Writing for Film Fisher, Tom Upjohn says that the point of Memento is clear: Truth is knowable, and the truth is that life is meaningless. Leonard is able to find his wife’s killer, but his revenge doesn’t make him happy, so he continues to make new mysteries for himself to solve. It’s so important for him to believe in something that he makes it up. At the end of the movie, Leonard more or less says exactly this: “I have to believe in the world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.” According to Upjohn, Memento is a cynical and nihilistic in its portrayal of how the world works.
Upjohn admits that Nolan doesn’t usually follow the cynicism and nihilism to its logical end. Many of his films are actually fairly optimistic (The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk), though some of them (Inception) rest explicitly on the assumption that meaning is what we make it to be. If a pinwheel means something to me, I can call it meaningful, and change my actions to suit that meaning.
What complicates Upjohn’s review (and worldview-oriented movie reviews in general) is that all of Nolan’s movies are actually about movies. I suspect that Nolan is agnostic when it comes to “objective meaning” in real life. What actually interests him is how movies work, technically and emotionally. I learned this from a review of Inception written in [year] by [blogger]. When all the evidence is laid out, the conclusion that Inception is a movie about movies is inescapable.
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