Memento Part 3

Episode is up: http://www.filmreroll.com/?p=389

Ok, so let's talk about the structural challenges presented by telling a story backwards. I had wanted to do Memento for years, and had always intended to hand off Leonard from person to person to simulate his cluelessness to what's going on around him. But when I rewatched the movie to actually start planning it, I started to wonder if it was a good idea:

Memento is actually very specifically structured to take advantage of its backwards narrative. The whole movie works on a principal of recontextualization, the audience is not driven by a desire to find out what happens next, but to find the context that will explain what the events they've seen. The movie is carefully constructed to change our understanding of the main characters on a scene-by-scene basis, driving towards a conclusion which alters our understanding of Leonard himself. 

The problem is that kind of writing takes careful architecting. It's not the kind of thing you can reliably do through improv. Furthermore, the big reveal at the end of Memento, even if we could find our way to the same reveal, which is not guaranteed, would lack power because it will be the same expected reveal which most of the audience has seen in the film. Without the set-up, it will lack the shock of the film. I was happy to populate the world with some further secrets from Leonard's past, but if we start at the same spot from the movie, we won't have any way of finding them at the "end" of the movie. Plus, those kinds of secrets need to be laid in conservatively, otherwise you run the risk of feeling like you're running roughshod over the film.

The realization I came to, was that ultimately while our version of the film will not be architected around a single big reveal, there is still a ton of power in the recontextualization of past events. Doing it as improv presents challenges, but the value and opportunity is in the audience and the player sharing the confusion of the lack of context together. And the constant catharsis is in finding the circumstances that led to the hijinks we heard before. Hearing the players struggle through the confusion is inherently interesting, and while we won't be able to reproduce the kind of film that Memento is, there are other ways in which we can find an interesting film in the improv. So that's what I set out to do. Next time we'll talk more about the specific ways I adjusted my storytelling to adjust to the backwards edit.