Sandler, who does not specialize in humility and contrition, plays it - her condition suits him perfectly. In a way this can be seen as a condign punishment, but in another way - and this is how Mr. Suddenly the man who specialized in forgetting women, and making them forget him, finds himself in love with a woman who can’t remember him from day to day. But one day he meets a local girl, Lucy (Drew Barrymore), to whom he is unaccountably attracted and who has lost her own short-term memory because of an accident. He is a reminder that Don Juan is the prototypical amnesiac. Like him, they are presumably looking for a good time and often want to forget about it (and him) when they return home, as he always forgets about them. In this year’s 50 First Dates, for example, the hero played by Adam Sandler is a womanizer who lives in Hawaii and dates only tourists. All, however, are more or less alert to the moral implications they raise, linking them to a school of films that explore the ambiguity of our feelings toward our memories by using memory loss as metaphor. Except for Groundhog Day, these all have a certain fanciful and merely speculative quality to them that makes them seem insubstantial. A similar idea occurs in Sliding Doors and Twice Upon a Yesterday (also known as The Man with Rain in His Shoes), both of 1998, and Me Myself I of 1999. There are also a number of movies that explore the idea of people getting a “do-over” in life, the best of them all being Groundhog Day. It is naturally horrifying to think of ourselves as unable to recognize our loved ones or to remember the things that are most important to us.Īlzheimer’s itself makes a moving appearance in such films as Iris, about the English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, the Argentinean film Son of the Bride ( El Hijo de la Novia), and the forthcoming adaptation by Nick Cassavetes of a Nicholas Sparks novel, The Notebook.īut it is hard to do very much with such a theme except to show, with the help of flashbacks to better times, the pathos of what the disease can do to destroy a person with a vibrant presence - especially, as in all three of these cases, a woman - and make her into a hollow shell of a human being. On the other hand, we are terrified by the prospect of Alzheimer’s disease or permanent amnesia. To those for whom the past is a burden there is bound to be something attractive about simply shedding it - though ethical questions may also arise, as in the case of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where something like “brain-washing” is going on. Where fresh starts are a kind of national religion, and assuming that our other faculties remain more or less intact, memory-lessness is the ultimate fresh start. We like to believe that history is bunk because we don’t like being bound by it. On the one hand, America is the land of second chances. We all instinctively feel that to lose our memory is to lose ourselves, a prospect that stirs audiences with mixed feelings. But what if the people themselves don’t recognize their context? This is interesting to moviegoers who know what the characters don’t, which is the case in most such movies, or moviegoers who have to figure out the context just as the characters do, as in Memento or Mulholland Drive.īut memory is also shorthand for identity: we are our memories in a way that everyone instantly understands and that the movies have been happily exploiting at least since the classic 1942 amnesia flick, Random Harvest. The central task of the mise en scène is to place people in some context. But life as most of us experience it depends utterly on knowing who and where we are on earth, on placing ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. Human life is always writ large on the big screen. The movies are supremely realistic - surrealistic, you might almost say - in their capacity to look more like life than life does. The other reason has to do with visual paradox. One is that the movies are always and inevitably tempted by voyeurism, and exotic illnesses or injuries, including psychological ones, promise voyeuristic thrills aplenty. There are at least two good reasons why Hollywood is so fond of movies about memory loss.
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