Memento Psychoanalytical Intepretation

Memento
In this film there are various ways in which we can fit Freud’s psychoanalytic model. This model can be used as a tool to identify the personality of a character in a film. The moviefocuses on Leonard Shelby who can’t make new memories since an incident in which he got hit in the head when fighting two people who were attacking his wife. This means that Leonard’s Preconscious level hasbeen affected, if we relate it to Freud’s view of the human mind depicted with an iceberg. He still has his previous memories and knowledge up to that point, but now there is no way of making newones. Since Leonard’s last memory was seeing his wife die, that’s the first thing he remembers. He will react towards it and what he wants is to get revenge and find the person who killed her. Thisalways happens every time his new memories fade away and goes back to his last memory of her wife dying. Violent motives like revenge come from the unconscious level, driven by his id. This is what drivesLeonard to take revenge and kill whoever murdered his wife. Since he can’t make new memories, what he did was to tattoo on his body whatever information he thought was important for him to know. Mostof the things tattooed to his body were information that would lead to the person who killed his wife. He also took pictures and wrote notes on them to know the people he met. His skin, and thepictures with notes became his new way of recording memories, his way of making the preconscious level work again to make new memories. The conscious level is what makes us aware of things. What webasically see in the film is the conscious level doing its work to solve what happened in a memory form the preconscious level driven by the unconscious with violent motives. At the end of the film, it isrevealed that Leonard had already killed the person who murdered his wife. The problem is that he does not remember it. For some reason he did not record the fact he did that, even though there was a...