When I go to the movies I can sometimes get into a film so deeply that I come out disoriented. I might walk outside and be shocked that it’s daylight instead of midnight. It can take a while for the pressing issues of my life to resurface in my consciousness.

As memory comes filtering back in, I’ll think “Damn! I’ve still got to write that paper tonight,” or “Oh yeah, it’s Christmas time.” And sometimes, if the movie is really absorbing – call me a sucker for cinema – I can actually come out forgetting what I look like. After spending two hours looking through the eyes of someone else, it will take a glance in my rearview mirror to remind myself whose eye sockets I’m sitting in.

“Memento” is this absorbing. It pulls us in with what might be the best movie gimmick since the brain tunnel from “Being John Malkovich.”

In “Memento,” the main character, Leonard (Guy Pearce, the goody-goody cop from “L.A. Confidential”), has lost the ability to make new memories. His short term memory is the same as yours or mine and he can remember everything before a fateful struggle with burglars that caused his condition and his wife’s death, but nothing new sticks; at least not in his memory.

Leonard writes himself notes on Polaroid photos and tattoos more important things on his body in order to bring coherence to his life. A message written in reverse across his chest reminds him “John G. raped and murdered your wife.” A snapshot in his pocket shows a man named Teddy and reads “Don’t believe his lies.”

But Leonard is always working with an incomplete picture, constantly searching backwards to uncover how he should go forward, and more pressingly, what’s going on in the present.

Since the answers in “Memento” lie in the past, the movie continually backtracks through time, ending before it began. We are given the movie in brief pieces, each about the length of time that something will stick in short-term memory. These segments proceed in reverse order, ending where the previous one began.

So, when a scene starts with Leonard jolting to consciousness in a hotel bathroom holding a near empty bottle of tequila, we are as clueless as he is about how he got there.

He thinks, “funny, I don’t feel drunk,” and proceeds to take a shower. A man comes in and he and Leonard get in a fight, but Leonard doesn’t know why. It’s not until the next scene that we see Leonard was actually hiding in ambush in the bathroom waiting for the assailant. That is, until he forgot what he was doing.

This reverse mode of storytelling is what makes “Memento” so captivating, almost frustratingly so. As a viewer, we form an instant bond with Leonard through our shared ignorance of all but the very recent past and a few cryptic notes.

Following the movie perpetually requires the same sort of rapt attention and frantic mental scrambling that Leonard’s condition forces him to exhibit.

As an edge-of-your-mind psychological thriller, “Memento” is a fresh, trippy, and highly successful addition to a tradition of film noir amnesia films (recently, Dark City).

Of course, “Memento” has a more ambitious agenda than just telling a gripping, twisty-turny mystery. It uses its engaging qualities to transfer Leonard’s epistemological and ontological questions to the audience. In a sense, Leonard has an external memory consisting of notes and pictures – memos to self.

Aren’t they also memos of self? Leonard can take pictures and write down “facts” to make himself remember and he uses them to define himself in the absence of his memory.

But it becomes clear that these aren’t necessarily any more reliable than the people who seem to be his friends. Can we trust ourselves to remember things the way they really are? Should we even bother? Perhaps who we are is not just a result of the things we do, but also how we choose to remember them.

Contrary to what Leonard says, maybe we can make the world disappear if we close our eyes.

Or if we forget.

Or go to a movie?

Disbelief isn’t that hard to suspend and sometimes it’s nice not to remember.

Ok . now, where was I going with this?

Luke Thompson is a senior in English from Fort Dodge.