Essay on Exploring How Audiences Decode the Narrative of...

Exploring How Audiences Decode the Narrative of Memento The decoding process is a method in which audiences of any kind of media material breaks it down and eventually understands to what it is. An easy example of a decoding process would be to look at a simple narrative which is found mostly in fairy tales; these are the easiest as they have been designed for children and are not complex and contain no real hard understanding. Yet our subject film is very different from a fairy tale in a lot of respects yet the most obvious would be the use of time and the order of the story, which is completely in reverse going from the end towards the beginning and not chronological at all. Todorovs†¦show more content†¦Enigma codes are strive and very important to Momento every scene has them and it is only in the next scene backwards or perhaps the one after that we recognize and find out the answer to a quandary we perhaps had for the story. Characters and the roles they play are covered by the theorist Propp who contested there are only a certain number of characters that pop up in the majority of narratives. Propps list of character types are not all present, although in our film the cast do fill roles described by Propp. Our perspective of characters intentions and motives are changing throughout; an example is Teddy who we firstly see as a victim, then we have the impression that he is actually a killer and that his murder was justified, only to find that our first thoughts were true and he is completely a victim. Mr. Levi Strauss theory on binary oppositions can be seen within this film; the most obvious one being vulnerability/ strength. Our main character is very vulnerable because of his condition and this has him abused by those he takes for friends and leaves him very puzzled sometimes. The makers highlight our understanding of his condition here and this method is an attempt to show the audience the severity of his problem. It is otherwise difficult to find any others and if there were I dont believe they would help us understand