Word: amnesia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Amnesia is one of those rare mental conditions--like narcissism--that it's O.K. to make fun of. Maybe that's why it's such a favorite among screenwriters: since Christmas, we have had no fewer than three movies that revolve around people misplacing their memories. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet pay to have the memory of their lousy relationship erased. Paycheck was a sci-fi thriller about a man (Ben Affleck) whose employers wipe his memory for security purposes. (As an extra precaution, they then erased Paycheck from the memory...
...that's not all. There's an amnesia epidemic raging at the box office: Memento, The Bourne Identity, Finding Nemo, Vanilla Sky, The Man Without a Past, the entire Matrix trilogy; and don't forget that Carrey forgot who he was once before in The Majestic. Why the obsession with absentmindedness? This isn't just a handy screenwriting device. There's something going on here, somewhere down in the zeitgeist-haunted basement of popular culture where our national subconscious lives. Why can't the great American movie hero remember...
...deep down we're not unique immortal souls but swirls of fungible data points on a rewritable hard drive. If all we know of reality, of ourselves, is information, and information is infinitely malleable, how can we be sure it hasn't been corrupted? What if we all have amnesia, and we've just forgotten that we have it? Joel is a new kind of hero: he's not struggling with somebody else or with himself. He's fighting for the idea that there's a "he" to fight in the first place...
Joel's trapped in a nightmare, but he got there by following a dream, a dream that's both tenderly hopeful and profoundly American: the second chance, the clean slate, the shot at redemption. There's another reason amnesia movies are everywhere: America is the land of amnesia, a frictionless meritocracy where anybody can start over at any time and work his way to the top, and every baseball team can show up on opening day with an undefeated record. It's not a mental problem; it's a national tradition. Compared with other nations, America itself is an amnesia...
...would be tempting to end here with the historian George Santayana--"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"--but I think the comedian Steven Wright said it better: "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before...