Exploring How Audiences Decode the Narrative of Memento

Exploring How Audiences Decode the Narrative of Memento

The decoding process is a method in which audiences of any kind of

media material breaks it down and eventually understands to what it

is. An easy example of a decoding process would be to look at a simple

narrative which is found mostly in fairy tales; these are the easiest

as they have been designed for children and are not complex and

contain no real hard understanding. Yet our subject film is very

different from a fairy tale in a lot of respects yet the most obvious

would be the use of time and the order of the story, which is

completely in reverse going from the end towards the beginning and not

chronological at all.

Todorov's theory is particularly relevant here as the story itself

does show strong signs of the three areas and their boundaries.

Although this process is running backwards you are not greatly thrown

as it is the same backwards as it is forwards it is the story itself

that seems to give the film it's edge.

Barthes idea that a text is a tangled ball of threads can potentially

be said to be true for Momento; the unraveling helps describe the

difficulty to which the audience needs to "work" to understand the

plot. I believe for this particular text it can be described as being

"open" the reason I say this is because the film does attempt to

convey different meanings with it be with characters whose motives do

not seem clear or by the conclusion (which happens to be our

beginning). Action codes help give our story predictability; which

allows our audience to become more sophisticated and more likely to

anticipate what is going to happen, this in turn gives ...

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...stand the sequence of events you

must watch intently and make sure you catch all of these symbolic

codes.

This film in my view is very unique in respect to its backward time

running. Although it does make it different it does not make it a good

film a good film in my view is a film that provokes emotion in the

audience the bigger or stronger the emotion/s the better the film; for

me this was not the case for Momento. The plot is complicated yet not

totally impossible to work with, perhaps the reason for my dislike of

the film is because I had watched segments of it at a time and also

that I missed the concluding part. In all Memento is no big Hollywood

big seller simply a quirky chronologically challenged movie that

attempts something radical and does it ok, the lack of big names

involved does not help it's case.