Honors English Essay

Honors English Essay

Memento is a screenplay about a man, who has no short-term memory, who is in search of the man who killed his wife and caused his memory loss. An overall theme that I have noticed in this screenplay is that when looking back on your life you see how your purpose in life has changed and how relationships you’ve had with people can seem to be one way but have turned out to be a completely different way.

In the screenplay Memento the literary device of structure plays a big part in the theme. Now what’s interesting about Memento is that while the story is going forward for the audience it’s going backward for the characters. The first scene for us in the audience is really the last scene for what happens to the characters. Besides this the structure of this screenplay is very similar to the structure of most other screenplays. Most stories are structured like this: first there’s rising action then something that gets in the way of the protagonist then there’s falling action, then rising action again until there’s a climax and then falling action. This is where it gets confusing because of the reverse storyline the structure is in reverse too. When it’s in reverse it follows the typical structure but if you look at the events in chronological order the structure is backwards. There is also a simultaneous series of events going on while the main story is going on. Leonard is telling someone on the phone how he deals with his memory problem and the story of Sammy Jankis who had the same problem as he did. Unlike the rest of the screenplay this part is in chronological order just broken up throughout the screenplay and then later meets up with the reverse story line at the end of the screenplay.

Another Literary device important to this screenplay are flashbacks because not only is this movie displayed as a flashback but it also gives you a background of what has happened before the beginning of the story. If this screenplay did not have the flashback of Leonard telling someone on the phone what happened to his wife and how he deals with his condition because of his previous client of his with the same disorder the story would just be a man looking for revenge with no real method of figuring things out.

Also one of the most important literary devices used in this screenplay is characterization because at one part of the screenplay a character could be acting one way, but then you realize they are really the opposite. For example the character Teddy. In the beginning of the screenplay you see Leonard murdering him because he thinks he killed his wife, this makes you think that he is the villain the whole movie giving you a different perspective of the character. But by the end of the movie you realize that Teddy was really helping Leonard from the start and was just shown to be a villain to give people that perspective of that character. Another example is the character Natalie who from the beginning of the movie is shown to be helping Leonard trying to catch who he’s looking for but as the story goes on you see she was really using him to kill Teddy to get revenge for her missing boyfriend.

Without these there literary devices we would not have the same theme. If the character were shown differently, the structure was in a different order, or if the flashback hadn’t been giving pre-story details the theme that when looking back on your life you see how your purpose in life has changed and how relationships you’ve had with people can seem to be one way but have turned out to be a completely different way the theme wouldn’t be conveyed. If it weren’t for the flashbacks then we wouldn’t of seen how Leonard looks for his purpose in life. If the characters teddy and Natalie were shown differently we wouldn’t realize how Leonard’s relationships are effected, and without out the structure of this story we wouldn’t have the “looking back” quality of the theme.