Memento

Memento is my favorite of all the films that Christopher Nolan has directed. It was based on a short story that his brother had written, which I have also read. The film's a very successful adaptation of the story, and the story itself is one of the most interesting and engaging setups in cinema, in my opinion. The protagonist has retrogade amnesia, and therefore is unable to make any short-term memories after being attacked by burglars. He now spends his days performing his own investigating, to the best that he can, as his wife was raped and murdered in the attack, and he believes that one of the attackers got away.

The fact that the opening scene was actually the ending scene was a really brave and interesting choice. It also definitely set up the tone and plot structure for the rest of the film. Having to figure out the story in reverse (As that's how it is shown to us) is very similar to how the main character has to figure out his memories by looking at them in retrospect after having forgotten them. The way that this film was made to replicate and correspond to the ideas of forgetting and repeating time was brilliantly done.

The temporal labyrinth is in the narrator's own mind. He even sets up his own obstacles for himself. In the end, when it is revealed that the narrator found and killed the real attacker long ago, and that he actually chooses to forget in order to continue the only semblance of a life that he knew how to live now with his condition and his wife gone, that to me was the most interesting component of the whole story. The actor who portrayed the protagonist was so charismatic, and the protagonist himself so likable, that this reveal almost ruined the experience of the film for me when I first watched it several years ago. However, now, I am able to appreciate the aspect of an unhappy ending, and it's added that much more to the film for me.

Labyrinth

The Circular Ruins was a very intriguing read for me. I thought that it was beautifully and lucidly written despite the subject matter being all about dreams. The narrator goes through dream sequences attempting to "dream a man," the perfect, idealized man. Immortality is referenced and achieved in the story through the process of cloning, The narrator seeks immortality by dreaming up his own son by visualizing a beating heart. In the end though, the narrator eventually realizes that he himself is just the product of a dream, from another person. The labyrinth in this story is metaphorical and temporal. It all takes place within the world of a dreamscape.

The second story, The Library of Babel, also contains a metaphorical and temporal labyrinth. In this story, a library functions as a metaphor for the universe. The narrator talks of spending his youth, like most others, in search of a book within the library. The books in the library supposedly contain every possible combination of the characters in the alphabet. However, because of the massive wealth of information, many of the readers in the library feel despair, and actively try to destroy books. Others believe that a messiah of sorts exists as a figure who read and has access to a book that perfectly indexes the library's contents. I rather like this idea of a library as a a labyrinth. Visually, it works very well, with the endless shelves filled with endless scores of text.

The tale of Sisyphus contains the most literal representation of a labyrinth out of all the stories. His labyrinth is also the most inescapable and inevitable. He was doomed to roll a massive boulder to the top of a steep hill, however, before reaching the peak, the stone would always roll back down. Although this is a labyrinth, it's much more simpler in structure than the labyrinth in the other stories. While the other stories contained labyrinths that could be traversed, navigated, and even journeyed through, Sisyphus's labyrinth just functions as eternal punishment.