Loss Of Amnesia In The Movie Memento

There are four different types of amnesia, Anterograde amnesia which is when you can’t form new memories due to head trauma, Retrograde amnesia which is a loss of pre-existing memories, Lacunar amnesia which is a loss of memory of a specific event, and Childhood amnesia which is a common inability to remember events from childhood.
In the film Memento, we meet Leonard Shelby or Lenny, who has an exaggerated form of anterograde amnesia. Lenny is on a mission to kill John G. because he believes John G. raped and murdered his wife. However since he has anterograde amnesia finding and killing John G. isn’t as easy as he’d like it to be because he constantly forgets information. Lenny definitely has difficulty trusting the information provided by …show more content…
Lenny recalls how he had to investigate Sammy Jenkis when he was an insurance investigator. Sammy Jenkis was a man who couldn’t make any new memories. And Lenny had him take some tests that proved Jenkis’ condition to be psychological, not physical. When asked by Jenkis’ wife if he could ever remember again, Lenny said physically, he should. So Jenkis’ wife tried several times to get Sammy remembering again and when all those times failed she had him accidently overdosed her on insulin. According to Teddy, Sammy Jenkis wasn’t married and was a fraud that Lenny proved to be pretending to not remember, and the all things about the wife and the insulin was Lenny not …show more content…
The police report could have showed that only one guy broke in Lenny’s house and that his wife survived the rape, but Lenny purposely lost pieces of the police report to make up this story that his wife was raped and killed by a John G. and Lenny made it his mission to find him. Maybe Lenny created the murder mystery for himself because when he was pushed into the mirror, knocked on his head and failed to capture his intruder, he might have felt insecure of his “masculinity” and then created the John G. character as a way to become the hero that he felt inferior to. In his own version of the story he grabbed a gun and came just in time to shoot one of the intruders, and vowed to kill the other. His one main goal was and is to find the killer and kill them in the name of his wife. He forgets anything that may contradict this superhero complex that he’s built for himself. His wife probably tried to get Lenny to stop hunting for John G. and remind him that she’s not dead but he wouldn’t remember (that would mess up his whole superhero complex). Maybe she was a diabetic that still believed that he could remember again and decided to call Lenny’s bluff by having him give her several insulin shots causing her to die (or end up in a coma). But Lenny doesn’t remember any of it maybe even purposely because no hero would