ABSTRACT
The philosophical literature on the relationship between love and death is practically nonexistent perhaps it is too bizarre to put life’s greatest good together with life’s greatest evil in the same thought. Each of the Before movies plays out the memento mori theme in a different way, although all of them enjoin us to be ‘presentists’ to beat the temporal by staying in the now of love. Besides appearing on the cover of Céline’s book, in Jesse’s description of his great-grandmother’s ghost, and in their visit to the graveyard, the topic of death emerges throughout their dialogue. In Before Sunset, Jesse and Céline had to face the nervousness of the re-encounter and the anxiety over whether there would still be a connection, so some stiltedness and some showing off are still explainable by the circumstances. Time and death are still themes explicit in the dialogue, but now the dialogue is between Jesse and the other men.
