Adaptation, Memento, and Narrative Structure

Kathleen Brosnahan

History and Criticism of Film

Professor Saphire

October 11th, 2020


    The films Adaptation and Memento are mind bending experiences that play around with narrative structure to tell their stories. Memento is a thriller about a man named Leoonard with memory issues trying to solve a mystery and the narrative structure is reversed to provide his point of view. Adaption is a drama about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and journalist Susan Orlean. Charlie tries to adapt Susan’s book, The Orchid Thief, and their seemingly separate stories tie together in the end, and narrative structure is used to tell them together.

    In Christopher Nolan’s groundbreaking Memento we are presented with the story of Leonard, a man with memory loss who is trying to solve and avenge his wife’s rape and murder. Leonard also has short term memory loss due to an accident, complicating his situation even more. Nolan puts the audience in the protagonist’s shoes by presenting the narrative in reverse chronological order. Every scene starts with a question on how we got to this point in the story. For example, in one scene we open on him in the bathroom with an open bottle of liquor and he thinks to himself he doesn't feel drunk, clearly confused, and the next scene we find that he was getting back at someone that was chasing him down and was going to use the bottle as a weapon. Memento is presented in a fragmented way, and is spliced with the story of Sammy Jankins, a man with the same condition as Leonard, that goes in chronological order and is essential to understanding Leonard’s character arc.

    On the other hand, in Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, the story is presented in chronological order and weaves in between the experiences of Charlie Kaufman and Susan Orlean. Kaufman is a screenwriter who is trying to adapt Susan’s book, The Orchid Thief, into a film. Susan is a writer for the New York Times who flies to Florida for a story about John Laroche, an orchid fanatic who steals them from swamps and pursues the rare ghost orchid. As Charlie struggles to adapt her rambling book into a cohesive movie, we are presented with flashbacks to Susan’s life. Charlie, out of options, needs to meet Susan in person, so he flies to Florida and discovers that her life has deteriorated to that of a drug addict. Both of their stories climax at the same point, and it ends with a chase in the swamp and a deux ex machina gator.

    The films Adaptation and Memento experiment with narrative structure to tell their narratives. Memento uses it to put us in the perspective of the main character trying to unravel a mystery with memory loss, while Adaptation uses it to tell us two different parts of the story at once to unite them at the climax in the end. In both instances it’s cleverly used and makes both stories richer.