Summary
Black-and-white. Leonard is on the phone as he pulls a bandage off his arm to reveal a tattoo that says, "Never Answer the Phone." He stops short and asks, "Who is this?" The person on the other end hangs up.
Color. We see Leonard in Natalie's house, telling himself to write something down. Suddenly he hears her car door slam as she gets home. She comes inside with a bloody nose and a bruise on her cheek. "Dodd beat the shit out of me," she says, upset. She gets angry at Leonard, telling him that Dodd is mad at her because she did what Leonard told her to do. She tells him Dodd is mad at her because she told him about Teddy.
Calming her down, Leonard gets Natalie some ice for her face. Natalie tells Leonard that she went to Dodd and told him she didn't have any of Jimmy's money and that "Teddy" must have taken everything. When Leonard asks what Dodd's response was, Natalie tells him, "He didn't believe me. He said if I don't have the drugs by tomorrow, he's going to kill me and then he just started hitting me." Leonard offers to go after Dodd on Natalie's behalf, but she warns him that Dodd will kill him.
Natalie wants to talk about something else, but Leonard is intent on beating up Dodd. "He'll probably find you, I told him about your car...I had to tell him something," Natalie says. He tells her to write everything down and leaves.
Black-and-white. The phone rings in Leonard's motel room. He picks it up and hangs up immediately, before calling down to the front desk and asking Burt to hold all his calls.
Color. Leonard is sitting on Natalie's couch when suddenly she comes in, upset about the fact that someone named Dodd thinks she has someone named Jimmy's money. When Leonard cannot remember anything, Natalie becomes angry and tells Leonard that Jimmy went to meet someone named Teddy, had a lot of money, and never came back. She then offers Leonard money to kill Dodd.
Leonard tells Natalie he cannot kill for money and she becomes enraged, annoyed that he will not help her, and frustrated that he cannot remember anything. She tries to get him angry, then says, "I'm gonna use you. I'm telling you now because I'm gonna enjoy it so much more if I knew that you could stop me if you weren't such a fucking freak."
She continues to berate him until he grabs her face and causes her lip to bleed. Natalie is undeterred and says, "You know what one of the causes of short-term memory loss is? Venereal disease." She suggests that perhaps Leonard's wife was having an affair and gave him a disease that caused his condition. She taunts him until he punches her in the face. She falls to the ground and smiles at him, before leaving the house and going outside to sit in her car. He becomes anxious trying to find a pen to write down what just happened, but he cannot find a pen. Natalie waits in the car until Leonard has forgotten what happened, then comes inside.
Black-and-white. Leonard puts a glass up to the wall, paranoid. Suddenly Burt knocks on the front door and tells Leonard that there's a cop on the phone who thinks Leonard will want to know what he has to say. Leonard closes the door, telling Burt that he isn't good on the phone.
Color. We see Leonard arriving at Natalie's house. She tells him he can sleep on the couch and asks how long it will take him to find the guy who killed his wife. Leonard pulls out a file and consults it, as Natalie asks why the police haven't found the guy for Leonard if he has a file's worth of information. "They don't think he exists," Leonard tells her.
Leonard recounts the night of his wife's death. He was asleep, and the sound of shattering woke him up. We see Leonard in flashback, hearing a struggle in the bathroom and grabbing a gun from the closet. He breaks down the bathroom door and finds a stranger raping his wife, who is wrapped in a shower curtain. He shoots the stranger and runs to his wife, but another masked man grabs him and throws Leonard into the mirror, knocking him unconscious. Leonard falls to the ground, his head bleeding.
The scene shifts back to Leonard recounting the story to Natalie. "There had to be a second man," Leonard insists, and she asks how the police explain what Leonard remembers. "John G. was clever. He took the dead man's gun, he replaced it with the sap that he hit me with," Leonard explains. "I was the only guy who disagreed with the facts, and I had brain damage," Leonard says.
Natalie tells Leonard he can stay there, but that she has to go to work. As she goes to leave, he takes a photo of her, and she tells him her name is Natalie. After she leaves, he watches television and notices the tattoo on his hand, "Remember Sammy Jankis."
Black-and-white. Leonard sits in his hotel room as the phone rings. He lets it ring until it stops, when suddenly someone slips an envelope under his door. The envelope says, "Take my call," and inside it is a Polaroid of Leonard, smiling and pointing at his heart. The phone rings again.
Color. Leonard is at the bar where Natalie works. As she gives him a drink on the house, she says, "You really do have a problem, just like that cop said," referring to his condition. He tells her that the last thing he remembers is his wife dying.
Black-and-white. Leonard answers the phone and says, "I know you're a cop, but what do you want? Have I done something wrong?"
Color. Leonard sits in his car and looks at the back of a coaster from the place Natalie works, Ferdy's, that reads, "Come by after, Natalie." He goes to the bar and orders a beer. Natalie tells him he cannot just come into the bar dressed like that, and informs him that she is the Natalie that he's meeting. When he explains his condition, Natalie tells him that she heard about him, "the memory guy," from her boyfriend, Jimmy Grantz. She then tells Leonard that a cop came by earlier looking for him. "Are you Teddy? Did Teddy send you?" she asks, but Leonard doesn't know.
"What's happened to Jimmy?" she asks, and when he says he doesn't she asks, "You don't remember anything? You don't remember where you've been or what you've just done?" He shows her the coaster, his reason for coming to the bar, and she takes it from him. She pours a beer for Leonard, then asks a man nearby to spit in it, before bringing it to Leonard and asking him to spit in it. After he does, she spits in it herself. After stirring it, she takes it away and Leonard goes to a booth to look at his Polaroids. A few moments later, Natalie brings him the beer and he drinks it, not recognizing it as the one that has spit in it.
Analysis
A shocking revelation takes place when Leonard, in the middle of a long phone conversation, looks down at his arm and notices a tattoo that reads, "Never Answer the Phone." When he asks the caller who they are, they abruptly hang up. For much of the film hitherto, it has seemed that the person on the other end of the phone was a confidant for Leonard, a person who was able to listen to Leonard's plight. Thus, it is all the more shocking when Leonard discovers a note from himself reminding him not to do the very thing he is doing.
In the beginning of this section of the film, it is impossible to know who to trust. While it would seem like a movie that starts at the end would give more clues as to how things shake out, Memento is structured around complication and mistrust, and matters are barely more legible than they were in the first moments of the film. One moment it seems that Teddy is Leonard's only friend, the next that Natalie is out to protect him. Leonard has no grasp of who to trust, and because of the structure of the film, the audience is in the dark as well.
More information comes to light when we realize that Natalie is more manipulative than she seemed initially. When Leonard refuses to kill Dodd for her, she becomes irate, belittling him, insulting the memory of his wife, and even explicitly telling him that she plans to use him, which will be all the more pleasurable for her because he will not understand.
In this section of the film, we finally get more information about the night of Leonard's wife's death. In flashback, we see the incident from Leonard's point of view, and the horrors he faced that night. The scene is surreal and menacing, the two masked men subduing Leonard's helpless wife and then throwing Leonard against a medicine cabinet. The incident is indeed traumatic, a life-altering nightmare in Leonard's mind.
The structure of the film, its fragmentation, reverse order, and quick splicing together of two different plots about the same man, pulls the audience in in an unusual and intriguing way. Because information can only be revealed in small bits, and nothing is as it seems, the viewer is placed in the same position as Leonard, forced to cobble together bits of information as it comes along, barely able to make cumulative strides in logic. In the midst of a story that features so much mistrust, the viewer must invest a great deal of trust in the plot's ability to add up, the promise that by the end, all will be made clear.
