Introduction

To say that Memento (2000) is thought-provoking would be, at best, an understatement. One of the main reasons for this neo-noir\u27s popular success is that audiences were hooked by the very puzzles that make the film a challenging one. These puzzles occur at various levels. There is the initial question of what exactly the structure of the film is and, once this is solved, the much more difficult task of extracting the story—what actually happens in the film, and the chronological order of the fictional events—from the fragmented plot. At the same time, however, the film quite explicitly raises philosophical questions such as what makes us who we are, both at any given moment in time and across time, with an emphasis on the role of memory