How Memento and Adaptation Use Narrative Structure

 Jacob Raymond

COM 126

Professor Saphire

9-29-20

How Memento and Adaptation Use Narrative Structure

After analyzing the films Memento and Adaptation, it is clear to say that the characters and their overall stories were created through narrative structures. What these two films have in common is the amount of space that each film offers between the scenes and the characters. What also catches my attention is the amount of vocabulary from chapter 4 in the textbook that could be described within these two films that some movies use in filmmaking today. Although Adaptation is a comedy using real world time in their shots and Memento uses repetition to elaborate on backstory events to create a narrative flow, their narrative structures are both well polished and creatively delivered upon release in the early 2000s. In other words, here is how both films fulfill the narrative structure concept.

    To start, I first looked at the 2000 film, Memento. The story follows a man who uses Polaroid pictures to help him seek revenge after suffering a brain injury and his wife killed. Off the bat, this film is a dedicated revival of the film noir genre that existed back in the 1940s, which were focused on sinister tones in movies involving crime and drama. This genre is expressed through a nonlinear narrative in the movie by alternating between color and black and white shots, each with different perspectives. Chapter 4 of the textbook defines these transitions in a stretch relationship because the overall screening of the film is running longer than the plot of each film segment. Near the end of the film, the climax kicks in when Leonard strangles Jimmy and takes a picture, However, the resolution unfolds when the color scheme of the scene changes again after the picture and Teddy comes along to reveal that Leonard has had a memory that he repressed to escape from his guilt on the incident, thus leading to Leonard burning the picture and monologuing about justice through first-person narration. In other words, Memento is a good example on how narrative structure is used to create characters and their stories.

    Aside from Memento, another film that uses narrative structure to create both characters and stories is Adaptation. This 2002 metafilm follows Donald Kaufman and his experiences on trying to adapt the 1998 book, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean while suffering from writer’s block. This work of fiction is known for adding fictional elements to a story that was based on true events. What makes this movie stand out on narrative structure is the Chapter 4 textbook use of diegestic elements to create events that did not exist within the normal world, such as how the film put Susan Orlean in a relationship with John Laroche. This form of narrative structure sums up a quote that Mark Cousins mentioned in his documentary The Story of Film, pt 5: Post-War Cinema. In the documentary, Cousins states a quote from Cesare Zavattini, an Italian screenwriter by saying “when we’ve throughout a scene we feel the need to “remain” in it because it can contain so many echoes and reverberations” (Cousins). He considers this quote reverberatory because things took place in real time and the ordinary details mattered, which was the case for Adaptation by recreating true events while also adding fictional subplots in the narrative. In conclusion, modern movies such as Memento and Adaptation have since used narrative structures to create characters and their stories.