Word: amnesiaize
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ESSAY: Lev Grossman on America's strange case of amnesia...
...walks into doctor's office. Doctor says, I've got terrible news for you: you're suffering from terminal cancer. Also, you have amnesia. Man says, Hey, at least I don't have cancer...
...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...
...This is a patent lie. Sure, they say they’ve never seen Must-See TV. But they’ll jump eagerly into the debate over what the next episode of “Alias” will reveal about Sidney’s amnesia. Or they’ll feign ignorance about last night’s “The West Wing,” but laugh before the punch line. Their false compassion is hopelessly transparent...