So you lie to yourself to be happy. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all do it.
Leonard, Memento
Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir breakout film Memento (2000) is a fun movie, if nothing else. It feels more like a game of detective than a narrative. Leonard (Guy Pierce) doesn’t know what the hell is going on, leaving you to use his clues to figure out the mystery for him. It takes all the trappings of classical noir and amplifies it. The trope of the smooth-talking, broken and solitary antihero is turned into a psychotic villain. The mystery becomes a twist within a twist. The love interest, Natalie, is an earned femme fatal. She calls someone with a serious handicap a “fucking retard” because he won’t kill her ex boyfriend.
Memento has all of the lying and deceit in noir but lacks classical cinema’s graceful way of speaking, making the modernized version feel more brutal. The big takeaway from the film is to not trust anybody, including yourself. It shows the fallibility and inherent bias of memory.
The film loves the color blue. It’s the color of Leonard’s wardrobe, the color of his hotel room, and the color prominent in a revelatory scene, shot inside a bar called The Blue Room.
The Blue Room is Burbank’s oldest bar and has kept its design, circa 1950, of leather booths and wood paneling. Bars are essential to the hardboiled detective genre and the retro feel of this one brings us back to the more classical noir films.
The scene in The Blue Room provides one of the first big clues in the reverse-chronological film. Our hardboiled detective, Leonard, walks into the bar alone, chiseled-face scratched, for a mid-day beer.
Natalie stands behind the bar. She’s wary of Leonard. We see that she clearly despises him and that she has a boyfriend she likes, yet we’ve seen her and Leonard in prior scenes (remember, in reverse-chronological order) as lovers. This signals to not trust her.
There’s a lot of mirrors in the bar, which are used repeatedly in the scenes with Leonard and Natalie.
Looking into the mirror, in cinema, is supposed to reveal truth because the action of looking at yourself is representative of confronting who you really are. However, Leonard is really bad at this. Natalie is using him, but despite numerous warnings, he’s unable to see her for who she really is. But don’t feel bad for Leonard because he also can’t see himself for who he truly is. He chooses to live in a false reality. He will go down any path, no matter how dangerous or corrupt, as long as he doesn’t have to face up to his involvement in his wife’s death.
You can watch the scene here :
While bars are a staple of noir films, I think it’s an especially fitting location for this one. Bars are a place to escape reality, forget about problems. While you’re aware that the alcohol is a flawed temporary remedy, it still feels good going down. The Blue Room, with its dark lighting and unassuming ambience, is a bar you can go to for a cold one after a rough day. The inhabitants won’t judge you and the beer will make you stop judging yourself.
I’ve been to it once before. I met a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile. It was just us two on the barstools all night. While we may be obnoxious at times while liquored up, that night we were quite charming. The bartender enjoyed our company and gave us both a chip that would get us a free beer the next time we came in.
Or, maybe my memory is off. Maybe we were obnoxious and only I found the interaction to be charming. Maybe the bartender gave us the chip as a signal to go home. What I know for certain is that I have the chip. And I’ll finally get to use it next week when I go for Part II: Inside The Blue Room.
Fun Fact: Guy Pierce! He was also in the film featured in the first film of this noir series, LA Confidential.
Here’s him shirtless with a crazy mustache and of him with a baby tiger.
Frolicing Rooms 