By HLTD51 student Teaformeplease
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive disease often associated with older age. Its symptoms are usually described as debilitating given their impact on cognitive status and ability: memory loss, inability to communicate, and behaviour change. Although one may have an idea of what dementia may look like, it is often impossible for a person without dementia to understand the lived experiences of someone who does. In order to address this, I will analyze this week’s in-class animated short film titled “Undone”, by Hayley Morris. Its featured setting of an ocean explores the lived experiences of Alzheimer’s disease and the consequences it has on one’s memory and identity. As part of my discussion, I will referencing the novel Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff: a story about a philosophy professor who recollects his mother’s steps into the depths of dementia.
To begin, Morris’s film uses the symbolism of the ocean as the embodiment of dementia by demonstrating how it strips victims of their memories. This is seen throughout the film as the ocean progressively offers, then claims back, objects of memory from the main character. For example, at 2:51, the ocean can be seen grabbing and engulfing a locket with images of the character’s family members and loved ones. Like a powerful body of water, Alzheimer’s dementia is often portrayed as “robbing” its “victims” of their dearest memories (Basics of Alzheimer’s Disease, 1). (Importantly, Hannah Zelig offers an insightful critique of this very language here).
Secondly, the character’s being stranded on a boat in the midst of an ocean can be thought to represent the physical experiences of the person with dementia. In “Undone”, the main character is has no particular direction or destination: a meditation on the sense of being lost that speaks to the lived reality of short term memory loss and confusion that many patients of dementia experience (not to mention the literal manifestations of lost-ness that might accompany behaviours like wandering) (Basics of Alzheimer’s Disease, 17). Therefore, the strandedness of the main character in the film represents the person with dementia’s difficulty navigating the physical and the psychic world.
Being lost can also be used to describe another symptoms of dementia: the loss of one’s ability to communicate expressively. A prime example of this can be seen in the book Scar Tissue by Michael Ignatieff’ s the main character describes his mother’s experience with dementia, and her reduction in vocabulary: “She was down to simple sentences—subject, verb, predicate—which seemed to compress everything down to essentials (Ignatieff, 101).” Alzheimer’s disease reduces one’s ability to express themselves and to also navigate the social world. Furthermore, the ocean is used to represent how dementia strips one’s identity. This can be seen through the materials that the ocean is made up of—various bundles of brightly coloured clothing. The detail here is particularly striking as clothing is often a way for individuals to express their individuality, and is why institutions like prisons force their prisoners to wear monotonous uniforms as a way of identification.Using clothes to represent the ocean, illuminates how dementia strips one’s identity especially in relation to the process of caring for someone who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
A similar moment is seen in Scar Tissue, when the caregiver changes the mother’s outfits as her dementia worsens, “Mother was beginning to spill things, and to keep her neat and clean, my father changed her wardrobe substituting bright, easy to wash nylon skirts and blouses for the more costly and subtle clothes my mother used to wear . . . Mother’s new clothing made her look like an inmate in a nursing home (Ignatieff, 71).” As a result of everyday caregiving duties, the mother’s clothing becomes less reflective of who she was as she was no longer able to wear the brightly colored clothing that she once was able to when she was independent. Morris’s use of fabric to represent the ocean in “Undone”(which is enhanced by the lack of clothing on the character) similarly symbolizes the process of dementia as the process of losing one’s physical identity (a pattern that goes back at least as far as King Lear and that play’s interest in the significance of clothing and nudity).
Lastly, the camerawork and point of view in “Undone” helps represent the unknowability of Alzheimer’s. This is seen through the use of camera angles, which often zoom up to the ocean for a couple of seconds, forcing viewers to anticipate—something. This seemingly pointless detail emphasizes the mysterious causes and general uncertainty that surrounds our understanding of the nature of dementia. The uncertainty of whether someone will inherit the disease, or whether a person with dementia is aware of their condition, of what causes Alzheimer’s in the first place, and the ultimate mystery of finding a cure. Overall, I think Hayley Morris’s “Undone” employs its setting to reflect one interpretation of the lived effects of Alzheimer’s disease on one’s memory, identity and personhood.