Memento Movie Analysis

Memento is a movie that makes the audience thinks and reflects back to themselves about their identity and their existence. Lenny is the person who experienced anterograde amnesia which is losing the ability to make new memories after the event happened in the past. After a short period of time, he would not remember what he did before. This problem happened when the a man raped and killed his wife and attacked him in the head;therefore, this is the only memory that he had left. Everyday, his mission is to find a guy who murdered his wife even though he had no clue about the man but he collected evidence by hand-written note, polaroid pictures and also tattoos all over his body. I believe that this movie wants to give the idea of personal identity according to memories and in my opinion, memories are important to identify a person since it develops a character from the past to the present. Even though according to Lenny he believes that memories are unreliable source and collecting facts by records are more important because in his case he has no other choice to keep track of his memories like other people. Therefore, this case actually links to the theory of Descartes who believes that self exists according to dualism, rationalism and science, Locke’s theory is self can known through sense experiences, Hume’s thought is self doesn’t exist since we are bundle of sensation, Kant thinks that anything that we experience is having it own self and it is the idea that he called “transcendental unity” and finally the idea of Hegel is the dialectic of the self which define as humans have both absolute and spirit in themselves.

Lenny states, “The world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it? My actions still have meaning, e...

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...d on them and we will become more independent. Therefore, Lenny does not tend to depend on anyone but himself and his own note, the mirror is his memory devices and he uses them by the limited source that he has from his memories.

In conclusion, Memento is the movie that uses the great understanding of theories from all of the philosophers. Lenny is a guy that has no memories of what he does during a short period of time and the only thing left in him is the incident of his wife’s murder case. However, he notes down his fact in different kind of sources and he does not notice that he actually making memories day by day. The identity impact in this movie is memories need to be make to be able to know who we are and what we did to have the consequences in the future and it is an important factor to make up a person by their sensation, cognition and environment.