Memento - A film about framing ad human processing

Alright I just watched Memento twice in the last two days and my fascination with it seems a tad different than what I have read online so I wanted to share. Everyone seems super interested in the "clues" that will tell us what is actually happening, but I don't think that's the point. The whole plot is carefully designed to lend itself to many explanations of what happened and it would require at least a little bit of guesswork to declare any certain outcome the true answer.

This, to me, was a film that expertly highlighted how the human mind frames things. In our brains we have far more nodes/receptors for sensory processing than we do for storing that information. So, when we are given raw information, we have to somehow decide what gets kept and why it gets kept. A lot of those decisions have to do with what narratives we subscribe to and how we can position those pictures in our existing framework of the world.

See the movie purports to be about the dichotomy between facts and memories, but we find out quickly that this isn't so and that both methods are not reliable. Even though we are led to believe that Lenny is simply working with "facts" to aid his investigation, we learn at the end of the movie that all of these facts are only held on to if they fit his narrative and the captions that he gives the photos only kept if they also are to his liking. None of the information that he has is useful without the captions attached to the photos. For example, when Teddy presents him the picture at the end with blood on his hands Lenny doesn't know what to make of it. The photo has no caption. Even though it could have been read as evidence that the job was already finished, Lenny used it to believe that Teddy was a liar since it was so discordant with his purpose.

In the same way, we are presented a plot that doesn't make add up if just taken as is, but if we apply a given framework (e.g. Teddy actually is a cop / Teddy is the killer and wants to manipulate Lenny into killing a different John G) we are able to find ample evidence to suit each of those narratives. In a sense, if you think you've found the answer you might be captioning the photo in your own way.

We search for meaning in everything, and we will go to great lengths to preserve our understanding of the world and our purpose in it ("I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there."). That is what this movie highlights. Even though we believe ourselves to be expert picture takers, we can't help but caption our photos when they come out and that will naturally jeopardize the validity of them. This isn't a flaw, just like it isn't a flaw with Lenny, it is just very human.