Memento Essay (Genre)

There are many elements of Memento that could easily be considered as typical of the Noir genre, one of which is the use of motifs throughout the movie. This allows the director Nolan, in a film about struggling with the memory, to test the audiences memory and immerse them in to the movie in a more interesting way:

'Nevertheless, various critics have sought different unifying features: motif and tone (Durgnat, 1970), social background and artistic/cultural influences (Schrader, 1971 [sic]), iconography, mood and characterisation (Mcarthur, 1972), vista style (Place & Peterson, 1974), the 'hard-boiled' tradition (Gregory, 1976), narrative and iconography (Dyer, 1977), a master plot paradigm (Damico, 19780, conditions of production (Kerr, 1979), paranoia (Buchsbaum, 1986…) and patterns of narration (Telotte, 1989)' 

A perfect example of this is the similarity of two scenes, the first time (so the last time) the audience see Leonard and Teddy visit the derelict industrial building (or 'fucked up building' as Teddy would choicely put it) and the last time we see Leonard and Teddy in the derelict industrial building (so somewhere around the middle of the movie), where the  slow panning wide shot of the cars approaching the derelict building is almost identical, in the first instance the car being Leonard's pick up truck and in the second instance it is Leonard in the Jaguar pulling up next to pick up truck, the pick up truck becomes, somewhat, a motif as it is a reoccurring idea and it symbolises the idea of memory's unreliability. The fact that Leonard left the truck there signifies his struggle with memory and its reliability and also it tasks the audience in a way as it makes them use their memory to remember that Leonard left his truck there, also making them feel in a similar boat to Leonard.

Another element of Memento that makes it fit into the Noir genre, outlined by this article, is how different it is:

'A key feature of all these essays, articles, chapters and books is an acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of the films, and hence the potentially problematic nature of the 'phenomenon' the term 'film noir' has been used to label' 

This applies to Memento as its unique narrative structure defies genre conventions of the thriller, mystery genre, which in fact plays right into the Film Noir genre as it has heterogeneity, meaning it is various and different, a key component in the film Noir genre and a problem as defining a genre and heterogeneity don't go hand in hand.