Cinematic victimology as phenomenology: Memento as Stuck in Time

This paper develops a theoretical framework for cinematic victimology as phenomenology. We argue that cinematic fiction can offer insight into the experience of victimisation that is difficult to access through standard victimological methods, given the double hermeneutic that shapes both the telling and the interpretation of victim experience. Drawing on McGregor’s tripartite framework for the criminological value of narrative fiction, we contend that fiction’s phenomenological value for victimology is not parallel to its mimetic and counterfactual qualities but is constituted by their interplay. The mimetic quality of film immerses the viewer in experiential detail; its counterfactual quality performs a function analogous to a phenomenological epoché, suspending the viewer’s ordinary evaluative stance towards victims and creating the conditions under which the structure of victimisation can be attended to from within. Together they generate experiential knowledge that neither delivers alone. We develop this argument through an analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Memento . Its reverse chronology simultaneously reproduces the protagonist’s epistemic condition in the viewer and strips the viewer of the retrospective coherence that would ordinarily allow evaluation from outside. Leonard Shelby’s inability to form new memories serves as a limit case for key features of the phenomenology of victimisation: temporal confinement, the destruction of connection, and the complexity of re-storying. His revenge quest, isolated from the considerations that ordinarily complicate it by his condition, reveals revenge as primarily concerned with the avenger’s own shattered identity rather than with the relationship with the offender. It is an ultimately contradictory attempt to structure identity. The analysis demonstrates that cinematic fiction can serve as a methodological instrument for accessing the victim experience.