Forget Other Hot Trends--Amnesia’s Where It’s At

What’s hot? Well, R&B; vocalist Alicia Keys--she’s this year’s “hot chanteuse,” according to Rolling Stone. And the “hot book du jour,” says Daily Variety, is the new Walter Kirn novel “Up in the Air.” And, improbable as it might seem, tourists and travelers have made Iceland a “hot destination,” reports USA Today.

Useful information? Maybe, but how about something less obvious?

What, for example, is the hot neurological disorder? Clearly, it’s amnesia.

To wit:

* The English rock band Radiohead’s recently released fifth album is titled “Amnesiac.”

* “Memento,” one of the year’s most talked-about movies, follows an amnesia-stricken character as he hunts for his wife’s murderer.

* A film playing at the New England Aquarium in Boston uses amnesia as a plot device to acquaint viewers with city history.

* “Amnesia,” a just-published novel about a New York City architect who is more than a little forgetful, is the latest from best-selling author Andrew Neiderman.

* National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jonathan Lethem thought enough of amnesia as a fictional plot device and a fixture in nonfiction to edit “The Vintage Book of Amnesia,” an anthology of writing that in various ways deals with amnesia.

* And, of course, amnesia is, has been and likely always will be a staple of soap-opera story lines.

From Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo” to novelists including Philip K. Dick and Lethem to musicians including Brian Eno and Talking Heads, amnesia is deeply ingrained in American culture. And it seems to have peaked this year.

“What it does,” Lethem said, “is it sort of isolates the basic question people are asking all the time--even if they’re not aware they’re asking it--which is, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do I come from?’ The function of amnesia is that it helps make that question super-literal, super-explicit.”

Added Lethem, “It isn’t that we meet a lot of amnesiac people out in the world. It’s really a self-perpetuating image of life that artists and writers and filmmakers have propagated because it’s so useful.”

Neiderman, author of “The Devil’s Advocate” (later an Al Pacino movie) and the ghostwriter of more than 30 novels under the name V.C. Andrews, said amnesia crops up so often in fiction and movies because it makes for a compelling story.

“Anybody who suffers from amnesia is in a very vulnerable state,” he said. “They have to accept on faith what they’re being told about themselves and their past and their history.

“That sort of situation will lend itself to so many different plot lines and character problems that it’s an interesting condition for a writer to exploit.”

And if amnesia lends itself to the telling of a good story, it stands to reason that it’s a good way of discrediting one too. Just ask Pete Rose. How did Rose respond this month when a former friend claimed he had funded a drug deal, bet on baseball games while manager of the Cincinnati Reds and corked his bat?

He suggested his accuser was suffering from amnesia, of course.