On Friday night, I watched Memento. Afterwards, I started exploring the DVD, which incidentally has probably the most involved design I’ve ever seen. After consulting the internet for tips on how to navigate the menus, I found my way to an easter egg I’d be interested in for some time: a recut of Memento, restructured into chronological order. At first I was just planning on checking it out of curiosity, but before long, I found myself sucked back into the film.

Viewing the film in chronological order creates an extremely different experience. For one, the entire arc of the film is completely changed, as the climax of the original is more of an act break in the chronological cut. It’s undeniably an inferior experience, though. As Christopher Nolan himself rightfully points out in Murphy’s book, the structure of the original cut plays perfectly into Leonard’s problem. Without the preceding scene, the audience is in the exact same situation as Leonard, not knowing where he is or what is going on. Scenes that are tense and suspenceful in the original become malicious and sadistic. The best example is the trio of scenes involving Natalie near the middle of the movie. In the original, we are stunned to see how manipulative she is, but seeing it chronologically, we see the manipulation from the beginning, and Leonard’s later ignorance is all the more hard to watch.

Perhaps the biggest change, however, was how I viewed the character of Teddy. For one thing, watching him in chronological order you get a much better sense of just how shrewd he is. Every scene with Leonard, he plays extremely close to his chest, more or less refusing to reveal that he knows any more than Leonard does unless absolutely necessary. One scene in particular sticks out in my mind. In the original cut, it is probably the third or fourth color sequence, but it comes near the end of the chronological film. Teddy and Leonard are in a diner, discussing killing John G. Teddy the nonchalantly asks Leonard “Where you staying these days?” Viewed in the original cut, this seems like a completely reasonable question, as the audience has little information of the motel Leonard stays, and establishing it as a major location of the film is important. But when you hear him ask that question, in light of all the stuff that comes before it in the fabula, it is suddenly an extremely strange question. Teddy knows where Leonard is staying. He even recommended the place to him earlier (although Leonard was already staying there). For whatever reason, Teddy refuses to divulge too much of his knowledge about Leonard, and it’s a detail that is easily lost when viewed in the original cut.

However, probably the biggest change in my perception of Teddy was his explanation of what Leonard has done. In the original, this comes at the end of the film, while in the chronological cut, this is about 1/3 of the way through the film. For some reason, Teddy has much more credibility in the original. I’ve noticed this in other works as well. Usually, it’s very easy to accept an explanation at the end of the film, particularly a puzzle film like Memento, while anywhere else in the film you might take the same information with a grain of salt. I suspect that this ties into the audience assumptions we’ve been discussing the last couple classes. An explanation given at the end of a film (or any other work) is assumed to be the correct one, and unless the given explanation completely stretches the limits of believably, it will be accepted. There is pretty much absolutely no reason to accept a single word that Teddy says, and yet, when he lays it all out at the end of original, you probably accept all or most of what he says, particularly as the film has been priming you to be looking for a solution due to its convoluted syuzhet.