Memento Opening Scene Analysis

The opening scene for Christopher Nolan 2000 film Memento is a good example of an opening for film noir. The opening poses questions that are not answered until later in the movie. The audience has many questions: Why is this in reverse? Why is this man taking a picture of a corpse? Who is the guy with a camera? Who is the dead guy? Why did the guy with the camera kill the dead guy? These questions make the audience feel the same way I do in my biology class almost every day: really confused. Since the audience is confused, they want to figure out what in name of all things good and holy is going on. Thereby, the audience becomes invested in the film because they want to know what is going on.

The element of confusion can be found in other noir films such as John Wick (in John Wick, we see John Wick stagger out of an SUV bloody and wounded, showing he just got out of a fight)which hooks the audience in because, unless they are insane or stupid, people do not like to be confused (as evidenced by the fact that few movies have managed to be confusing and receive praise from critics and audiences alike.) The element of confusion is something that is something of a motif in noir films because the protagonist is usually some person looking for answers (in the case of both John Wick and Memento, the questions they are trying to answer are similar: who killed a person/dog important to me.) By establishing the question/questions to the audience in the first 15 minutes of the film, they are able to piece together a plausible answer along with the protagonist. This, in turn, creates more mystery surrounding what is going on in the film and allows the audience to play detective with the detective.