Memento and Adaption: A flurry of Narrative Structure

 Ahmiir McIver

COM 126

10/8/2020

Narrative, it's defined simply as a story. But it can be twisted and turned in numerous ways to illustrate and convey a film's story. In the case of Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento and Spike Jonze’s 2002 film Adaptation, both directors use the idea of a narrative structure to build their film’s narrative around. In Memento, Nolan tells the story in reverse with colored scenes, and the black and white scenes are played forward. Leading the film to end with the film beginning. In Adaptation, how Spike Jonze plays with the narrative structure is by having the main protagonist Charlie thoughts being narrated in his head throughout his film. Giving the film a sort of meta feel to it. 

Continuing on the film Adaptation, Jonze and Kauffman use the first person narrator in the film for the main character of Charlie as he battles himself while writing his screenplay. Throughout the film, we see the first person narrator give information but only information that the character Charlie would know about or be aware of. It is completely different from a third person narrator who is able to provide information about the narrative that the characters in the story may not be aware of. Another interesting concept in the film that I found could be sort of an allegory for studio interference in Hollywood. In the first half of the film, Charlie was dead set on making a simplistic film with no sex, drugs, and action. But in the second half, Charlie’s brother Donald takes over the screenplay and is admet on adding the sex, drugs, and action. And Charlie is finally willing to do it after going against it at first. The reason I say that this may be an allegory for studio interference in Hollywood is not only because this film is a meta commentary on screenwriting and filmmaking. But Donald taking the screenplay and adding everything that Charlie was against in the first half of the film has been seen before in Hollywood with different productions of films. An example of this would be Spider-Man 3, Sam Rami had made two excellent Spider-Man films in 1&2 in 2002 and 2004 respectively. So when production began on Spider-Man 3 in 2007, Sony butted in and told Rami that he needed to add Venom and Sandman in the film as villains or he would be replaced as director of the film. This meddling from Sony led to Spider-Man 3 having a mixed reception. So seeing that, it’s interesting to imagine that it was what they were going for with an allegory for studio meddling with Donlad taking over in the second half of the film. 

In the case of Christoper Nolan’s 2000 film Memento, Nolan uses the first person narrator of the main character of Leonard as he processes his thoughts in his mind throughout the film. But the way Nolan utilizes it with the narrative structure of the film. You see, the character of Leonard is suffering from anterograde amnesia ( which is the inability to form new memories). So using this trait, Nolan is able to use the reverse narrative with the colored scene being reversed and the black and white scenes being played forward. I feel the reason why Nolan does this is to have the viewer watch the film from the perspective of Leonard, disorienting and completely jumbled and out of place.