50 First Dates Summary

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50 First Dates: Mental Illness Portrayal In the movie, 50 First Dates, Dr. Henry Roth (played by Adam Sandler) is veterinarian at an aquarium in Hawaii. He also has a habit of exaggerating to hook up with attractive tourists. He owns a boat called the Sea Serpent, in which he plans to sail to collect data about walrus’s under water habits. One Tuesday morning, Henry went to eat breakfast at the local café. There he caught a glimpse of a beautiful women sitting alone building a waffle tepee. Mr. Roth already adores her. He continues on eating his breakfast and leaves. He comes back again the next morning, and sees the same women at the same table. Only this time she is building a waffle house. She is struggling to make a door. He grabs a tooth pick and makes a door for her. Thanking him, she asks him to sit down and introduces herself as Lucy (played by Drew Barrymore). They eat breakfast and leave. He goes back the next day, but she has no clue who he is. He tries for the remainder of the week with no prevail. Eventually, the lady who owns the café tells him what happened. She and her father were out picking a pineapple for her father’s birthday. A stray cow wandered on to the road, they swerved and hit a tree. Her father broke a few ribs but Lucy suffered a head injury and lost her short-term memory. To keep sure Lucy remembers who he is, Henry Roth made a video to refresh her memory every morning. In the movie, Lucy is diagnosed with “Goldfield Syndrome”. This is not a real syndrome, but one created in Hollywood for the movie. According to Dr. Catherine Myers of the Memory Disorders Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey, the film conflates two real memory loss syndromes. The first is Organic Amnesia. This is short-term memory loss due to brain injury. The most obvious symptom is rapid forgetting. New information fades from memory

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