Narrative Structure in Adaptation and Memento

Logan Peterson

Professor Saphire

COM 126.01

10/9/20

Just Make Yours a Good One

Adaptation and Memento are excellent studies in character and how they are used to tell a story. Adaptation uses first person narration to display the insecurities and thought process of the main character, Charlie. Memento does a similar thing, but due to the character’s condition that prevents him from making any new memories, the audience can’t trust his narration. However, both films exemplify how a single character can not only carry a narrative, but make it exceedingly interesting. 

Memento is an interesting film and at first, I was tripped up by the fake rules that director Christopher Nolan puts in place. Nolan uses the inherent authority narration gives a character to convince the viewer that the protagonist’s tattoos and notes to himself are never lying. In fact, by the end of the story, it is discovered that Lenny, while seemingly round and complex is in a simple, unending loop of murder in order to atain justice for his wife. 

Nolan’s structure is what lends so much weight to Momento’s twists and turns. The movie starts at the very end of the story and travels back to the actual payoff, which is at the beginning. Using this method of storytelling, Lenny’s character arc is complete at the start of the film and rather than showing the audience his progression as a character, Nolan shows the environmental factors that lead to the Lenny we met at the start. Nolan also uses the noir genre mentioned in Cousins’ documentary, but flips it on its head. A femme fatal is still involved, but Lenny only sees her as a friend rather than a romantic interest and rather than him trying to kill her significant other in order to gain her favor, she is using him to discover who already did the deed, unaware the entire the time that it was Lenny all along. 

Adaptation is vastly different from Memento. The latter is a crime drama set in reverse, whereas Adaptation is a metafilm, intended to change the way we see film as a whole. From the beginning the protagonist, Charlie Kaufman, gives powerful narration in order to allow the viewer to understand his thinking. Kaufman is in no way a perfect character. He is awkward, self conscious and a perfectionist, all of which leads to the entire conflict of the movie: not being able to write one. 

The fictional Kaufman that is in the film, mirrors the real Kaufman, suffering from writer's block after coming off of writing a critically acclaimed film. The fictional Kaufman fights tooth and nail the entire film to write only about Orchids, the subject of the book his script is to be based off of. Kaufman spends the entire film resisting the temptations of his little brother Donald, an aspiring script writer who isn’t afraid to buy into trends in order to make his movie a hit. In the beginning of the film, he is often lying down on the floor, as low as he can possibly go, while Charlie often hovers over him, or sits. As Donald writes his script, the farther along he gets, the taller he stands in shots with Charlie. A powerful tool, that is reminiscent of camera techniques like the ones used in Citizen Kane, that Cousins’ talked about in his documentary. 

Charlie’s passion is to finish his script, but the subject matter of flowers and the current mood of Hollywood are his great obstacles. Charlie finds himself fixated on Susan Orlean, the writer of the novel and the person whose story he needs to adapt in order to fit into modern Hollywood. In his quest to finish his script, both the real-life Kaufman and the fictional one, sacrifice the deep storytelling they had been aiming for in order to wow the audience. They include sex, guns, drugs and all of the things Charlie had intended to keep out of the film to begin with. Charlie’s obstacle was to get through his writer's block and finish his script, but in doing that he gave into the worst impulses of Hollywood. He let Donald, who wrote a script that Charlie knew was bad, take over his own project and push him in the direction he never wanted to go in. 

Susan Orlean and John Laroche become two-dimensional, cartoonish villains, losing all of their moral ambiguity. John, while odd, seemed to have a beautiful mind and a real understanding and love for nature. Susan Orlean was a lost soul searching for passion and inspiration, not unlike Charlie. As a result of his pivot, the fictional Charlie loses his Hollywood star brother, who ends his story where he began, on the floor. The real life Charlie creates a meta film, which is impressive in its own right, but loses sight of what it set out to do to begin with: tell a story about flowers.

    Adaptation is a proof of concept, the idea that you can take what is a borderline joke ending in a movie that had otherwise serious undertones and turn it into a hit. Memento is a creative reinvention of noir, that may not have revitalized the genre, but certainly proved it was still a viable one. While I have issues with both films, I find myself coming back to the same place as I have in other movies, whether it be a mega franchise like Star Wars, or an unnoticed gem like Bad Times at the El Royale. Both Adaptation and Memento are shocking to me because Lenny and Charlie are what held my attention for most of the films. I wanted to see Lenny put a bullet in someone, because I felt his pain, despite never losing anyone close to me. I nearly cried at the end of the film when Charlie got the girl, even though it was a cheap copout, because I’ve spent most of my life dreaming about that very same thing. Charlie and Lenny prove to me that we’re all stories in the end and ultimately, that’s the only thing that matters. For Lenny, his story was one of a husband desperate for justice for his dead wife, even though he was the one that killed her. He wrote himself a story, so that he could forget what he’d done and justify living another day. Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into a script about a movie he wanted to make so that he could justify copping out and giving in to the pressure of modern hollywood. The saddest thing about the two films is that the characters and narratives are tragic reminders that we are all stories in the end, but far too often, we forget to make them good ones.