Can you explain memento

His memory condition casts doubt on the veracity of his biased investigation, and he is murderously self-deluded in his final moment of clarity, ready to frame Teddy because revenge is the only thing that gives his life some purpose.

A few years earlier, Pearce played straight-shooter Ed Exley in "L. Confidential," the by-the-book detective whose morals are corroded by the cesspool of corruption around him. Like Exley, Pearce's earnest charisma and chiseled heroic looks make us instinctively side with Leonard, and it's devastating to find out what levels of self-deception he will stoop to in order to keep his rampage of revenge going.

Meanwhile, poor Teddy. He is still untrustworthy in our eyes even when it becomes clear that he is telling the truth, perhaps because he is played by an actor as innately shifty as Pantoliano. It's a puzzle of a thriller that remains hugely satisfying, no matter how many times you sit and put the pieces together. But first, the plot That sounds quite straightforward Is Leonard's Condition a Real Thing?

So what happens at the end of Memento? Trevor grows close to a waitress called Maria who serves him coffee at night at a local diner, and he feels protective over her young son Nicholas, especially when Trevor starts to believe Ivan is going to hurt the boy.

The twist: Well Mother and son are his visions of Maria who in reality is a completely different waitress that he never speaks to and Nicholas who is his hallucination. Ivan is also his hallucination and is actually a vision of himself, before the accident when he could eat and sleep and so looked healthy and happy. His guilt about the crime has been driving him mad. At the close of the movie, Trevor finally recognises the truth and hands himself into the police, meaning he can finally sleep.

Christopher Nolan's masterpiece is twisty-turny all the way through. Hell, the whole thing is told backwards , but it's the big twist the one that comes at the end of the movie, but occurred at the beginning of the movie's timeline get it? Guy Pearce plays Leonard, a man with anterograde amnesia, which means he can't make new memories and has short-term memory loss every few minutes.

Leonard uses tattoos, notes and polaroids to help him keep track of what he's doing, particularly in relation to his big mission — to find the man who raped and murdered his wife and injured him, giving him his condition.

During his ongoing investigation, Leonard tells the story of Sammy Jankis, a man with the same condition as him, who Leonard investigated when he was an insurance loss adjuster.

Jankis killed his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin — she didn't believe he had amnesia and kept requesting more insulin in an attempt to get him to admit he was lying. Anyways, through a series of clues and leads, Leonard finds the man he believes is his and his wife's attacker, a guy called Teddy, and kills him. The twist: Only that's not what actually happened.

At all. The attackers who injured Leonard, causing his condition, raped his wife but didn't actually kill her. Leonard did, via an insulin overdose — Leonard is Sammy Jankis, but created the story as a way of dealing with the guilt. Teddy is not the attacker. He helped Leonard find and kill the actual attacker a year ago, but Leonard couldn't retain the memory, so Teddy has allowed him to track and kill other dodgy characters, making him think each one is the culprit.

Teddy explains all this to Leonard. After he's finished, Leonard destroys evidence of another man he's killed having believed him to be the attacker and deliberately writes 'Do Not Trust Teddy' on his polaroid — an action which eventually leads to Leonard murdering Teddy which we saw at the start of the movie, but is actually the end of the timeline. Leonard says that his final memory is of his wife dying, and we see the crime, but a story that he tells the mysterious party on the phone in the black-and-white sequences is actually crucial to the main story, as it throws into question whether said crime even happened.

Leonard tells the story of Sammy Jankis portrayed by Stephen Tobolowsky , a man with anterograde amnesia whom he met in the course of his job. Leonard had denied Jankis' insurance claim on the grounds that his condition couldn't be proven, causing his wife to take matters into her own hands. She did so by requesting that Jankis give her multiple, successive insulin shots, killing her but proving that his condition was real.

Crucially, an extremely brief shot late in the film shows Sammy sitting in a mental institution, and in a brief flash, he's replaced by Leonard. This will become relevant later. The final black-and-white sequence shows us that Leonard has been talking to Teddy on the phone, and that Teddy is, or at least claims to be, an undercover cop. At the film's end, when Leonard kills Jimmy, the dying man whispers the name "Sammy" — a name he would only know if Leonard had told him.

This throws Jimmy's guilt into serious question, and when Teddy arrives to tell Leonard that he's killed his wife's attacker, Leonard expresses doubts. This causes an impatient Teddy to blow a fuse, and when he does, he might come closer than anyone else in the whole movie to actually telling Leonard the truth of his situation.

Teddy tells Leonard that the two of them had tracked down and killed Leonard's wife attacker over a year ago, and even shows him a Polaroid of an ecstatic, blood-soaked Leonard pointing to a tattoo-free spot on his chest to prove it. He tells Leonard that, despite this, the memory refused to take, so, with plenty of shady John G. Heck, Teddy points out, even his real name is John G. Further, Teddy asserts that Leonard's wife had actually survived the attack, and that the Sammy Jankis story was actually Leonard's story.

The twisty-turny time fuckery of Tenet has mostly been drawing comparisons to Inception and Interstellar but it mostly feels like the natural thematic endpoint of ideas first raised in Tenet. After debuting with Following , Nolan really emerged with a story told backward, an illustration of the way one moment in time can have consequences we might not even understand, consequences we can't change.

Twenty years later, with Tenet , Nolan decided to stop mucking about and just ask: Well, what happens if we could? Vinnie Mancuso is a Senior Editor at Collider, where he is in charge of all things related to the film 'Aquaman,' among other things. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter VinnieMancuso1 or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.

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