Sneaky Sunday: Memento Tells You the Ending First, on Purpose
Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan) opens with its own ending: Leonard Shelby shooting a man named Teddy in a derelict building, then tells the rest of the story backward from there in reverse chronological segments, intercut with a forward-moving black-and-white thread. Leonard can’t form new long-term memories since the night his wife was murdered, and navigates his hunt for her killer through Polaroids, handwritten notes, and tattoos inked directly onto his own body – a structure Sneaky Sunday exists for, since the film’s real twist only fully assembles once you’ve seen the whole shape of it and can look back at what the reversed order was concealing.
The Twist
Leonard already found and killed his wife’s actual attacker, years before the film begins – Teddy, a corrupt undercover cop, helped him do it and told him the truth once it was done. Unable to retain that closure because of his condition, and unwilling to let a story with an ending stay finished, Leonard has been manipulating his own future self ever since: discarding facts that don’t serve the hunt, burning a photo that would prove the job is done, and building “John G.” into an open case he can pursue forever. In the film’s final (chronologically first) scene, Leonard consciously chooses to write down false information about Teddy, converting him into the next target, specifically so that future-Leonard, working from nothing but the note, will act on it as fact. He is, by his own admission in voiceover, choosing to be deceived.
The reverse structure isn’t a gimmick bolted onto a conventional revenge story – it’s the mechanism the twist depends on. Because the audience experiences events in the same fragmented, context-free order Leonard does, his condition and the film’s own storytelling become the same unreliable narrator, and the “twist” isn’t a single fact revealed at the end so much as the accumulating realization that Leonard has been an active, willing participant in his own deception the entire time, not a passive victim of his memory. That’s what earns this a spot alongside the Nolan film that opened this same week’s Sneaky Sunday slot last time out, The Prestige – both hinge on withholding not facts, but the order information reaches the audience, and both reward exactly the kind of second, forward-order viewing this column is built to encourage.