Film Quote of the Day: Christopher Nolan Hid the Entire Point of 'Memento' in One Line

One of my favorite Christopher Nolan movies is Memento (2000). I was at the right age to see it right when it came out, and it blew my young mind. It was a movie told in reverse, breaking all these formal "rules" and engaging me in a mystery you could only unravel in the past.

It's another one of those Nolan movies that picked apart time and perspective, with some poignant lines that are a study of human psychology.

The whole story winds up being about self-deception for self-preservation, and all that gets summed up in one line.

Let's dive in.

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The Scene in Question

Okay, Memento is a complicated movie. We have a whole Memento ending explained that you should check out, where we diagram everything.

Basically, we have two timelines, a color and a black-and-white one, that are telling two different stories, and they finally converge near the end of the movie..

... which is also the beginning.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) discovers a devastating truth from Teddy (Joe Pantoliano). The real "John G.," the man who murdered Leonard's wife, has been dead for a year.

Teddy is a corrupt cop and has been using Leonard's memory condition to turn him into a personal hitman. They target various criminals and lletLeonard believe each one is the real killer of his wife, so it's a justified killing.

Leonard finally has to deal with this fact and come to terms with the fact that his quest for justice has been a lie this whole time.

In order to try to remember all of that, he burns the photograph of the dead criminal he just killed. Then he writes down Teddy's license plate number on his Polaroid of Teddy, appending the fatal directive: "Don't believe his lies."

This sets us up as a reveal for the beginning, where we see he has killed Teddy and are trying to trace why, over the course of the film, told in reverse.

But we echo back to the line Leonard is told by Teddy, the one universal truth:

"We all lie to ourselves to be happy."

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What The Quote Means

In the context of the story, the line is chilling because it reveals Leonard isn't a passive victim of his brain injury; he is an active architect of his own delusion, one that Teddy then used against him to make him happy over and over as he kills his wife's murderer time and time again.

This carries a lot of narrative weight; it's a payoff for why Teddy is killed at the start of the movie, and it also explains where Leonard will go with the story.

Nolan uses Leonard’s condition as a metaphor for everyday human behavior.

We don't need amnesia to rewrite our personal histories.

We'll always find the lie that motivates us and keeps us going. For Leonard, it's that he's not Sammy, and that he is looking for his wife's killer.

For Teddy, it's that he's not hurting Leonard, because Leonard forgets everything, and killing a new person deserving justice makes him briefly happy.

Summing It All Up

Memento is a movie that got famous for its structure, and then for its director, who became one of the most important of our generation. But ig you go back, I think why this movie was so lauded is that ot found a way to be universal, even in a story told out of order.

We all understood the lies we'd tell ourselves to get through hard times, and how we all have our own subjective truths that safeguard us.

These themes would carry over across Nolan's movies in interesting ways as well.

Let me know what you think in the comments.