Séamas O’Reilly

On the eternal sunshine of the spotless cultural mind

What’s wrong with this picture? Séamas O’Reilly writes on all the tv shows you’ve watched, but have no recollection of viewing.

Lacking any better idea, I stuck on Shutter Island last week, one of the few Scorsese films I’d not seen. Or so I thought. I was about ten minutes in before I realised I had indeed seen it before, along with another, altogether more jarring awareness that I couldn’t remember a thing about it. “Mark Ruffalo’s in this?” I said, incredulously, to my endlessly patient wife. “Emily Mortimer too?”

My memory didn’t use to work ...