Why Does Captain Marvel Have Amnesia?

Because we want her to

There is so much amnesia in our media that you can’t forget it even if you try. Jane Doe in Blindspot, Samantha Caine in The Long Kiss Goodnight, Mike Howell in American Ultra, and of course Jason Bourne all wake up one day with no memory of where they picked up their superspy ninja assassin skills. Wolverine in the comics spent years rediscovering his incredibly complicated backstory after having his mind wiped; practically the entire cast of Dark Matter can’t remember who they are. Swamp Thing forgot he was a plant, and Superman, Flash, Power Girl, and probably every superhero in comics has lost their memory at one point or another.

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If an alien visitor came to earth and knew nothing about us except what they’d learned through watching our media, that alien would come away thinking that earthlings all lost their memories at least once a month. We don’t, of course. Plot amnesia —in which healthy people lose their personal histories but otherwise suffer no ill effects—basically doesn’t exist.

So why has this apparently random condition which never appears in real life become so popular in fiction? The answer is that plot amnesia puts the main character in the same position as audience members. The protagonist and the viewer or reader have the same information and learn backstory at the same time. This makes storytelling easier and increases identification. Plot amnesia isn’t about memory loss at all. It’s about how viewers experience narratives.

Captain Marvel provides a good recent example of how plot amnesia works. The story begins by following Vers (Brie Larson), a Kree warrior in training. Vers doesn’t remember her past, but she’s determined to do her part to fight the nefarious shape-shifting, infiltrating green Skrulls.

In other words, Vers starts out in the movie exactly where you as the viewer start out. She doesn’t know anything about her backstory, just as you don’t know anything about her backstory.

Fictional narratives, always start in the middle; something always happened before the things that are happening with the first sentence, or image, of the story. Somehow, you need to let readers know that Hamlet’s father is dead, or why John McClane and his wife are separated.

You can do that through exposition. McClane tells his cab driver why he and his wife are separated, and you get to listen in. But with plot amnesia, you don’t need these subterfuges. You can have the protagonist seek out and discover the needed details herself as you go along.

Essentially, in Captain Marvel, Vers is an audience member, following the plot along with the audience. She finds out that the Kree lied to her and that the Skrulls are the good guys at the same time that you do. She even learns her name along with you. You start to call her Carol Danvers at the exact moment she realizes that she’s Carol Danvers, a fighter pilot from earth. Plot amnesia means she knows exactly as much, and no more, of the plot and backstory as you do.

In tying viewer and hero together, plot amnesia also brings the empowerment fantasies at the heart of many action movies closer to home. This is especially obvious in the many amnesiac spy narratives. In The Long Kiss Goodnight, for example, a suburban housewife gets conked on the head in a car accident and suddenly discovers she’s a deadly killer who knows her way around knives and guns. American Ultra is about a loser burnout who discovers he’s not a loser burnout at all, but something a lot more deadly.

These people (and Jason Bourne too) are just average Janes and Joes, who wake up one day with super-powers. Similarly, audience members enter the theater as just normal, boring accountants and librarians and freelance writers—and then suddenly they’re imagining themselves as some hero who can kick the baddies through a wall. Plot amnesia in these cases replicates the empowerment fantasy. You enter the narrative, and all at once you’re kicking ass.

Carol’s plot amnesia doesn’t function in quite the same way initially—when you meet her, she’s a Kree warrior, not a normal schlub. But plot amnesia does sync up with the empowerment fantasy later on in smaller but important ways.

Carol discovers that she can pilot a plane, for example—like all those amnesiac superspies, she suddenly realizes she’s cooler than she thought. And that’s even more true at the climax, where she suddenly discovers that her powers are her own, not Kree granted, and that they’re much more extensive than just firing a force bolt or two. Plot amnesia means that Carol doesn’t realize how strong she is until the plot requires her to be that strong. She and viewers together learn just how awesome she is (or they are.)

Plot amnesia can have some downsides too. The first half hour of Captain Marvel feels disjointed and poorly developed in part because you’re dumped into an alien culture you know nothing about, which you see from the perspective of a woman who has no memories and doesn’t know who she is.

You could argue that you’re supposed to be confused, as the protagonist is. But it’s not really Vers who’s confused; it’s the script. Or, conversely, at the end of American Ultra, the fully self-actualized cleaned-up superspy is a lot less fun to spend time with than the burned-out doofus he used to be. Which is a bit of a let down.

Plot amnesia, then, increases audience identification, but sometimes at the cost of consistent character building. Real people don’t just suddenly sprout holes in their memories, and so it can be hard to create convincing characters who just so happen to have forgotten all the relevant plot details.

These drawbacks haven’t stopped plot amnesia from becoming a staple of pulp storytelling, though. That’s because we love stories in which our heroes know just as much as we do. And because we like to pretend that we may, at any moment, remember that we are heroes ourselves.

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This piece first ran at the Escapist.