My Kind of Amnesia

In Breaking Bad, Walter White disappears for a few days when he is kidnapped -- he escapes only by murdering his meth-addled drug dealer. In order to cover his tracks and account to his family for the missing days, he feigns amnesia. And he's persuasive, possibly because everyone has seen so many amnesia movies. He's so persuasive, in fact, that the doctors think that the amnesia might recur. In order to get himself released from the hospital, he confesses to the state shrink that he was only pretending. "There was no 'fugue state,'" he admits.  That's a kind of theatrical amnesia in which I can believe -- phony from start to finish.