Two years before Christopher Nolan's Memento made its movie debut, Jonathan Nolan, Christopher's brother, generated an idea for a short story titled Memento Mori, which would present a meditation on time and the meaning of life. Although it took Jonathan another two years to write the story, he shared the idea with his brother. Garry Gillard explores the relationship between the two works, using the short story as an aid in processing and understanding the cognitively and emotionally difficult Memento. At the same time, Gillard examines the ways in which Memento employs different conventions of cinematography and various film genres. The driving thematic force in the movie is the concept of revenge, which allows filmmakers to play with relative moral values, simultaneously providing a remarkably feasible structure for the narrative. Nolan's film utilizes this principle to build a powerful psychological motivation for the protagonist, at the same time providing multiple opportunities for suspense to engage the audience. Memento, Gillard argues, also reflects the conventions of the crime genre and its detective subset by building the protagonist on the basis of a common genre trope an investigator who is not a police officer and is often smarter than the police themselves. Despite recognizing the ways in which Nolan uses film conventions, the author points out that Memento is unique in one aspect of its structure the very first thing we see after the film's title appears on the screen is the very last thing that occurs in the story. While many other films begin with the same situations with which they end, such as Sunset Boulevard, Gillard points out the outrageous thing about Memento is that it actually runs backwards, so that the first moment is the last. Gillard closes by drawing a parallel between the existential ruminations of the protagonists in the film and the short story as they relate to the unifying theme of living within a moment and within one's own mind. The author argues both insights are the result of meditation on the nature of experience, the nature of time, and the relationship between the two.