Category: History

Mitchell Hadley engages in a bit of fiction for fiction:

He calls himself ‘Michael Alden,’ but says that this is not his name. He claims not to know his real name, nor who he is, nor anything that happened to him up until two months ago. Tonight we explore the mystery that is amnesia—the loss of a person’s memory, and with it, the loss of his humanity as well. I’m Walter Cronkite, and this is The 21st Century.”

Obviously, this never happened. As classic TV fans know, “Michael Alden” is the character played by Frank Converse in the cult classic series, Coronet Blue. And, as our ersatz Walter Cronkite says, Michael Alden has amnesia. He was dragged half dead out of the water, murmuring the words “Coronet Blue.” He has no idea what this means, nor about anything else that has happened to him up until the time he is rescued. He doesn’t even know his own name; he picks the name Michael Alden because it’s a combination of his doctor’s first name and the name of the hospital where he was treated. For the remaining thirteen episodes, Alden will search for clues as to his real identity, and what “Coronet Blue” really means—while the people who tried to kill him look to finish the job.

It’s a great idea for a television series, and had Coronet Blue existed in the real world (as is the case with many TV shows today), it’s quite likely that Alden would have been an ideal subject for a science program like The 21st Century (which aired on CBS from 1967-1970; it’s predecessor, The 20th Century, began in 1957). But just how plausible is the idea behind Coronet Blue? And how realistic is pop culture’s depiction of amnesia?

What do we know about Michael Alden? Not much. As Coronet Blue opens, he’s onboard a ship, one piece in a moving puzzle. It’s clear that he’s part of some kind of plot; a heist, perhaps, or some kind of undercover operation—we just don’t know. Quickly, it becomes apparent that something’s gone wrong, that his confederates have discovered something about him—he had ratted them out, he wasn’t who he claimed to be, something like that—and consequently he’s been targeted for death. There’s a struggle, he goes over the rail of the ship and into the water, the bad guys take a couple of shots at him (or are they good guys? We just don’t know), and after a time he’s dragged ashore, nearly dead, mumbling the words “coronet blue.” He recovers, physically. Mentally, however, he’s a mess. He doesn’t know who he is, how he got there, why someone would want to kill him, and he has no idea what “coronet blue” means. Michael Alden has amnesia.

In pop culture, the situation most like Alden’s is probably that of Jason Bourne, the character played by Matt Damon in the Bourne movies. Like Alden, Bourne is pulled out of the water after someone has tried to kill him; like Alden, he has no memory of his identity, although he retains his language and motor skills.

Both Alden and Bourne suffer from a type of psychogenic dissociative amnesia called “retrograde” amnesia. As opposed to “anterograde” amnesia, which affects the ability of the mind to form new memories, retrograde amnesia means the inability to recall things that happened before a specific date, usually the date of an accident or trauma. In both of these cases, we see how retrograde amnesia “tends to negatively affect episodic, autobiographical, and declarative memory while usually keeping procedural memory intact with no difficulty for learning new knowledge.

Now, within this fairly broad diagnosis, there are two subsets which we could be dealing with. The first, “situation-specific” amnesia, sometimes called “suppressed memory,” means that memory loss is confined to a specific traumatic event, with the victim able to remember things that happened both before and after the event. In the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare as a Child,” for example, Janice Rule plays Helen Foley, a woman who unknowingly suffers from such a condition: Helen has no memory of her mother’s murder, nor that the young Helen was a witness to the murder, until the appearance of a little girl (Helen when she was young; an apparition? A manifestation of her subconscious? It is the Twilight Zone, after all) brings her memory back in time to apprehend the murderer, who’s returned to eliminate the only witness—Helen.*  That’s an example of “situation-specific” amnesia.

However, Alden’s amnesia appears more likely to be a type known as “global-transient”; in other words, a major gap in the part of the memory that relates to personal identity. The most common illustration of global-transient amnesia is a “fugue state,” in which there is “a sudden retrograde loss of autobiographical memory resulting in impairment of personal identity and usually accompanied by a period of wandering.” That last is significant, because the premise of Coronet Blue is built around Alden’s attempts to find out who he is, resulting in travelling—wandering—to different parts of the country, searching for anyone or anything that can help him discover who he is. And what coronet blue means, of course.

It’s likely that Alden’s doctors would have checked for some type of brain damage or other organic cause of his amnesia; they didn’t find anything, but even with today’s advancements in medical science, it’s unlikely that his amnesia was caused by anything as mundane as the proverbial “bump on the head.” Most of the time, psychogenic amnesia is traceable back to some type of psychological trigger; with Alden, it’s almost certainly related to the attack on him at the beginning of the first episode.

I wonder, though: does he really want to remember? Or is it fear—fear of what he doesn’t know—that keeps his memory from returning? All the time, though, he remains focused on “coronet blue,” and it’s not just because the theme keeps playing in the background. Find out the meaning, he knows, and it’s likely he’ll be able to unlock the mystery.

That fear of finding out what his past might be, though—that leads us to an obvious question: is Alden’s amnesia genuine? Is he a reliable narrator, or is he withholding something from the viewers?There are at least four episodes from the great legal drama Perry Mason that deal with amnesia. The first season episodes “The Case of the Crooked Candle,” and “The Case of the Desperate Daughter,” the fifth season episode “The Case of the Glamorous Ghost,” and the seventh season episode “The Case of the Nervous Neighbor” all involve Perry dealing with someone—generally a woman—claiming some form of amnesia.

Is there a significance in this gender distinction? Possibly. While there’s no particular evidence to suggest that women are more susceptible than men to amnesia, the victim in “Glamorous Ghost,” Eleanor Corbin, claims to be suffering from amnesia “after police find her running and screaming through woods near her apartment building.” Doubtless someone would have referred to Eleanor as being “hysterical.” And that term, as understood and applied to women, dates back over 4,000 years. The National Center for Biotechnology Information calls hysteria “the first mental disorder attributable to women, accurately described in the second millennium BC, and until Freud considered an exclusively female disease.”

Therefore, with Eleanor displaying no signs of physical injury, the suggestion is that her amnesia is a  form of retrograde amnesia known as “hysterical reaction,” one that does not appear to depend upon an actual brain disorder. Perry accepts this diagnosis, at least insofar as it provides him with the opportunity to stall for time while he tries to assemble the facts. The police, however, are suspicious: and for good reason, as Encyclopaedia Britannicanotes darkly: “Although most dramatic, such cases are extremely rare and seldom wholly convincing.”

In fact, malingering—that is, the rational output of a neurological normal brain aiming at the surreptitious achievement of a well identified gain—is a constant threat in such cases. It’s understandable, then, that law enforcement officials have long been leery about such diagnoses, and for years they’ve pushed for some kind of standardized test for amnesia. Unlike the M’Naghten rule, which tests for criminal insanity, judging the legitimacy of amnesia claims defies application of uniform standards. As one expert remarks, amnesia cases “differ in onset, duration, and content forgotten” to the extent that it cannot be broadly defined in legal circumstances. And in a landmark case in England in 1959, a jury was called on to determine whether a defendant was faking amnesia, making him legally unfit to stand trial. The jury ruled he was faking (and convicted him, to boot). In truth, most cases of psychogenic retrograde autobiographical amnesia resolve themselves on their own accord, so if Hamilton Burger is willing to be patient, he might well be able to wait his suspect out. And, in fact, Eleanor Corbin is faking her amnesia, a deception which is soon uncovered by the police.* Could Michael Alden be doing the same thing?

The police were, it appears, suspicious of his claim; however, that suspicion was mitigated by the fact that he wasn’t accused of having committed any crime. Indeed, the only crime apparent seems to have been perpetrated against him. But if he is faking it, it’s reasonable to assume that the reason goes back to that mysterious scene at the beginning of the series. Which means that there’s something in his past he’s trying to hide, something very dark indeed. And he knows full well what it is.

Even a series as reliable as The Fugitive has an amnesia episode. It’s the ninth episode of the second season, “Escape into Black,” in which Dr. Richard Kimble is caught in an explosion at a diner. He awakens in a hospital, badly injured, and with no idea who he is or what has happened to him. Fortunately, there’s a social worker on the scene, one determined to look out for Kimble’s interests even though he can’t look out for them himself. Learning that Kimble had been asking about a one-armed man prior to the explosion, she renews the search herself. A good thing, too, because Kimble, having found out he’s wanted for murder and with no idea of whether or not he’s guilty, is on the verge of surrendering himself to Lt. Gerard.

We know how it ends, of course: Kimble regains his memory in time to escape Gerard and resume his search for the one-armed man. It’s mighty convenient for us all that his problem clears up before the episode ends—but how likely is it?

Well, it’s at least plausible. That same article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that retrograde amnesia cases “usually clear up with relative rapidity, with or without psychotherapy.” Once Michael Alden’s doctors make their diagnosis (which, although it’s not mentioned by name, is almost certainly psychogenic retrograde autobiographical amnesia), then comes the treatment. Or at least it would, if Alden was willing to stand still for it. But he’s still running for his life, remember, and he realizes that he can’t afford to sit around undergoing extensive therapy to try and recover his memory. While that’s happening, the killers could catch up to him again, and this time they might not miss. (They could keep him in the hospital, of course, but then who knows if his insurance covers it, or even if he has insurance? It’s not as if they can look him up.) The treatment, however, would almost certainly have been a course of psychological therapy. Now, in the early decades of the 20th century, the therapy might have consisted of “truth serum” drugs such as barbiturates and benzodiazepines, and doubtless there are those who might wonder why his doctors didn’t try that. In fact, however, those drugs weren’t very successful in dealing with cases of amnesia—while they did make it possible for the patient to speak more easily about things, they also lowered the threshold of suggestibility, with the result that the information from the patient lacked reliability. By the 1960s, that kind of treatment would have been out.

It’s far more likely that a course of psychoanalysis would be suggested, and I think it’s intriguing that one of the possible diagnoses to come from such treatment would have been along Freudian lines, by suggesting that his amnesia was a form of self-punishment, “with the obliteration of personal identity as an alternative to suicide.” I wonder if that will come up in the course of the series? Is it possible that Alden’s apparent dual identity at the start of the series has to do with something so secretive, so horrifying, that his subconscious simply can’t deal with it anymore, with the result that he tries to sweep it all clean? In an early episode, someone shrewdly observes that he has an opportunity few people ever get: to make a brand-new start to life, with no baggage, nothing linking him to the past. Is that what he’s subconsciously trying to do, to divorce himself from something he doesn’t want to be reminded of? In such conversations, Alden invariably states that all he’s interested in is the truth of who he is, and if it turns out that there’s something bad in his past (in one episode, he thinks he might be a killer), well, so be it—that’s the risk he’s willing to take

And this, Walter Cronkite would probably discover, is where the story ends. In cases involving brain damage, doctors may be able to find a cause, and perhaps a cure. But Michael Alden’s case remains a mystery. It is likely, but not certain, that his amnesia will eventually clear up. It may happen relatively quickly, or it may take a protracted period of psychoanalysis. But as to how or why it happens, and how or why it resolves itself? And what the amnesiac goes through, a man without a past, whose continued survival depends on reclaiming that past? It is, surely, part of the mysterious world of the amnesiac. One thing is for certain, however: the trauma that Michael Alden faces is one that most of us will never have to deal with. …

Don’t wait; that should be the moral of the story. Do your living now, while you can, while you can still live in the present. That’s what Michael Alden does, in Coronet Blue. He does it because he has no choice. And really, neither do we. Life is not meant for inertia, but for movement. Forward movement. However you can, wherever you can, whenever you can. Even if you’re not like Michael Alden.

But we have a couple of advantages over Mike: for one thing, he doesn’t know who’s shooting at him, but we know who’s shooting at us. Life is firing the bullets, and the one thing of which we can be certain is that one of them, somewhere, has your name on it, and another one has mine. For another, most of us don’t have to worry about our series being cancelled before we find out the answers.

There’s only one problem with this analogy, of course. We don’t know what “coronet blue” means either. 

Come on. If you know cars you should be able to find a Dodge Coronet in blue …

… although finding one that isn’t in a blue and rust two-tone is a bigger challenge.

After this musical interlude …

… the first thought is that all of us who complain about the entertainment world’s lack of originality should realize that this is not a new phenomenon.

For those who want to know the secret of Coronet Blue, read this from IMDB.com:

David Gross writes to Generation X:

The reported release of a Barbie movie (don’t ask why) made someone point out that Barbie apparently comes from Willows, Wis.

Where? Back in 2020 Tyler Maas wrote:

As Wisconsin was waiting to officially go blue in the Presidential Election, the Richland County locale with a population of around 500 people took its sweet ass time processing its estimated 300 ballots. Ultimately, Willow finally got around to doing so around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, the state’s 10 electoral votes went to now-President-elect Joe Biden, and the southwest Wisconsin town immediately faded back into obscurity.

Though Willow, Wisconsin’s stint of relevance was justifiably quite short, it was long enough to inform us of a strange fact that was somewhat related to the tiny town’s name. While waiting for the state to find and process its ballots, excellent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter (and fun/informative Twitter follow) Mary Spicuzza tweeted about a fictional city called “Willows”—yes, with an S at the end—which is the apparent birthplace of Barbara Millicent Roberts. You probably know her better as “Barbie.”

We’ve written about fictional Wisconsin places in pop culture before, but this factoid about the iconic doll’s Badger State connection totally eluded us until Spicuzza brought it to our attention. Figuring we weren’t alone in learning that Barbie lore claims a fake Wisconsin city as her hometown, we tried to dig a bit deeper to learn more about Willows. Here’s what we found out.

Willows was founded by some weirdos called the “Founding Fathers Of Willows”
Though the city’s eponymous tree certainly has an important role in the history of Willows (more on that later), we have to mention the Founding Fathers Of Willows. The guild was composed of both men and women, who apparently hid a treasure somewhere in town. There are a bunch of plaques scattered throughout the city, which serve as clues to help people find that treasure. According to a Barbie movie Wiki page, one of the plaques opens up a tunnel that leads to a cave, an underground lake, and a vault. We know that Wisconsin has a ton of lakes, but this is the first secret underground lake we’re aware of in the state.

Willows is famous for its willow trees
Legend states the fictional city that’s now known for its abundance of willow trees started with but one weeping willow. However, from that single tree sprouted a great deal of others. Each year, Willows hosts a carnival-style festival called Willowfest. Riveting stuff.

There are conflicting details about Barbie’s time in Willows
Since things like a consistent story arc and character continuity aren’t always paramount in children’s entertainment, Barbie’s backstory—and how that backstory aligns with Willows—doesn’t always match up. What we can say for sure is that Barbie was born in Willows and spent at least part of her childhood there. After that, it gets murky. Some story lines say Barbie and her family moved to Malibu when her youngest of three sisters (Chelsea) was an infant. Other sources suggest she stuck around long enough to attend Willows High School and be on the school’s cheer leading team. Her grandmother still lives in a quaint house in the outskirts of Willows.

Willows is probably a small-ish city
In recent films like Barbie & Her Sisters In The Great Puppy Adventure and Barbie & Her Sisters Puppy Rescue, the Roberts siblings return to their former hometown. While there, they go to The Willows Museum, an ice cream shop, and City Hall (where the mustachioed Mayor Jenkins presides). There’s also a clocktower and a willow-shaped fountain that’s a popular attraction. Based on the clips we’ve seen of the movies (sorry, there’s no way in hell we’re paying to watch these!), it looks like a quaint little place with an historic downtown, some modern amenities like a dance studio, and impressive bikeability. Most buildings seem to be brick. We’ve found no mention of its location within the state or its population, but it looks to be a quaint town with a lot of charm. Like Burlington without the underlying racism or Lake Geneva without the chain restaurants and FIBs.

Mattel once made a “Willows Wisconsin Series”
Wanting to “give a glimpse into Barbie doll’s life before Malibu,” Mattel made a Willows Wisconsin Series that, for the most part, served as a way to showcase Ms. Roberts in some vintage wardrobe. Beyond the classic cocktail dress and swimwear straight out of 1959, there’s also a nod to her rural roots with a “picnic” outfit complete with a cherry blouse and bluejeans. There’s also a “Busy Gal” Barbie that we don’t necessarily feel the urge to talk about here in 2020.

All of that was more than I (1) ever knew or (2) cared to know about Barbie’s apparent (fictional) Wisconsin origins.

Fictional Wisconsin (a subject I covered in my previous life as a business magazine editor during a period when several films were being shot in Wisconsin) has been a setting for fiction outside of Barbie, as Maas explores because …

Despite being placed directly between coasts and in the thick of a region of America that’s commonly reduced to “flyover country,” Wisconsin manages to be cast in film and on television fairly often. Whether as means of acknowledgement from expats now making good in Hollywood, or a destination point decided in a meeting populated by half-assed executives who have never crossed into the Badger State border, Wisconsin has served as the site for dozens of TV and movie productions. Long running sitcoms like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and That ’70s Show are obvious ones. And yes, we remember when Bridesmaids showed the Hoan Bridge and that apartment exterior in Bay View for a few seconds.

Milwaukee Record risked the purity of our Netflix recommendation algorithm, thumbed through the public library DVD collection, and searched for a Blockbuster Video that was still in business to find 10 more Wisconsin settings—some fictional, others poorly depicted—in television and film.

The Young and the Restless, Genoa City (1973-present)
The Genoa City that most housewives, unemployed people, and second shift workers have known as the site of their favorite soap opera since 1973 couldn’t be more different than the actual 3,000-resident and 2.3-square-mile town of the same name that’s nestled against Wisconsin’s southern border. Y&R’s depiction of Genoa City is generous—boasting the headquarters of four international corporations, a national newspaper, penthouses, skyscrapers, two hospitals, a prison, and innumerable other trappings of high society. The real Genoa City is recovering from the excitement of last week’s Lions Club Bingo and is preparing for a mock tornado drill Thursday. To our knowledge, no professional athletes have dropped by recently.

The Great Outdoors, Pechoggin (1988)
John Hughes had a habit of basing the majority of his iconic films in his longtime home of Chicago. However, the filmmaker’s John Candy-starring classic, The Great Outdoors, saw his still-Chicago-based characters vacationing in Perhcoggin, a fictional FIB paradise in Wisconsin’s north woods. Locals have grown accustomed to the stereotypical Illinois tourists (portrayed expertly/aggravatingly by Dan Aykroyd), gritting their teeth as visitors support the economy of the bear-laden “hole in the earth” by go-karting, eating at the A&W, horseback riding, and sipping Point and Leinenkugel’s beer at the Potowotominimac Lodge. The entire film was actually shot in Bass Lake, California.

Step By Step, Port Washington (1991-98)
This has been covered elsewhere before, but we must repeat: THERE ARE NO ROLLERCOASTERS IN PORT WASHINGTON! Unless, of course, you count actual Port Washingtonian Dustin Diamond, who has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster since his days playing “Screech” on all incantations of Saved By The Bell.