Trusting Teddy’s side of the story seems like a most plausible thing.However, in both scenarios, there are few assumptions that should be considered as ‘fact’.1) Lenny’s wife, Catherine, is dead2) Lenny and his wife was attacked by two men; Leonard killed one attacker, and the other escaped. He’s been looking for the second attacker ever since.But honestly, why should we trust these assumptions? What if Lenny has a severe mental illness? If that’s the case, then we really shouldn’t trust anything Lenny tells us. Both the attack and Sammy Jankis story happened before his amnesia. Whether Sammy Jankis’s story is true or not has been a debate ever since the movie came out, but no one argued against Lenny’s story of attack. But how do we know if attack ever happened? And how do we know if his wife ever died? We hear everything from Lenny’s perspective, and the only other person who seems to know about the attack is Teddy. Seeing that Teddy himself is a mysterious character, we really can’t assume anything as ‘facts’.I know that these things sound ridiculous. I go with most people that Teddy’s story is most reliable, and that Lenny has been repeating the murder throughout the years. I just wanted to point out that debating as to whether which interpretation is ‘the truth’ is quite meaningless. Truth is relative and prone to change depending on perspectives. In real life, what we see as truth might not be viewed same from other perspectives. We conceive something as truth, only if we believe in them. But what if we only believe in something because society and institution manipulated us to do so? In that sense, we can interpret Leonard as one of us who has been taken advantage of by outside force, such as Teddy, Natalie and even minor characters like motel manager. None of the interpretation in the movie is a lie. Whoever’s story we believe in becomes the truth.
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