Amnesia on Film: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Desperately Seeking Susan offers a cartoon version of amnesia. Pow, Roberta is knocked into a lamppost and doesn't know who she is. And then, a day later, pow again, she is knocked to the ground, bumps her head, and her memory returns intact. The film isn't interested in amnesia except as a plot device to facilitate the doppelganger relationship between Roberta and Susan. Roberta is a downtrodden cautious Fort Lee housewife; Susan is an anarchic adventuress. In the course of the film, each woman tries on the other's identity. Without a memory, but wearing Susan's clothes, Roberta "becomes" Susan, and Susan in turn invades Roberta's home and tries on her clothes, her pool, and her husband. At the end, Roberta has absorbed enough of Susan's pizzazz to leave her stifling husband and Susan has changed enough so that she can enjoy a moment with the boyfriend who has been desperately seeking her. It's an easy-to-watch film. Rosanna Arquette is lovely as a perpetual naif and Laurie Metcalf is superb as Roberta's short-tempered know-it-all sister-in-law. And it has more than one brilliant line of dialogue. "I thought you were dead."  "Naw, I was in New Jersey."  And my favorite: "How do you use the bird?"  -- which you have to have been there to understand and appreciate. An enjoyable film; unless you approach it with the idea that it has anything to do with real-life loss of memory.