Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas guys!

Hope y'all are having a good break from school.

Outline

Memento Presentation Outline

I.                   Introduce the film.

The overall point of the movie is following Leonard Shelby, a man with Anterograde Amnesia, as he tracks down the man who raped and killed his wife. But a lot of stuff happens in the process.

 

II.                What makes the film a work of noir?

1.      The ambiguous protagonist, Leonard Shelby.

A.    The protagonist in Memento is Leonard Shelby. He has something called Anterograde Amnesia, meaning he cannot form any new memories. So, he is virtually stuck in the same moment in time and unable to know or remember what he has done. This makes him very easy to control and manipulate. In the film, he kills two men of his own free will, and is guided into killing two others. Leonard is not inherently good or bad, because he can’t be either for more than five minutes at a time. So he tends to do things on impulse, which makes him even more susceptible to being pushed into doing something. Because of this, he is constantly on the edge of the moral line.

2.      The femme fatale.

A.    The femme fatale in Memento is a woman named Natalie, pictured in the last slide. She is an evil, scheming, manipulative lady. Though, you wouldn’t know it at first. For half the movie, she seems to be a victim of one thing or another, and appears to be helping Leonard find the killer. But then we discover that she is trying to use him to eliminate people she doesn’t want around anymore, including Teddy, another character that is helping Leonard search.

3.      Use of amnesia and flashbacks.

A.    This is why Memento is so hard to understand. The entire film is told in a series of small segments, which wind up overlapping each other, shown in reverse chronological order. Essentially, we have to experience the movie as Leonard experiences all of the scenes. We get small bits of information at a time, and we have to do what we can with it while it is there.

 

B.     Breaking up these segments are short scenes of forward-progressing time, where Leonard talks to a mysterious person over the phone about Sammy Jankis. The two storylines eventually meet up in the end-beginning of the film.

 

C.     A small change though, I think. Generally, amnesia in films implies memory loss. In this film, he can remember almost everything before his injury but cannot make any new ones. So it’s lack of memory gain I suppose. Not the usual way amnesia is used, but it’s still there.

 

4.      The setting.

A.    The very first scene is in an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere. Much of the major story telling points in the movie are told in ‘Just some anonymous motel room’, as the movie says. The film, for the most part, takes place in a fairly large city. Not Los Angeles, but not some rural place either.

 

III.             How does the film update the noir genre, and go into neo noir?

1.      The search for self.

A.    Pretty early in the film , Teddy asks Leonard who he is. When Leonard answers with his name, Teddy says “That's who you were, you don't know who you are”. This is true. Leonard has no idea who he is. He couldn’t tell you when his wife died, who he knows, even what he ate for breakfast. He is a blank slate from the time of his assault onwards. He doesn’t know what he does or has done.

2.      Sammy Jankis.

A.    Throughout the movie, Leonard tells a mystery person about Sammy Jankis, a man who went through the same sort of situation as himself. He tells all about how Sammy gets in an accident, loses his ability to make new memories, and winds up accidentally killing his wife by overdosing her on Insulin.

B.     Teddy gives the movie a huge plot twist though. When he is arguing with Leonard about his identity, he reveals to us that Sammy is, if you choose to believe it, actually Leonard. Sammy was a real person, but he was a con artist. He was faking his condition. Leonard made up the Sammy he tells everyone about to hide from himself.

C.     The strongest evidence supporting this is during the super quick memory lapses Leonard has while Teddy is telling him all of these things. There is an image of a man, presumably Sammy, in an institution of some kind, sitting in a chair. An orderly walks across the frame, and the person in the chair changes to Leonard.

 

Quotes from outside sources:

Quote one:

In their review of the film, titled “Neo-Noir Elements of Memento”, Chamandeep says that “Natalie is one of the constant characters in Leonard’s life, but someone he meets after his accident.  So when we meet her and Teddy, we are left wondering if these characters are helping Leonard or if they are playing on Leonard’s condition and trying to use it to their advantage.  It turns out that Natalie is the one that is lying to Leonard and using his condition to her advantage” (Chamandeep).

This really sums up Natalie as a character. We don’t know who she is, and Leonard doesn’t know who she is. She starts out all sweet and innocent, and acting the victim for parts of the movie, then turns around and sets up all of the situations she sends Leonard into herself. She lies to him, she manipulates him, and she is overall a bad person.

Quote two:

In their article “Memento and Neo Noir”, Nandini Godara writes that “The ambiguity provided by the shuffling narrative is used to put the audience in the same shoes as the protagonist. We know only as much as he knows, and much like his photographs and tattoos, every scene is a piece of the puzzle that the audience needs to solve it” (Godara).

I like this quote because it helped me make a little more sense of the movie. I was very confused at first, but after I read this, I began to view the film differently. I found it to be a very accurate statement, we really are made to view the entire film as Leonard would have to, bit by bit, and slowly piecing together the story.

 

Film clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6DxaxuUJXQ

This is a scene in the movie where Natalie has sent Leonard to go and ‘take care’ of a man named Dodd. Mid chase, he forgets what he is doing and has to figure it out on the run. Literally.

This just shows how bad his amnesia is, and how easy it would be to get lost in the world for Leonard. It shows how amnesia becomes the main point of focus in telling this story, because this happens to Leonard all the time.

-Random-

Hello, everyone. How are you all doing? How are your papers coming? Nobody has to respond to this, I'm just bored and procrastinating.

Blog #... Whichever one we are on.

Okay. I still don't have the book so I really can't do this assignment. But I will try anyway. I was going to try to cobble together a response from all of the other blogs, but I don't have any understanding of the stories so I don't think I should. Plus, it is my own fault that I don't have the book yet so it wouldn't be fair.
I only kind of know one of the stories in L.A. Noir, and I don't think it is in the sections given so this will be totally off topic.
I only got bits and pieces of the story I was given in class, about the man (Russell something) and his mistress and his Silicone computer chip company.
I didn't really think it was very Noir at all. That is probably because I had to speed read chunks of it though, so I didn't get the whole story.
The crime itself, the kidnapping and the killing, could have happened anywhere. The author certainly knew about the area, and described what one might see out the window of a car if you were there. The only real Noir like thing that I read was that the wife orchestrated the whole deal for money and revenge. She was definitely a bitch. I mean, Femme Fatale.
I was rushed, and didn't like the authors writing style so I didn't take much more from the story. It could have happened anywhere, but the description of the environment made it seem like it might be more likely to happen in that area.
Plus, the circumstances of particular crime, with this particular victim and his job as a computer chip producer, made it so that it really was more likely to happen there. It's Silicone Valley. Where computer innovators and all of the delicate part factories reside.

Blog #6

Jerold J. Abrams, in his article “Space, Time, and Subjectivity in Neo-Noir Cinema”, delved into the similarities and differences between Neo Noir and classic Film Noir. I had some difficulty understanding the majority of what he was talking about, probably because I need sleep, but this is what I was able to make out of it all: The main differences are the setting (Now not confined to cities) and the protagonists.

The protagonists in Classic Noir are, as Abrams puts it, “always a detective looking for clues to unravel the mystery of whodunit” (pg.1). They are your typical ‘Hard boiled’ detectives, looking for criminals and taking crime head on. They hunt the bad guys.

The protagonists in Neo Noir are a bit different. While they may also be detectives, their primary search is not for a criminal. It is for themselves. Be it by amnesia, trauma, hypnosis, or some other means of memory loss, our protagonist has lost or forgotten themselves. They spend the whole story looking for what is missing.

Abrams discusses three types of Neo Noir; past, present and future.

In past Noir, the story was typically in a low tech time and asked a lot of theological questions. One of the examples given, of George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a perfect representation of this. In the film, Indiana Jones is looking for treasure (the Ark of the Covenant), as much for the adventure as he is “looking for an experience of the Ark in order to test his faith—or whether he has any” (pg. 6). He is searching for himself in a spiritual sense, searching for the Ark ultimately to see if he can have faith in God or if science is the way to go.

Present Neo Noir is… Present. It’s happening in the now. Having never seen the films listed as examples, I have to go from Abrams’s descriptions. Bourne Identity sounds like a good example of this style of Neo Noir. It is a man who has no recollection of who he is or what has happened, who suddenly turns into a killing machine when faced with a threat. He has to spend the majority of the movie trying to figure out who and what he is, and who is after him and why. Another film I might think would fit this form of Neo Noir is the X-Men series, more specifically focusing on Wolverine. He has no memory of what his claws are, where they came from, why he can regenerate, none of it. He needs to figure out who did this to him and why.

Future Neo Noir is like the other ones, just based sometime in the future. The film Minority Report is a good example. It follows John Anderton, who runs the Pre-Crime division. But when the Precogs see him killing someone in the future, he is forced to run from his own team in search of his himself (or, his future self), in order to stop the crime he doesn’t know why he is committing. Another possible example for this is the movie Looper. While he isn’t looking for his philosophical self, the protagonist here is looking for his physical self, from the future, trying to stop him from finding and killing someone in the present.

Blog #5, Response to Brian Gallaghers Article.

Whoa, that was a lot to read.

‘I Love You Too’: Sexual Warfare and Homoeroticism in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity” by Brian Gallagher brought up a lot of interesting points about the film and the novel that I didn’t pay much attention to before. But, I disagree with some of what Gallagher said.

First off, I still do not see the homoeroticism in either the novel of the film. Not as it is described anyway. I don’t see any sexual tension, suppressed or otherwise, between Walter and Keys. All I can see is a close bond, either a long lasting friendship or a father-son sort of thing, between two men who have been working close together for a long time and have come to know and respect each other. When Walter says that he loves Keys, it doesn’t mean that he has any sort of desires to be with him. I ‘Love’ a lot of people. I care a great deal about them, and I would do almost anything for them. A lot of them are guys. I don’t want to be intimate with them. They’ve just made their way into my circle of people that I trust, and who I consider family.

As for the cigar being a “Clearly phallic” (234) object, I would like to ask why it is seen that way. Cigars are typically a male thing, and most people in my experiences who smoke them are men. Yes, lighting another persons smoke is typically seen as a romantic thing, or something that men do for women, but it could also just be a kind gesture. Keys refuses to carry matches because they are unsafe, and Walter always happens to have some because he also smokes. He’s just helping his friend.

Something interesting that he pointed out, but I have not real argument for, is when Keys picks up Walters phone when he is in his office, assuming the role of the “Secretary”. I just like how observant and analytical some people are.

 

The only time that I saw that might have been slightly homoerotic was the very end of the film, when Keys states that Walter was closer than just across the desk. But again, these men have been working together for a long time, and have come to know and respect each other. They trust each other. They are friends, and friends don’t normally like to accuse each other of murder and insurance fraud. Also, death can do something to you. Keys saw that Walter was in serious pain, and might not make it to the hospital. I don’t really like putting personal things in here but I’ve sort of been in that situation. You get either really desensitized to the world, or you realize just how much someone meant to you. Gallagher says that this is the only time that he feels he can express his true feelings; I think it is just how humans work.

Gallagher compares the tension between Huff and Keys to that of soldiers in the war. Where, if a comrade is dying, it is acceptable to hold them, kiss them, show affection. This irritates me. If Mr. Gallagher was reading this, I would ask him to place himself in their boots. That is a person you have gone through hell with. They are your brother. You are watching your brother die, in an already emotionally tense situation. Nobody would just let them die. You comfort them, you let them die in a friends arms, in relative peace.

I’m at 600 words now, so I have to stop. This was a good article, and I liked some of the perspectives it took. I just don’t see them in the story.

*Totally unrelated to class, browse over if you want to.

Hey guys, I have another blog where I put up some of the things I've written in the past. I'm not very good at it, but if you have some free time I'd appreciate some honest feedback. (If it sucks, tell me it sucks. If you have suggestions, give them to me). It's linked on the right, under "Home". It says "I like to write". Thanks.
-Michael