50 First Dates - Short Term Memory Loss in the Movies

my rating:

I'm going to toss out any journalistic integrity I might have had, and review a movie I haven't seen. I might rent it someday out of morbid curiosity, but I really don't want to see 50 First Dates, despite the fact that there's something about it that draws me in.

It's not that I have a thing for Sandler... Quite the contrary. I haven't enjoyed an Adam Sandler movie since The Wedding Singer (and I've been dragged to a bunch of them), and I think that one was just a fluke. I'm convinced that one has to have a streak of self-loathing masochism to enjoy sitting through two hours of Sandler screaming and whining and smirking and thinking it's cute, like an over-sized 11-year-old. (Ditto for any moview with Rob Schneider, who doesn't even have Sandler's not-so-bad looks.) The previews for this movie send a pretty clear message of what this movie will be like. The fact that it's opening "unopposed" as the Valentine's "date movie" for 2004 is disturbing on so many levels.

No, I'm drawn to this movie because of Drew. No, not Ms. Barrymore, but Andrew, my former boyfriend.

Andy suffers from short-term memory loss. Like Barrymore's character in this film, he doesn't remember yesterday. He doesn't even remember an hour ago. He lives constantly in the present, and almost entirely in the past. In his case it's due to brain damage from a bleeding blood vessel in his brain. (The character in the movie got hers from an accident of some kind.)

Another key difference is that Andy's brain trauma happened after we'd been boyfriends for 6 or 7 years, and the movie character's happens before Sandler's character first meets her. The schtick of the film is that he falls in love with her without knowing that she won't remember him the next day, so he spends the whole movie getting her to fall in love with him (starting from scratch) every time they meet. "Aw, isn't that sweet!" we're to say, as the doofy schlep carries on his sysiphean burden.

As if.

Short-term memory loss doesn't work like some kind of Groundhog Day effect, in which the person goes to sleep and forgets the day's events overnight. Someone without short-term memory never remembers things in the first place. She (or he) lives in a state of ongoing disorientation, unable to follow a conversation, or engage in anything that requires paying attention. We've all lost our train of thought, forgetting what we were going to say, or what we'd just been talking about, or what we went into the other room to get, because of a distraction. That's what short-term memory loss is like... all the time. So if Barrymore had it, even a complete dork like Sandler would notice. And unless he was merely fixated on her appearance, I doubt he could really fall in love with her.

Don't get me wrong: I still love Andy. But that's because we already had a relationship before his cerebral hemorrhage. Like I said, someone in his condition lives mostly in the past, and we still have that in common. So everytime we'd see each other after his stroke, his response would be "Hi, love! {kiss}", not "Who are you?" It's hard enough to live with an unchanging status quo of affection; not even the stupid loser which is Sandler's only "acting" persona would tolerate day after day of complete indifference. He'd give up. He'd have to.

I did. To a large extent it was forced on me: his family hated me, and they eventually made it impossible for me to remain part of his life. But even during the time I was still able to see him, I could see that - short of a miracle cure - our relationship was at best stagnant. I would grow and change, and he would not. You don't need Dear Abby, Joyce Brothers, or Dan Savage to tell you that won't work very well.

Of course this is by no means the first time Hollywood has used memory loss as a hook for entertainment. Most of the time they use variations on "retrograde amnesia", in which a person loses their past memories and tries to either recover them or move forward without them, or they lose the memory of a specific incident or period of time. Only a few have tackled characters with short-term memory loss, which is sometimes referred to as "anterograde amensia" referring to that the lost memories are from after the trauma, not before it.

my rating:

The first movie I'm aware of that dealt with anterograde amnesia is a minor Dana Carvey flick named Clean Slate. I haven't seen it (Carvey isn't as repellent as Sandler, but he doesn't exactly inspire me to see a film) but I know it's about a detective whose memory suffers from the overnight erasures of 50 First Dates, so he has to record notes to himself to keep track of his progress. This is probably where the writers of Sandler's movie did their "research" about short-term memory loss.

my rating:

It also sounds similar enough to the schtick of Memento that I suspect it provided some of the inspiration for that later movie. It's about an insurance investigator (played by Guy Pearce) who is trying to track down and take revenge upon the killer of his wife, despite the short-term memory loss he suffered in the incident. He compensates for his inability to form new memories by writing notes to himself, taking Polaroid photos of people and places he wants to remember, and for the most important "memories" having them tattooed on his skin.

This takes some artistic liberties with realism, because someone with memory loss as profound as Pearce's (he routinely has no idea where he is or how he got there) would not be able to function as well as he does. It's not that his memo-to-self trick couldn't work. An actual adaptive mechanism for people with short-term memory loss is to put reminder notes for them in key locations (e.g. "put food back in fridge" on the doorway out of the kitchen). But he'd have too much difficulty learning the trick. The big huge Catch-22 of short-term memory loss is that the person may not even understand that they have it.

What redeems Memento from this is the brilliant technique it uses to give the viewer a sense of Pearce's disability. The scenes of the story are played in reverse order, which means that in any given scene we have the same memories to work with as he does: none. All we have are the photos and tattoos made in "previous" scenes, with their imperfect and easily misunderstood clues of what's gone before. So when Pearce finds himself playing cat and mouse with a bad guy, not remembering whether he was chasing the man or the man was chasing him, we don't know, either. We understand later when we see the previous scene (though Pearce does not), but by that point we're scratching our heads trying to figure out what's going on and who's who in that scene. When the motel owner jokes with Pearce about being able to cheat him by asking him to (re?)pay his rent every time they see each other, we don't know if that's what he's doing. Others have use the flashforward/back technique to keep the audience in the dark, but writer/directory Christopher Nolan manages it for an entire film, to very good effect.

my rating:

In case anyone thinks that my beef with 50 First Dates is the fact that it's a comedy, I offer Finding Nemo as my pick of the best portrayal of short-term memory loss on the screen. For those who've denied themselves the pleasure of seeing this excellent movie, it's about Marlin, a widower fish (voice by Albert Brooks) trying to find his only son, accompanied by Dory (voice by Ellen Degeneres), a tropical fish with no short-term memory. She's very funny, in much the same way that a person with the same disability can be funny. Yes, we're laughing, but it's mostly laughing about the disability, not laughing at her.

The setting and choice of characters here gives it a leg-up in the realism department because "a tropical fish with no short-term memory" is (I assume) redundant. It's really not much of a handicap when your life consists of little more than swimming around, eating, fleeing from preditors, and reproducing when the opportunity arises. Her behavior actually fits with how a human with the condition might act.

For example, to remember a bit of information long enough to relay it to Marlin, she recites it over and over. With some prompting she manages to remember it again later. I tried this with Andy. We went out to dinner at a local restaurant, and as we were leaving I pointed out the sign and asked him where we'd eaten. He told me, rolling his eyes at being asked such an easy question. The rest of the way back to his parents' house, I kept asking him where we'd eaten. He'd tell me. (He didn't get sick of the game, because he didn't remember how long we'd been playing it.) Later that evening, I asked him to tell his parents where we'd eaten. He drew a blank. I said the first letter. He remembered it.

But overall, Dory develops no permanent memories. As long as she stays with Marlin she remembers him, because he's "always" been there. But when they get separated, she forgets him... mostly. When she sees him again, and he reintroduces himself, this time she comments that Marlin is a nice name. She has a vague emotional memory of someone like him, just not him in particular. And near the end of the movie when they separate again... oh, go see it yourself.

It's ironic that an all-ages computer-animated film about fish contains cinema's most realistic depiction of short-term memory loss in humans. Though of course it's no surprise, considering that it was made by Pixar, whose kiddie cartoons have more depth and intelligence than your typical "restricted to adults" comedy starring human actors.

Still, 50 First Dates will probably do boffo box office, thanks to the throngs of unsophisticated movie-goers out there. So expect more memory-themed movies to be made, both good and bad. Given the prominence of Alzheimer's Disease in our society - which is similar in many ways to short-term memory loss - I'd expect it to be a topic of a movie or two before long... though I suppose Hollywood's aversion to making movies of/by/for old people might prevent that. In the meantime, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (opening in a few months), a surreal film about a man who chooses to have his recent memories erased but then changes his mind, looks like it could fall on the "good" side of the bi-polar screen career of Jim Carrey.