The Best Unchronological Story
Writing about movies is something that all FMS majors have to do once in their life time. For many it’s how they found themselves into this major. I had my first movie paper assignment back in high school, and I couldn’t have gotten a better movie to write about: Memento (2000) by Christopher Nolan.
Memento is a movie about a guy with short term memory loss and is trying to find the man that killed his wife. What’s incredible about this movie is the order in which the story is told. Half of it is told in reverse. What I mean by this, is a scene will play without any context on how we got there, and the next scene ends with where the previous scene began, in the process giving us information on what has actually happened. On top of that, between these chronologically reversed scenes are chronologically straight forward scenes from earlier in the story. For example if there are 10 scenes, the order would be 10 - 1 - 9 - 2 - 8 - 3 - 7 - 4 - 6 - 5.
What’s amazing about this order of storytelling, is how it perfectly captures how the main character sees the world around him. He doesn’t know what just happened because of his memory loss, and we the audience don’t know what just happened because we haven’t seen it yet. This allows for some really unique twists through out the movie that are impossible with a story told chronologically.
Memento is one of my all time favorite movies and that has not changed ever since I saw it my junior year of high school. Every time I think about this movie my thought is, there’s no way you should be able to follow the story with the order of scenes so jumbled up like that. And yet every time I watch it I am floored with how it’s not hard to follow at all. Creativity in plot and characters and visuals are what you see in most movies, but to even consider playing with the order of scenes in such a drastic way is pure genius to me. I remember being mind blown as the story unraveled itself the first time I watched it. I think it’s a movie where the execution needed to be perfect for it to work. The mixed up timeline could have absolutely ended in a completely confusing mess. The result however, is a incredibly well crafted, one of a kind movie. I do believe my love for Memento is partly related to my fascination and passion for film editing. When the editing becomes a crucial part of the storytelling, I am unsurprisingly all over it.
We had to choose from a list what movie we were going to write about and I remember picking Memento because my dad had talked about how he loved it. Safe to say I am very pleased with my decision.
