Memento is simultaneously the ultimate stoner film, a noirish thriller and a brilliantly enacted investigation of the philosophical questions of time and memory. Remembering, the film makes clear, is not simply the opposite of forgetting. Forgetting, as Pynchon observed of ignorance, is not just a blank on the map; it has its own contours and laws, its own hunger. It is forgetting, after all, that makes memory possible. Total recall is close to complete amnesia. In Borges‘ famous story “Funes, His Memory,” the character who remembers everything -- “not only every leaf or every tree in every path of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf” -- ends up like Shelby, who remembers nothing: “His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.”

Working from a short story by his brother, Jonathan Nolan, this newcomer has created a perfect movie: perfect in its form (witness the absolute "movieness" of its segmented takes, its backward logic, its pieced-together, visualized version of memory) and perfect in its measured effect on us. Memento gives us exactly as much as we are capable of absorbing and using-no more, no less. It cups us in its hands, plays with us for the duration, and then sets us free by allowing us to spring the catch.