In 'Memento' (2000), Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator, suffers from anterograde amnesia and uses notes, Polaroid photos, and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife. This Christopher Nolan film ingeniously uses a non-linear narrative to mimic Leonard's own disjointed memories.
Leonard cannot form new memories, so he tattoos his own conclusions on his body. The reverse-chronology forces us into his epistemic prison. Every reveal is also a confession that the narrator has been the villain all along.
Reverse chronology forces you into Leonard’s prison the first time. The second time you can finally see the parallel black-and-white timeline collapsing toward him, and the long con he keeps running against himself.
Nolan reverses the timeline so you experience Leonard's amnesia. The twist is structural, then narrative; both lie to you for different reasons.
The story is about a man with short-term memory loss attempting to find his wife's murderer.
Nolan reverses the timeline so you experience Leonard's amnesia. The structure makes the narrator unreliable by design — you only know what he just told himself, and he is lying to himself.
