Christopher Nolan’s psychological thriller film “Memento” (2000) is a fictional representation of severe anterograde amnesia. The protagonist, Leonard Shelby, sustained an injury that prevents him from creating new memories. However, despite this, he manages to remain a coherent and individual person, planning to take revenge on the man who gave him the injury and killed his wife. While his acts of murder are pre-meditated, the turbulence and inner turmoil he was not able to escape or grow out of prevents those acts from being cold-blooded.
To discuss Shelby’s case, personal identity must be defined. A child is the same person as their future sixty year old self, even though every single cell in their body has been replaced many times over. It almost seems paradoxical that one person can be a single individual, and remain that individual, yet be subject to radical change over time. There must be some element of continuity that allows one’s personal identity to persist over time.
One of the leading theories of personal identity is the bodily continuity theory. It posits that even though all of the cells in one’s body are replaced, there is a certain consistency that defines it as the same body. It’s not as though all of the cells are replaced at once – at any given time, there remains cells from the previous stage of the body. However, the idea that personal identity is intrinsically connected to a body is not intuitive at all. Many pieces of fiction feature the concept of a mind-swap; if Leonard Shelby’s mind were transferred, in talking to him it would seem obvious who they were talking to regardless of the body he was in.
What seems like a more instinctive theory of personal identity is the psychological theory of continuity, which tracks the continuity of consciousness – or more specifically, the episodic memory that links each stage of conscious life. A person is a unique individual because they possess a stream of unique memories of experiences that are accumulative in creating their beliefs, values, behaviours and opinions.
Yet there is another problem that needs to be addressed. Episodic memory is the memory of experiences – actual memories register an actual experience had by the person remembering, while quasi-memories are experiences in which they seem to remember that something happened to them. If personal identity consists of stages of a person over time linked by memories of experiences had by only that person, it starts to become defined in terms of actual episodic memory and vice versa; this presupposes the identity of the owner of the experience. Quasi-memories are subject to falsification or misplacement, as Leonard himself notes:
“Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the colour of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record…”
So if they are the memories that connect person-stages, they must be identified in a way that minimises these risks – a quasi-memory must have been laid down in the correct way, ie. with a normal memory trace of how it came to be.
This describes the weak psychological continuity theory; that while one may fail to connect parts of their life in recent episodic memory, their identity is anchored in in past memories. In Shelby’s case, this is exactly what is needed. He can only remember his life before the accident, and brief periods of time afterwards which inevitably fade. But his identity doesn’t disintegrate because each of these periods are linked to his former life.
Nonetheless, because his identity is anchored in past memories, it cannot develop in the present or future. He holds onto a plan that gives him purpose; to kill “John G”, the man who did this to him, and eventually writes the number plate of a man of whose innocence he is not sure of as that of “John G”. According to the weak theory, Leonard’s connection to his past memories means that the Leonard that wrote the number plate is the same Leonard who committed the future murder – so he can be accurately charged with pre-meditated murder.
However, that man had just admitted to using Leonard and allowing him to kill any “John G” they came across. And each moment in time for Shelby is only connected to his last retained memory – the traumatic one in which he and his wife were attacked. His rage and grief will never be able to heal because they will always be his most recent memory of experience.
It cannot be disputed that Leonard deliberately planted false evidence to vilify another man, but given his perpetual emotional state, and the revelation that he had been used as a pawn in someone else’s plot, it cannot be considered a cold-blooded action. Leonard’s purpose was to get revenge, and the theory that he intended to create an existence for himself where he kills to maintain his own sense of purpose suggests a sense of calculation that someone in an unending state of grief, and a momentary state of violation, could be capable of. Leonard Shelby is a pre-meditated killer, but not a cold-blooded one.
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