March 19, 2001 [Memento]

Leonard in Memento has lost his memory--but he can still see his wife’s rape and murder, a memento mori that sends him into a crime movie along a dark passage with a narrow margin to a lonely place where the sidewalk ends and the force of evil makes him die each dawn--only to wake up screaming the burning secret that emerges out of the fog--only to fade, a woman’s face barely visible in his journey into fear with nothing but detours and strange illusions hiding in the dark corner, the blind spot out of the past in a whispering city where he walks alone by night along a street with no name down a crooked mile to the ends of the earth--and back to the scene of the crime, trapped in a whirlpool, an undertow to the edge of doom with no way out, as though quicksand had drowned the raging tide so that the unknown man can set a steel trap without warning--in which the last witness to murder, who has died a thousand times, cries in the night and in fury falls upon what may or may not be the wrong man.