Gone Girl And Memento: Film Analysis

The three films shown to us during the module – Rashomon, Gone Girl and Memento - presents us with situations where the context of the facts changes the perception of the truth entirely.

In Rashomon, we see multiple interpretations of a single event – the death of the samurai. The samurai’s death is the only event that is maintained as true, but the events surrounding his death turned out to be extremely pliable, with each character involved in it having a different version of the truth. Each character, depending on his or her background, personality, motivations or self-interest – in essence, their ‘context’, either distorts or omits facts to give their version of the truth. For instance, the wife of the samurai omits a huge part of her involvement in her husband’s death to both preserve her dignity and her image as a helpless victim, as well as to erase the guilt of her participation in the duel that resulted in her husband’s death. Even the

Although the film does not have multiple accounts of the events in the film, the importance of context in facts is heavily emphasized. The main character Leonard Shelby – and because of the presentation, the audience – struggle with determining the truth as we are presented with facts outside of their context, and it is not until later for the audience that we see the events preceding each other that provide us with the context of each event. Innocuous objects are shown to have meanings different from what is currently perceived – for instance, a bottle that Leonard picks up to defend himself before he blacks out is later thought of as a bottle that he had drank from, but it is not until later that the audience realizes this fact. What we see here is the importance of context and how it shapes and recasts facts under different lights – and as such how facts change the perception of the