.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the motel clerk admitting he has rented Leonard two rooms, played for comedy, and Leonard learning what he may have done to his wife. One law governs both: Leonard is used by everyone who knows his condition, himself included. The clerk’s petty fraud, Natalie’s manipulation, Teddy’s management and Leonard’s own forged note obey it. The two strands keep their own physics, reverse in colour and forward in monochrome, without a break until the designed meeting. What holds it here: the range is moderate, from dry comedy to grief and murder but in one register of cool anxiety and one man’s knowledge, and narrowness is not coherence; and the Dodd material obeys the rules of the thriller more than the film’s own.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The orders held: consciousness, at the centre and joined to the form; the family, in a marriage seen only in fragments, a bed, a book, a hairbrush; the law, in Teddy, a policeman who uses an amnesiac to kill a drug dealer; commerce at the edges, in insurance (Leonard was a claims investigator who denied Sammy’s claim), a bar, a motel and drug money. The plot integrates them: the insurance case is the lie, the policeman is the manipulator, the money is what Teddy wants. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the state, history, labour and the sacred are absent; the town and its society hardly exist outside a few interiors and a flat edge of road; and the other people are functions of Leonard’s condition. A small form held tight, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.6, then The Imperishable at 8.5 and The Swerve at 8.3. A form in which telling the story backwards makes the viewer share the hero’s condition and learn that trust follows the notes, braided with a forward strand that carries the lie and meets the reverse strand at the cause; a film that survives whole in its one cut after twenty-six years; and a structural departure from noir and the fractured chronology of the 1990s, made on a small budget at real risk.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.7: consciousness, a marriage in fragments, a policeman and the edges of commerce are held, and the state, history, labour and the sacred are absent. Below the rest, The Sublime at 7.2, height reached two or three times in a film of procedure under strain; then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5, a true disclosure delivered as a concept through a contrived case, and archetypes worked as the logic of a puzzle. These hold the work below Tier IV: the knowledge comes through mechanism rather than weight, and the height and the myth that would carry it further are not there.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.5 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, The Unconcealment at 7.5 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.7. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Memento as released, the theatrical cut of about 113 minutes, in English, from the fading Polaroid to the last line at the wheel: written and directed by Christopher Nolan from a story by Jonathan Nolan, “Memento Mori”, published in Esquire in 2001; photographed by Wally Pfister, edited by Dody Dorn, designed by Patti Podesta, with music by David Julyan; produced by Suzanne and Jennifer Todd. Premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2000 and released in the United States by Newmarket in March 2001. One cut was released, and it is the work. A chronological re-edit issued later on home video is a by-product of the release, not a version of the work, and is not scored. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain. Figures and claims that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of sequences in each strand, the budget and the box-office returns, prizes beyond the two Academy Award nominations, any later listing of the film for preservation, the date of the home-video re-edit, and the history of the film’s distribution.