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Isn't storytelling always a search for origins, an account of one's entanglements with the Law, an entry into the dialectic of tenderness and hate?
- Roland Barthes1
I. The story
This essay is a study in aesthetic resemblance, and, in a way, influence. Unlike traditional explorations of influence, however, my reading does not admit of cause and effect, and the ideas of mimicry or conventional adaptation do not belong here. Specifically, I am interested in the ways Shakespeare's Hamlet and Christopher Nolan's Memento (Sony Pictures/ Newmarket Video, 2001) converse with, sanction, and revise one another. This reciprocity works in thematic terms, but it also has potent formal and narrative consequences. The film conducts its intimate relationship with Hamlet through its deformation of the revenge genre, but also through subtler discourses of memory and temporality that structure both works.
Nolan's film contains some features that readers of Shakespeare will recognize as part of Hamlefs signature concerns. The hero must commit revenge to correct an intolerable present. He experiences uncertainties of thought and recollection at a time when self-confrontation or doubt could be fatal. He is unsure about the proper course of action, but his uncertainty fails to prevent him from performing acts of awful, unlamented violence. In the case of the film, some of these concerns arise from its acknowledged source text - "Memento Mori," a short story by Jonathan Nolan, the director's brother. The brief tale features a man with amnesia, trapped in a mental institution after criminals raped and murdered his wife. He cannot recall the crime in full (or much of anything), but he vows that somehow, to give his life purpose, he will find the killers. Here is Nolan's half-mad protagonist in second-person, interior monologue:
. . . Your life is over. You 're a dead man. The only thing the doctors are hoping to do is teach you to be less of a burden to the orderlies. And they'll probably never let you go home, wherever that would be.
So the question is not "to be or not to be, " because you aren 't. The question is whether you want to do something about it. Whether revenge matters to you.
It does to most people. For a few weeks, they...