Film Title: 50 First Dates (2004)

Rating: PG - 13 (crude humor & drug refrences)

Type of Film: Romantic Comedy

Story line: Lucy is a beautiful young woman who suffers
Retrograde amnesia from a car accident. For Lucy every date
is a first date, as she is unable to formulate new memories
after her accident. A young bachelor falls in love with her and
is determined to help her remember their first date, first kiss… and much more.

Accuracy:

This movie gets it wrong as far as TBI is concerned, but it also gets
it right. Extensive damage to the temporal lobe would probably result
in difficulty with processing information from vision, touch and hearing,
yet Lucy’s only symptom is retrograde amnesia. Another unlikely part to
the movie is the family reaction to TBI. Lucy’s family and friends are so
vested in keeping her from the real world, that would only confuse her,
that they’ve been pretending it’s the same day for an entire year.

What this movie accurately portrays is the terror and confusion Lucy awakes
with each day when she rediscovers she has been head injured and has lost
the past year of her life. As soon as her family give up the bit, we see a head
injured person stuck in the past, a past that no longer exists. The movie does
justice to this type of heart rendering suffering.

The movie also introduces audiences to severe memory a problem such as the
one Ten Second Tom portrays. It seems implausible someone could forget within
seconds anything said or done with another person – yet this is in fact Korsakov’s
syndrome.

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