ABSTRACT
As we work out the story told backwards in Memento, we decode layers of history built in to artifacts and bodies, often in wayward forms or through deviant causal pathways. Struggling to make sense of the events revealed in the reverse sequence of color scenes, we partly share Leonard’s inability explicitly to grasp or tap into that history. This primary narrative device rests on and coexists with a whole range of clues and residues of “actual” fictional-world time, little revelations of the asymmetric causal structure of reality: scars open up, clothes and cars get cleaner.
