People hate being disillusioned. I know I hate being so served.
Saw Memento last night.
It’s more of a chiasmus (to borrow the rhetorical term), a V or an X, than a backwards retelling, like the “backward” Seinfeld episode. One stream of narrative runs backwards, the other runs forwards. and they meet at a Polaroid. It is also a story that runs in a circle—the setting and characters of the beginning and end sequences (either way you look at it) are the same, arcing from one to the other.
(Spoilers)
I trust Teddy’s little ending revelations less than I trust Leonard and his sense of integrity. When the narrative becomes so twisted and unreliable, character must become paramount. The flashes of guilt that we see are a testament to his willingness to openly consider the possibilities that Teddy puts forth, not real memories. Even as he sets Teddy up for a future self to kill, it is from a sense of justice. Though he has conditioned himself to be a killer, he knows that vengeance has a natural limit that should not be tampered with, that there ought to be meaning, justice, and an objective reality, even if he can’t fully experience it himself.
And if we accept the beginning of the story, which is, after all, the end, we accept that he has finished with killing as was his intention when he started. If he has made himself a killer by conditioning, he can also put a finish to the killing as well, can unmake himself as well.
Teddy tells him, “You don’t even know who you are”—but he does. And even if we can’t trust his narrative, by the end of the movie we can trust his character. When he has a flash of himself and his wife and the “I did it” tattoo, he is picturing a world of complete justice.
10:57:48 PM 
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