50 First Dates Analysis

Abstract
The movie “50 First Dates” is a comedy in which Drew Barrymore (Lucy) was in an automobile accident to where she lost her short term memory. Adam Sandler (Henry) falls in love in with Lucy but finds out the hard way that he has to start over every day to become her love interest. Lucy’s father and brother basically tries to keep her from knowing her condition by continuously covering up the fact that she has memory loss. Her father and brother reenact the same day over and over. They are very protective of her and will go through anything to keep her away from Henry until they feel like he could actually help her. After a police writes her a ticket at the café it is then she realized that the date was different from what she had expected and that’s when the game of charades was to come to an end

The name of memory loss that was most similar to Lucy’s condition would be known as anterograde amnesia. Talmi, Caplan, Richards, & Moscovitch (2015) defined anterograde amnesia as “an impairment of memory retrieval from a long-term memory (LTM) store accompanied by intact retrieval from a short-term memory (STM) store or working memory”. The symptoms that were represented in the movie had parts that were realistic from the perspective of memory loss. In the movie Lucy’s condition was called Goldfield’s Syndrome and it was a made up diagnosis of memory loss. There is no such condition and this was probably put in place to keep the actual name which is anterograde amnesia from being offensive to someone that is actually suffering from the condition. One fact of Lucy’s condition was that it came from a traumatic experience. Surely the accident left her hospitalized for a while because of her head injury in which there was brain damage. Lucy was able to remember her father, brother, and the café that she always visited because those were parts of her long term