The other day, I found myself struggling to remember the name of a movie that came out in 1996: The Long Kiss Goodnight, in which Geena Davis plays a mousy yuppie mom who suddenly remembers she's a CIA agent with a killer after her. And then she starts blowing things up.

I was struggling to recall it since it has pretty much the same premise as The Bourne Identity, which opened last weekend. In The Bourne Identity, of course, Matt Damon plays an amnesiac who realizes he's a CIA agent, and that killers are hunting him down. Then he starts blowing things up. The people behind the Bourne Identity may assume we won't remember, or won't care, that more or less the same plot was in America's dodecaplexes just a few years ago.

But I do think that the idea of amnesia touches some real chord in the culture right now. I think that's why Bruce Willis, whether he knows it or not, is developing his amnesia thriller, called Me Again. And why such a disproportionate number of the most talked-about movies of the last couple of years have had heroes who can't remember who they are.

Pretty bad ones, like Jim Carrey's The Majestic and Tom Cruise's Vanilla Sky. And pretty some good ones -- like Memento, in which the hero forgets everything every five minutes during his amateur-detective search for his true identity, and Mulholland Drive, in which an amnesiac starlet embarks on an amateur-detective search for her true identity. Even movies like A Beautiful Mind and The Others have heroes who are profoundly misguided about who they really are and what they're really doing.

In the 80s we had amnesia comedies like Desperately Seeking Susan and the Muppets Take Manhattan. But now we have a glut of serious amnesia thrillers. I don't think it's a coincidence.

A kind of willed forgetting is central to being an American, for better and for worse. We're something of an amnesiac country. We un-learn the foreign languages and habits of our parents and grandparents. We tear down perfectly good old buildings and streets to build brand new ones. Our way of life, more than anywhere else on earth, is all about the freedom to reinvent ourselves. And reinvention is lots easier if you erase the vestigial memories of who you used to be.

This happy national knack for forgetting anything that happened more than fifteen minutes ago has been amped up, I think, during the last few years. The turn of the century, with its inevitable sense of a big clean slate was part of it. Our culture's flibbertigibbet obsession with speed and the now has gotten even more manic in this age of the 24/7 internet and digital everything. And if we're obsessed with right now, the details of yesterday and the day before tend to blur and fade.

For the last couple of years, since the end of the 90s stock market boom, lots of people feel as though they're waking up, recovering the memory of pre-bubble normal life. And if it's trauma that causes amnesia -- as it always does in the movies -- it makes sense that the events of September 11th, the day that everyone said "changed everything," would make these strange, dark movies about amnesia seem uncannily, ineffably relevant to the zeitgeist.

After all, Hollywood's first great movie about amnesia, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, came out during the final days of the Second World War, in 1945. Remember?

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.

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