Who Was Sammy Jankis In Memento & Did He Kill His Wife?

Sammy, who’s played by Stephen Tobolowsky in Memento years decades before his roles in Silicon Valley and One Day at a Time, was a claimant that Leonard refused insurance in his previous job. Sammy appeared to have anterograde amnesia, a condition which meant he couldn’t form new memories following a car accident that purportedly left him with brain trauma. He didn’t seem able to remember anything that happened after the accident for more than a couple of minutes. According to Leonard, Sammy’s condition led him to kill his wife by accident, when she tested his memory by repeatedly asking for insulin injections for her diabetes despite having just been injected by her husband.

Sammy Jankis Was A Real Person (But He Didn’t Have A Wife)

Leonard’s Version Of Sammy’s Story Isn’t True

A crucial scene in Memento reveals Leonard’s story to be false, however. Teddy, the police detective who helped Leonard track down his own wife’s killer, explains to him that he’s been confusing Sammy’s story with his own. Sammy Jankis was indeed a potential client whose insurance claim Leonard refused, but the other details of Leonard’s story about him are, in fact, related to Leonard’s own life. “Sammy didn't have a wife,” Teddy tells Leonard. “It was your wife who had diabetes."

In Guy Pearce’s best moment as Leonard in Memento, he looks at Teddy in confusion and horror as he tries to process this new information, via memories long since erased due to his own anterograde amnesia. Images of Leonard’s dead wife flash across the screen. As he repeats, “My wife wasn’t diabetic,” two different versions of the same scene play back-to-back: one in which he injects his wife with insulin, and the other in which he pinches her in the same spot, while she reacts in the same way. It’s left to the audience to decide which version is true, but we’re inclined to doubt Leonard’s failing memory and believe Teddy’s revelation.

The Real Sammy Jankis Was Faking His Condition According To Teddy

He Was The Fraudster Leonard Had Thought He Was

The actual Sammy Jankis, meanwhile, was precisely the con man that Leonard had accused him of being. He’d been faking his condition to commit insurance fraud. “You exposed him for what he was,” Teddy confirms to Leonard. When Leonard was tasked with investigating Sammy’s claim, he noticed a “slight look of recognition” in Sammy’s eyes while talking to him, and became convinced he was lying about his anterograde memory-loss. He prescribed Sammy with a “conditioning” test to prove that he didn’t have the condition he said he did.

Although Sammy failed the test, which proved in medical terms that he wasn’t an amnesiac, Leonard remembered the story as a tragic one, in which he himself had simply found a loophole to refuse Sammy’s perfectly valid claim. According to Leonard, his professional commitment to invalidate Sammy’s claim led Sammy’s wife to suspect her husband of lying when he wasn’t, which motivated her to implicate Sammy in a terrible tragedy he had no control over.

In fact, this version of the story was of Leonard’s own making, as he projected the guilt he felt for accidentally injecting his own wife with a fatal dose of insulin onto Sammy Jankis’ insurance case. While Sammy Jankis isn’t a completely imaginary character in the movie, he had nothing to do with this incident, which explains the earlier plothole of Leonard somehow knowing what Sammy had accidentally done to his wife, according to his own version of events.

Why Leonard Came Up With The Sammy Jankis Story In Memento

It Was Easier Than Facing The Truth

When the story of Sammy Jankis is first told, it appears to serve a purely practical purpose for Leonard’s anterograde amnesia, in a key difference from the short story on which Memento is based. “I guess I tell people about Sammy to help them understand,” he says, identifying the condition Jankis claimed to have with his own. “Sammy's story helps me understand my own situation,” he then adds. This second part of his explanation for the story is far more profound, primarily because it articulates the paralyzing state of confusion that Leonard’s condition perpetually leaves him in.

There’s another meaning to what he says, though, in light of Teddy’s revelation that the Sammy Jankis story is actually about Leonard’s own life. The story is essentially a falsehood, which serves as an unreliable version of Leonard’s memory. Throughout Memento, he’s plagued by unexplained feelings of guilt that only make sense once we learn the truth about what happened to his diabetic wife. By projecting the traumatic story of his wife’s death onto Sammy Jankis, he alleviates his guilt and escapes the suffering it causes him by passing it off as someone else’s.

What Memento’s “Remember Sammy Jankis” Really Means

It Also Means Forgetting Leonard Shelby

Leonard Shelby has the words “Remember Sammy Jankis” carved on his hand so that when he loses his short-term memory, he can once again remind himself of Sammy’s story. For most of the movie, this story simply appears to ground him in a basic understanding of his own condition, but by the end of Memento, it’s revealed to be the lie that keeps him going.

“Remember Sammy Jankis” is actually Leonard’s reminder to keep lying to himself. His condition seems to make him an innocent victim of his own health in this regard. Yet, in metaphorical terms at the very least, it serves as an extreme example of the lies that everyone tells themselves to make sense of their actions, relieve themselves from the worst of their feelings, and continue living with a sense of purpose.

As Leonard says in Memento’s final scene, "I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them." Therefore, he has to keep lying to himself via the Sammy Jankis story, in order to validate his quest to avenge his dead wife. The story allows him to continue turning his feelings of anger outwards and aiming it at others, rather than inwards at himself.