In the case of “The Color Blind Painter” in Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars Jonathan I. experiences “total color-blindness caused by brain damage, so-called cerebral achromatopsia” (Sacks, loc. 180), while in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” Guy Pierce’s character, Leonard, suffers from short-term memory loss to hunt down the man that he believes killed his wife (2000). In both of these stories, in print and film, there are certain things that the writer and director got right about the diagnosed temporal lobe dysfunctions of the two individuals, while there are others that were completely wrong. By working to understand the different comments that the author and the filmmaker are attempting to make about the respective disorders, and the ways in which society reacts to the people with those disorders, it will be possible to determine the reasons for those discrepancies.
Sacks is attempting to make neurological disorders less stigmatized by individuals within society. His works attempt to describe various neurological disorders in a manner that would be both easily understood by the common populace, those without a medical background, while attempting to convey a sense of wonder that such occurrences were possible in this world. Sacks treats the case of Jonathan I. as an oddity, something that the individual should wonder over, marveling at the propensity of the human brain. While Sacks was attempting to do good with his work in An Anthropologist on Mars, he instead works to dehumanize the individuals he discusses, and works to trivialize the neurological disorders that each individual has. Instead of working to promote knowledge on the different neurological disorders, Sacks instead trivializes them, as in his reference to the “so-called” neurological disorder, preferring to reference it by its common terminology instead. Such phrasing works to make the research into the area meaningless while working at the same time to marginalize the individual with the neurological disorder in a different way. Instead of Jonathan I. being seen as a freak or an oddity for his loss of color vision, he is now seen as a freak or an oddity because his loss of color vision happened in such a unique way. Though Sacks has attempted to make the temporal disorder more accessible, he has just changed the stereotype associated with the disorder instead.
Use your promo and get a custom paper on
"Temporal Lobe Dysfunction in “An Anthropologist on Mars” and “Memento”".
Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” is touted as being about an individual with short term memory loss, though this is not entirely accurate. The issue faced by Leonard in “Memento” is in reality post traumatic amnesia, or PTA. This type of amnesia, an inability for the short term memory to retain knowledge, or to send that information to the brain for long term storage, is as a result of the trauma experienced by Leonard at the death of his wife. This is not a simple issue of short term memory loss, but a legitimate disorder, one which is marginalized by the presentation of the disorder without the appropriate definition or explanation. While Nolan was attempting to explain the issue in the simplest manner possible, it would have made more sense to the plot of the movie if the disorder was explained appropriately, allowing the audience to see the reason for the extreme actions being taken by Leonard in his attempts to remember what he was working to accomplish.
Though each of these two individuals, Nolan and Sacks, were working to address their topics in a manner which made the temporal lobe disorders more accessible to the common populace, the better option would have been to treat the matter seriously, working to impart knowledge to the general populace while still maintaining a good story.
- Memento. Christopher Nolan, 2000.
- Sacks, Oliver W. An anthropologist on Mars. New York: Knopf, 2012. Print.
