Comparing Memento And Inception

The Distortion of Memories and Dreams In this paper I’ll be discussing the minds of two individuals from two different movies. A man who has short term memory loss, Leonard from Memento, and a man who can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality, Dominic from Inception. Both Memento and Inception made by Christopher Nolan contains several instances of symbolism that gives understanding to how the characters think and how they react to certain situations. Both Leonard and Dominic in a way manipulates others’ lives for their own desires. Memento and Inception are similar because of their story structure, same type of protagonist’s, and the symbolism in each movie. In Memento the story structure is told in reverse and has a combination …show more content…
Firstly they are both unreliable. Leonard decided to frame Teddy, the cop, in order to satisfy his own needs, so he left himself clues using tattoos and pictures to make it look as though he was the John G. he was looking for. He did this even though he knew at a certain point that Teddy told him he had helped him catch the John G. who raped his wife and that he killed him. Teddy even had picture of how happy he looked when he did it also saying that he has never seen him smile like that since that day. Teddy also said after he had gave Leonard his police file he took 12 pages out of it. Even still he decided to keep on playing his game creating a puzzle that will never be solved. Dominic goes into people’s dream to obtain secrets and then sells them to their competitors. Leonard and Dominic’s problems resort back to them causing their wife’s deaths. In Memento, his wife allows him to give her an overdose on insulin and, in Inception she throws herself out the window. In the end they both start believing in a false reality that makes them happy. Leonard lies to himself and makes sure there is no evidence to what really happened, Cobb’s appears to still be dreaming, but thinks he’s in