The Amnesiac Explained
There’s a trope that Hollywood keeps coming back to over and over again, almost like it can’t quite remember how many times it’s already used it… amnesia. So often short or long-term memory loss is used in stories to help create mystery or give a character a thematic hurdle to overcome. But memory loss in real life isn’t much like what we see on screen – while people do sometimes lose their memories (or, more often, just have trouble creating new memories) the kind of complete memory loss we see onscreen is extremely rare. So what are the real thematic reasons filmmakers keep returning to their exaggerated vision of amnesia, time and again? Here’s our Take.
Did Hollywood Forget How Amnesia Works?
Amnesia in real life is pretty much nothing like how it’s portrayed on screen. Clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale has debunked a lot of the amnesia we see onscreen as ‘neurologically improbable’. She says that some of the most popular movies about amnesiacs bear absolutely ‘no relation to any known condition’ – calling out memory loss classic 50 First Dates as an example.
In the real world, people are most likely to suffer from amnesia after medical incidents affecting the brain - like strokes, brain surgery, or infections. But in film, the root cause of amnesia tends to be a dramatic accident or assault. While post-traumatic amnesia can happen under these conditions, the main fallacy of Hollywood’s portrayals is that the people involved in these accidents end up with almost no recollection of who they are. What this tends to boil down to is that it’s often convenient for movie plots, and allows writers to teach the amnesiac a lesson. Thus the trope is born, stemming back to The Right of Way, a lost silent film from 1915, where the snobbish, mean lead character is assaulted and becomes a happy-go-lucky guy. And this specific pattern has carried on for over a century of cinema – take 1987’s Overboard, where the rich snob played by Goldie Hawn learns the importance of not being an uptight brat after an accident causes her to lose her memory of her fancy life. We’ve even seen this specific memory-loss-makes-you-a-better-person version of the trope again recently in both the Overboard remake and the Lindsay Lohan film Falling for Christmas.
But there are some amnesiac movies that accurately portray memory loss. Memento shows a type of amnesia called severe anterograde amnesia – Guy Pearce’s character Leonard doesn’t forget who he is, he just struggles to keep track of what’s happening day-to-day. Another is, surprisingly, Dory in Finding Nemo. Baxendale writes that Dory’s “difficulties in learning and retaining any new information, recalling names, and knowing where she is going or why” are all actual symptoms of profound amnesia. And more recently, The Vow turned a real-life case into a movie – with Rachel McAdams portraying Paige, a fictionalized version of Krickitt Carpenter, a woman who lost several years worth of memories after an accident and had to work to rebuild her sense of self and marriage. Yet these more accurate stories are truly few and far between.
Why Writers Love To Use This Trope
So why do filmmakers continue to use the highly unrealistic version of amnesia so often?
One theory is that they use the amnesiac because it sets them up with a blank slate – and a character who provides one or all of the following:
In movies like Mulholland Drive, Memento and the Bourne trilogy, a main characters’ full memory loss means that we, too, are constantly guessing about aspects of their past. The way amnesia is crafted in many of these movies provides the ultimate mystery, but also plays with our own deeper fears about loss of identity.
Mystery
Many of the amnesiacs in movies become more vulnerable in one way or another when they lose their memories. Take Jason Bourne: he’s a trained assassin, and has muscle memory of how to fight and carry out complex surveillance jobs, and intricate knowledge on how to evade capture – yet he can’t remember his true identity or important aspects of his personal life, which puts him in danger. Meanwhile, in movies like The Vow, Paige’s vulnerability is used to set up the positive idea that we’re bound to one true love, who we’ll find, again and again, no matter what. In Overboard, Joanna is powerful and mean before falling off her boat – and once she’s a vulnerable amnesiac, she’s exploited by Dean (although it’s played as a comic romance.) But through this experience, she becomes a better person – which is another key type of amnesiac storyline…
Vulnerability
Many onscreen amnesiacs experience total personality switches – with their journeys of self-discovery taking them from being selfish and unkind to sweet and gentle, to serve as proof that bad people can change for the better. And this makes a great device in movies because it provides us with plot points – of people discovering who they loved, or bad things they’ve done, or that have been done to them – that the characters must face head-on and overcome.
Capacity for Change
In life it’s impossible for us to ever know as much about a person as they do themself, so in a way, the amnesiac fulfills our need to know another’s true interiority while also letting us enjoy a mystery. Film theorist David Bordwell says that, in order to be successful, ‘stories demand gaps in knowledge’. Whether we have some key information certain characters don’t or they know more than we do, this provides a hook for a setup and payoff. One of the biggest pitfalls of storytelling is allowing audiences to get ahead of the story, already anticipating or knowing far more than they should as opposed to drip-feeding key bits of information that can propel the story forward while still providing some sense of intrigue of where things could develop next or why some condition exists. So the amnesiac gives us a unique participational experience, where we’re able to care for the character as much as we’re curious about them. All discoveries about the character are more immediate because the discoveries don’t just belong to us, but to the character as well. And depending on the genre, hilarity, tragedy or horror ensues as the truths of their life are revealed.
There’s also the fact that, because they have no memories, what happens in the film is likely to be formative for our characters. Neurobiologist Mo Costandi writes in the Guardian that: “studies suggest that our ability to imagine future events is dependent on the reconstructive nature of memory - we simulate events that have not yet taken place by stitching together fragments of memories of past events.” As viewers, we can’t fathom life, really, without our memories – and these characters are making their only memories in front of us. Plus, we get the excitement of finally figuring out who or what they were before. This is often the big twist – and it sometimes means having to make the hard decision to either return to their old life or continue on in the new one they’ve built, so our emotions - and theirs - are heightened.
The Tropes Main Takeaways
For some characters, like Jason Bourne and Eleven from Stranger Things, being stripped of their core memories at first makes them superhuman in some way – like their memories made them weak and fallible, and without them, they’re capable of so much more. But this erasure of their true selves also causes them a lot of pain, and to achieve their most powerful state, they must in fact remember everything. This makes sense in many ways – both of these characters have been reset to become more like machines, taking away a key part of what it is to be human. In fact, in Stranger Things, recovering memory plays a crucial part in the return of Eleven’s powers.
Amnesia on screen can also be used to show us how important all of our experiences are, even the bad ones. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Mulholland Drive, we’re shown that if we don’t have memories, we only have half the story. Without the full truth, we can make ourselves believe in an alternative reality or sugarcoat what really happened as a means of self-protection. Amnesiac characters are often unreliable narrators, and so much of the tension of the film comes from them, and us, having to find out and confront things they’d maybe rather not think about. But through all of this stress, we come to understand the true importance that every puzzle piece of memory plays in all of our lives.
Perhaps the most appealing part of the amnesiac’s story, above mystery and intrigue, is often that they give us comfort – that with a blank slate, everything will always somehow turn out OK in the end. Sometimes, the amnesiac character makes completely different decisions post-memory loss – showing us that we’re capable of taking a different path and becoming a different, better person. Other times, they go down the same path they did before they lost their memory: fall in love with the same person, and pursue the same career. This, too, gives viewers comfort – the idea that fate is really in control, and if something (or someone) is meant for you, you’ll always find a way to each other.
Conclusion
There are few tropes that are as perfectly tailor-made for movie mystery as Hollywood amnesia. Following someone with memory loss through a narrative can be confusing, stressful, and frustrating, as we’re learning about them and the world they inhabit, with them. But it’s also illuminating. ‘Who would I be, if I wasn’t me?’ That’s the question that the amnesiac character poses. If we forget what makes us us, what do we lose? Some stories tell us that we shed an important part of ourselves. But others frame it more positively – when we lose our memories, we get the opportunity to make new ones, to go on new adventures. And in discovering who we were, we can make who we are better – or, perhaps we’ll end up realizing that we always had what we really needed all along.
Sources
Costandi, Mo. “Memories and Amnesia in the Movies” The Guardian, 13 Feb 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2012/feb/13/1
Baxendale, Sallie. “Memories aren’t made of this: amnesia at the movies” National Library of Medicine, 18 Dec 2004 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC535990/#:~:text=Amnesia%20not%20only%20frequently%20results%20in%20a%20loss,involves%20a%20complete%20shift%20in%20values%20and%20behaviour.
Bordwell, David. “The Amnesia Plot” Lapham’s Quarterly, 25 Oct 2017 https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/amnesia-plot
Carr, Kevin. “Here’s What Movies Get Right — And Wrong — About Amnesia” Insider, 1 Jul 2014 https://www.businessinsider.com/amnesia-in-movies-2014-7?r=US&IR=T
Stivers, Clint. “The Perils of Fantasy: Memory and Desire in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive” Senses of Cinema, Jun 2014 https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2014/feature-articles/the-perils-of-fantasy-memory-and-desire-in-david-lynchs-mulholland-drive/