Alcorani Alice, Couteau Eline, Richomme Chloé
Abstract
This original Netflix documentary film, directed by Ed Perkins (2019), is based on the real history of Marcus and Alex Lewis, two twin brothers. The documentary structure is unusual because the two protagonists are interviewed separately all along the film. There are also reconstitution sequences in a house similar to theirs and pictures of their childhood.
This is the story of Alex, who had a motorcycle accident at the age of 18, in 1982. After this event he was in a coma for 3 months. At his awakening, he only recognized one person: his twin brother Marcus, that refers to the powerful links of twinning. Except his brother’s face, he had forgotten everything… Marcus helped him to relearn everything and to recover his memory. But the kind family stories told by Marcus were all wrong. Alex totally trusted his brother until their mother died. But at this time, Alex began having doubts about the veracity of these stories when they discovered strange and creepy personal effects of their mother (e.g. naked pictures of them, sextoys…). Alex asked Marcus “Have we been sexually abused ?”, the latter only said “Yes.”. Until the end of the documentary, while they are 55 years old, Marcus never accepted to answer Alex’s questions.
We decided to link the story of Alex and Marcus with two psychology concepts : post-traumatic amnesia and false memories.
Post-traumatic amnesia
When Alex woke up at the hospital, he was totally disoriented, remembered nothing and had no longer identity. He did not recognize his mother, did not remember his name, where he lived, and his accident. His twin brother was the only person he could recognize. Next to a head impact, a post-traumatic amnesia can occur and be more or less severe. In Alex case, the accident was so much severe that it totally destroyed his retrograde memory (i.e. memory of the events that occured before the accident). He needed his brother to adapt himself in this new world.
When he came back home he had to relearn everything. He did not remember what was a kitchen, a TV, how to lace his shoes, how to cook, or even how to ride a bike. Because his anterograde memory (i.e. the ability to learn new things) was fairly preserved, he succeeded in acquiring his past knowledges in only one month. The whole thing was possible thanks to Marcus who became his teacher and in whom Alex had a complete reliance.
False memories
After having regained all of his daily skills, Alex questioned his identity and his past. Then he began to ask more personal questions to Marcus, about their childhood. Based on what Marcus told him and the photos he showed him, Alex reconstructed his memories and his personality. At that time the role of Marcus was to “re-implant in his memory and giving him his childhood back and answering questions from the very beginning when he was a baby up to 18 years old”. On this way, Marcus gave him an idyllic picture with memories of a happy family without any problem.
Yet this family is not so perfect… Alex reconstructed their history on the basis of false memories. Also called “pseudo-memories” or “memory illusions”, false memories are either modifications of events’ memories, with distortions from real experience, or creations of events that never happened. Although inaccurate or invented, these false memories are generally as persuasive as true memories. The person is therefore misled and convinced to have experienced the event.
Marcus wanted to protect his brother by creating an illusion, by telling false memories that represented a normal and joyful family. He tried to protect him from a heavy secret: they were sexually abused by their mother and some friends of hers, until the age of 14. From Marcus’ point of view, hiding the truth by omitting or changing certain facts helped them both. For Marcus, it was a defense mechanism, a way of forgetting what happened to them. While Alex became amnesiac because of his accident, Marcus wanted to forget voluntarily. After their parents’ death, Alex understood there was a bleak secret that he needed to discover to really know himself. For him, living with lies and false memories for more than 20 years is harder to bear than living with the truth…
Words we have learned/that can be useful: misled (induit en erreur); bear (supporter/endurer); bleak (lugubre); twinning (gémellité); reliance (confiance, dépendance)