Whatever pull recovered-memory theory has for people in the real world, its allure for storytellers is all too tackily apparent: psychoanalytic theories give the appearance of depth and modernity to utterly conventional melodramatic romance plots. But these conventional plots simply compound the way the theories falsify what we know about psychological processes. In recovered-memory plots the omniscient storyteller can establish both the repressed trauma and its significance objectively; he simply coordinates the disordered implicit memories in the present with the unambiguously actual traumatic past event, all of which he has invented. This is what recovered-memory movies share with detective stories, in which no key has been cut but to fit in its keyhole. The narrative structure of a recovered-memory plot thus seems to deal with the murkiness of human memory, and the uncertain impact of past experience on the present, but replicates the difficulties only to resolve them, with nothing lacking and nothing left over. (The fact that the interaction of past and present is pretty much always a matter of speculation, not susceptible to objective falsification, is not meaningfully addressed.) Such plots turn some of the most protean and elusive processes of existence into gratifying pop formulas, dispensing psychotherapy as if from a drive-thru window.

In Spellbound, The Snake Pit, The Three Faces of Eve, Marnie, and Sybil, the psychologist (whether professional or amateur) also functions as a detective and this truth-seeking romance hero takes on the quest of piecing together the confused amensiac's backstory. (The cleverest of these movies, Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), turns the combination of psychologist and detective to comically self-conscious advantage by having Sigmund Freud himself probe Sherlock Holmes's dreams to discover the cause of Holmes's cocaine addiction and paranoid fixation on Professor Moriarty.) In Mysterious Skin (as in A Thousand Acres (1997), in which Jane Smiley grimly and gracelessly inserts recovered memories of sexual abuse to retell King Lear from Goneril and Regan's point-of-view), Brian is both victim and detective. If writer-director Gregg Araki (in what I'm told is a faithful adaptation of Scott Heim's fictional source work) is one length ahead of the pack it's because he suggests with Neil's story that not every boy would be so freaked out by molestation as to repress the memories, and with Brian's story that uncovering the truth behind the coded memories may not of itself cure life-long misery. (The latter in stark contrast to the triumphant ending of Three Faces of Eve, in which the heroine, having lost her Southern accent in the therapeutic process, recites her grade-school teachers' names to demonstrate the integration of her personalities.)

But even if you accept recovered-memory theory as valid, it stretches credulity to think that like Brian, the victim would be able to locate the one person who could decrypt for him his defensively distorted remnants of memory. It's this convenience that makes Mysterious Skin kitsch in the same vein as Spellbound, even without ineffable moments like the one in which Ingrid Bergman says, "Liverwurst." (Click here for DVD Savant's knowing devaluation of Spellbound. The least credulous use of recovered-memory theory in movies can be found in Karl Freund's Mad Love (1935), in which Peter Lorre as the fiendish Dr. Gogol tries to convince Colin Clive that he has repressed a childhood memory involving knives, and then in private refers to his "arrested wish fulfillment" theory as "a lot of nonsense I don't believe myself.")