In Mervyn LeRoy's Random Harvest (1942), amnesia is not merely a plot gimmick. The amnesia of Charles Rainier, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, is the principal subject of the film. Rainier (Ronald Colman) begins in Condition A (amnesiac but solid citizen and loving husband) but is hit by a cab in Liverpool and transitions to Condition B (aristocratic, efficient, but passionless, and with no knowledge of the three years between the war and the cab). Will he remember the lost years and reintegrate the two parts of his hstory? Well, yes, he does, but only with the decades-long assistance of his patient-Griselda wife Paula/Margaret (excellently played by the ageless Greer Garson).
It's kind of a soap-opera-y film and I'm embarrassed to confess that it moved me. The last scene, in which Rainier finally remembers that he had long ago loved and married Margaret under her real name Paula, is a curious kind of anagnorisis. Although they've known each other for decades, true recognition comes suddenly and joyfully. And I bought it, much against my will. Dropped a reluctant tear.
Because of the amnesia, Charles has two different lives, but he doesn't, as in other films, have two different personalities. He's kindly, steadfast, and rather boring in both states. The film offers little in the way of a theory of amnesia. "As one door opens, another closes" says a friendly but passive psychiatrist, whose expertise is validated only by his middle-European accent.
In most films, diseases resemble their manifestations in real life. Amnesia, on the other hand, can be anything the screenwriter says it it is. It's a mighty elastic phenomenon, unmoored to medical experience or knowledge. However imagined, the total amnesia of characters in films is a great plot device. The audience is always in the know and therefore feels superior to the poor character/actor who stumbles toward an understanding of his own self. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare was able to write forty plays without ever resorting to amnesia.
At a social event a few days ago I met a psychologist who works at the AFB in Colorado Springs with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. I asked her if she had ever encountered a case of amnesia. She said that many injured personnel can't remember the moments just before they were wounded, but that she'd never enountered a case of movie-style amnesia. Or heard of one. And, she added, trust me, I've dealt with many kinds of mental disturbances.
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