What is the enduring self? Memento

The film Memento is a philosophical exploration of the nature of the self, and the role of memory in the making and unmaking of identity. Its protagonist, Lenny Shelby, spends every waking hour on an all-consuming quest to find and kill the man who murdered his wife. He has suffered a severe head injury that has left him unable to transform his fleeting short-term experiences into new long-term memories. He can remember nothing that has happened since the murder. At each moment, he is beset with questions – questions that strike him as ever new and ever urgent. What am I doing here? How did I get here? What am I trying to achieve?

Part of the brilliance of the movie is not just that it raises questions about memory and the self, but that it forces us to wear Lenny’s shoes and to walk around in them for almost the entire movie. It weaves together two apparently separate, but eventually interlocking narratives – one moving backwards in time, the other moving forward. Like Lenny, we must somehow figure out, without the aid of memory, how we reached this puzzling present, what we are doing there, and why it matters.

It is only when the two narratives finally merge that we come to see the fuller “truth” about Lenny. It turns out that he actually tracked down his wife’s killer and exacted his revenge some time ago – though, of course, he forgot it instantly. We realise that it was Lenny who set himself up, without being fully aware, to successfully hunt down and kill another man. Lenny’s self-manipulation bespeaks a degree of autonomy that belies his brokenness. Though he is clearly not the sort of unbroken, autonomous, self-knowing being that we all naturally and easily assume our “selves” to be, he is clearly more than just a ruined and broken creature. The broken fragments of his identity are constantly seeking a kind of self-repair. Perhaps we should say that the enduring self is not, after all, a fixed and determined thing, achieved once and for all. Perhaps the self is always in the process of being made, unmade and remade. If so, then perhaps Lenny differs from the rest of us not so much in kind, but merely in degree.