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San Francisco, 8:25 AM
Wed Nov 25
23 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/28/09
We're fascinated with themes of isolation - The Shining, 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, The Strangers, and any horror movie where the rule is "never leave on your own and say "I'll be right back"". Losing your ability to trust not only others, but also your own mind, is the ultimate isolation. When you are gone, who is left? #horror
10/28/09
The loss of memory from Alzheimer's has a stigma attached to it amnesia and the clichéd bump to the head does not. I worked in the health care field and there is still a huge stigma associated with Alzheimer's. When doctors prescribed Alzheimer's meds some would avoid giving a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. They'd say 'Organic Brain Syndrome' or 'Age Related Dementia' or 'age-related deterioration of cognitive abilities' or 'Senility' rather than just say the patient has Alzheimer's. Even when asked directly if the patient had Alzheimer's, doctors would hedge the question and say something along the lines that there was no way to definitively diagnose Alzheimer's! They would refuse to "out" their patients with Alzheimer's.
10/28/09
10/28/09
TERRIFYING and genre-defining. #horror
10/28/09
It's not that he outright forgets large-scale chunks of his life, as that he finally was smart but the effects stopped working, and he was progressively losing everything he had gained. So he was losing all of his skills i.e. there's a point where he realizes that he had learned how to speak German, French, etc. but now he can't remember any of it.
The defining, and worst, part though was that eventually...he sort of falls back into what he did when he was mentally retarded; phonetically spelling things without punctuation...at the time, I don't think he was consciously imitating that so much as he said "it took me an hour to properly spell a simple paragraph, and its getting difficult to communicate"
....and I think there IS one point near the end where he forgets BRIEFLY that he had the operation at all, and just shows up for his adult education class....though in 5 minutes he remembers.
****The worst part is that when we read it in Junior High School, for whatever reason, my teacher told us as FACT that he thought that Charlie was going to die and was getting sicker, and really only YEARS later did I realize "maybe he just went back to the way he was, with a greater appreciation for life' etc. #horror
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10/28/09
[en.wikipedia.org] #horror
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