Character Analysis
Forget Me Not
Step aside, Holden Caulfield. Step aside, Ishmael. There's a new unreliable narrator in town. He's so unreliable, in fact, that we feel our own heads throbbing in confusion… even as we empathize with this poor dude.
Because Leonard Shelby is our own personal portal into his world of anterograde amnesia. We know what Leonard knows, we experience what he experiences, and there are plenty point of view shots where we see what Leonard sees. For all intents and purposes, we are Leonard.
Early on in the movie we learn that Leonard is an insurance claims investigator from San Francisco, that his wife was killed, and that he has anterograde amnesia. These are also all of the things Leonard knows. Fair enough, right?
But, as Teddy tells him, this isn't who Leonard is, it's who he was. As Teddy's lying bloody-mouthed on the floor he says to Leonard,
"Lemme take you down in the basement and show you what you've become. C'mon Lenny, we'll take a look down there together. Then you'll know. You'll what you really are."
What Lenny really is is a killer, but we don't know that and neither does he… until he kills Teddy a few seconds later.
But the advantage we have over Lenny is that of accumulation, a strange kind of foresight granted to us by Nolan's decision to show the film in a reverse chronological order. But just because we eventually know what's what, that doesn't mean we know what's true.
Leonard and us are equally uncertain about things. He has notated pictures and we have scenes of a movie. Both of us are uncertain about his real past, and even more uncertain about his future.
Leonard Is Not His Condition
While Leonard's anterograde amnesia is what makes Memento Memento, there is more to Leonard than his condition… even if he doesn't really know it. One thing that is very apparently from the get-go is that Leonard is impulsive. But then again, he kind of has to be.
Through his day he's constantly thrown into situations that he doesn't know the origin of. He finds himself in a bathroom with a bottle of booze and his first though is, "I have been drinking… but that can't be right because he doesn't feel drunk." So what does he do in the bathroom? He takes a shower because…why not? That's one of the main functions of a bathroom, after all.
This is the same surreal kneejerk reaction he has when he finds himself running alongside another man in a trailer park. After all, when you're running what should you do but keep running? Leonard often doesn't have time to just think about things. Yep, he is a man of action—but this is by necessity.
And these actions end up being truly, violently bizarre. As he's running with Dodd, his first assumption is that he's chasing Dodd when the truth is it's the other way around. When Dodd uses the bathroom and he opens the shower, instead of apologizing or being embarrassed or having other normal reactions, Leonard attacks him. It's not like Leonard remembers who he is; it's just a violent instinct.
Even pre-condition self seems to have a violent tendency. If his memory is correct, Leonard keeps a gun in his house and seems to be experienced in using it. He immediately picks it up when his wife isn't in bed and is quick in shooting her attacker.
Why does an insurance claims investigator keep a gun in the house? Why is Leonard smiling in the picture Teddy takes after he has just killed a man? Leonard seems not only to have adjusted to living in a constant state of action and adaptation, but to have adjusted to the violence necessary to living a life bent on revenge.
Samuel R. Jankis = Leonard Shelby?
Okay, maybe Nolan didn't pull a "Tom Riddle" with the names, but we can be pretty sure that these characters are fused at the hip. And at the head. And at the tattooed chest. That's right...there is no Sammy Jankis; no middle-aged man who accidentally kills his wife by repeatedly injecting her with insulin. There is only Leonard, and Leonard's feverish imagination.
The character swap in the home care scene combined with the brief memory of Leonard giving his wife a shot instead of a pinch, all suggest that Leonard is, in fact, the real Sammy Jankis.
Leonard, to lie to himself (which isn't hard to do when you have retrograde amnesia) about his wife being unable to cope with his condition, has taken a fraudulent case of his past and has merged that with facts from his own life. It's a pretty clever way of distancing himself from the truth.
Are you still not convinced Leonard is really Sammy? We admit that Teddy is definitely a liar and—aside from these flashes of hints that Nolan gives us—there's no hard evidence to suggest one way or the other.
But let's take a look at one scene that you probably missed. It's only about a second or two, and it happens as Leonard is watching TV at Natalie's before looking down at his "Remember Sammy Jankis" tattoo. We see a quick flash of a hand flicking a needle, the same one that Sammy uses to give his wife her insulin shots.
But let's freeze the scene and take a closer look. Sammy's hands are hairy; these hands are not. The person in the background is wearing a gold necklace; Sammy's wife never wears a necklace while Leonard's wife is almost always seen wearing a gold necklace. The person is also wearing a white V-neck; Sammy's wife never wears one while Leonard's wife has what appears to be the same or very similar shirt on in another scene.
We're not saying this is conclusive—especially because nothing in a movie that calls all reliability into question is conclusive. It's just another fact to add to our understanding of who Leonard really is. Either he's a guy who fuses stories and past reality together in order to soften the blow of his own tragedy, or he's a guy who has so much compassion that he briefly imagines himself as Sammy Jankis.
You be there judge: is the Leonard you know (and maybe love) more prone to acts of fabrication, or acts of reality-bending compassion?
Leonard's Timeline