You must remember this: Memory is the plot device that Hollywood just can’t forget about.
From such TV shows as “Dollhouse” (Fox, 9 p.m. Fridays) to “Samantha Who?” (ABC, 8:30 p.m. Thursdays) to just about every soap opera that has ever aired, memory plays an undeniable role in keeping audiences glued to their TVs.
Even game shows, such as last year’s Dennis Miller-hosted “Amnesia,” have delved into its contestants’ not-so-reliable ability to recollect the most arcane personal minutiae.
In movies, Alfred Hitchcock used amnesia to ratchet the suspense in “Spellbound.” John Lennon recalled his childhood and the shortcomings of nostalgia in “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
And the film “Blade Runner” was based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, who has repeatedly explored what might happen when technology allows the implanting of memories.
The subject of memory often stirs up some of the most primal and universal personal issues. In the TV series “Fringe” (Fox, 9 p.m. Tuesdays), the character Walter Bishop (John Noble), a scientist who suffers from memory loss, must deal with questions of identity as well as the mystery surrounding a murder in which he might have been involved.
“Drama is ultimately about conflict,” says Jeff Pinker, executive producer of “Fringe.” “The best drama arises out of conflict, and someone in conflict with themselves and their own mind is obviously a rich source to draw from.
“Memory is something that everyone can certainly identify with, and it’s something that everyone has been haunted by, confused by or frustrated by when they’re not able to remember.”
The mind is an endless source of fascination because we still know so little about it. That lack of information, in part, is what drove Sunil Vemuri to earn a doctorate from MIT’s Media Lab and to research a memory prosthesis that inspired his reQall (www.reqall.com) tool.
Though the iPhone and Blackberry applications from the company, based at Moffett Field, are designed to improve your ability to remember, they can’t erase some of the basic truths about the quixotic nature of memory that keep movie and TV audiences tuned in.
“Memory is so fragile,” Vemuri says. “And it allows us to relive experiences. But when our brains construct memories for us automatically as they happen, we have false remembrances of some things.”
The unreliability of memory keeps rearing its head in pop culture. Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” a film about four people who have markedly different recollections of a crime, has become the template for many such narratives. Everything from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to the film “12 Angry Men” has repeatedly challenged one’s ability to accurately recount an event.
Psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus, one the nation’s foremost experts on false memory, was involved in the trials of former presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson and employees at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach. Memory is so closely linked to identity that the notion of a false memory is doubly disturbing, she says.
“Memories become more and more vulnerable as time passes,” continues Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at University of California-Irvine. Just as “a weakened human body becomes more susceptible to infection, the mind becomes more susceptible to being weakened by misinformation. People find that hard to accept.”
Whether they accept it or not, audiences can’t get enough stories about memory in all its variations. Among the most noteworthy were Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and Christopher Nolan’s “Memento.”
“Sunshine” tells the story of a heartbroken romantic (Jim Carrey) who signs up to have painful memories erased; “Memento” uses a nonlinear narrative to dramatize the experience of short-term memory loss on the part of a widower (Guy Pearce) obsessed with finding his wife’s murderer.
But those are the rarities. Far more stories revolve around full-blown amnesia. Numerous TV series, including “Samantha Who?” and “Nip/Tuck,” have relied on that device, while seemingly every major soap opera has rejuvenated its plotline by having a character struggle with memory loss.
One character on “One Life to Live” has experienced amnesia nine times, says Damian Holbrook, a senior writer for TV Guide magazine and a former soap opera reviewer.
“It allows the writers and the actor to basically rescript a character,” Holbrook says. “If they don’t remember they’re a doctor who has a wife and children, they can slip on a leather jacket, hop on a motorcycle and live this other life. It can shake things up.”
While identity is rooted in our recollections, that only partly explains why we eat up movies and TV shows exploring memory, says Tim Minear, executive producer of “Dollhouse,” which features women whose personalities have been wiped clean and replaced.
“It’s about the mystery of discovery,” adds Minear, who explored similar themes on such shows as “Angel” and “Firefly.” The “internal mystery is what happened, how did I get here and who am I really? That kind of stuff is really interesting because you might be afraid to find out the truth.”
