Previously on... Film Theory!
Hey, I’ve seen a boat! *echoed*
How could Dory remember the boat, but then forget meeting Marlin?
I am on to you, Ellen DeGeneres!
-Keep swimming, swimming, swimming-
“Finding Dory”? More like “Exposing Dory”!
The truth is comin’ out!
Dory doesn't suffer from short term memory loss - she’s faking it.
/Dramatic thunder clap/
*Film Theory Theme Song*
Hello, internet! Welcome to Film- wait, what was I saying?
See, if I had anterograde amnesia like Dory claims, I wouldn't remember what I’m supposed to say here.
But as we talked about last time, Dory doesn’t have anterograde amnesia.
She’s faking her condition to look weaker and have the other fish underestimate her abilities.
It's a survival tactic.
Oh, sure, everything seems to check out. She can't remember Marlin's name,
she forgets where she is, can’t even remember what happened to her parents.
But as we found last episode, she slips up.
She remembers seeing the boat that took Nemo, even after she claims to forget who Marlin is.
This fact of seeing the boat should fall under declarative memory,
which, if she was truly suffering from short-term memory loss, she should have forgotten.
You've painted yourself into a corner, Dory.
And that’s not the only piece of evidence I have against you.
Today we’re throwing the book at Dory to show that appearances can be deceiving and to get you to view Finding Dory in a whole new context.
And here’s the crazy thing. To start exposing Dory's lies, we don’t even need to look that deep.
It all begins with the single most basic fact about Dory: the type of fish she is.
Now, Finding Nemo never specifies her species, but judging by her blue body and the black design running out to her yellow tail,
we can confidently say that Dory is a blue tang -
also known as a Paracanthurus Hepatus, Latin for "incredibly hard to pronounce".
These fish tend to be relatively small, growing up to only twelve inches when they reach adult-hood.
And look at that peaceful majesty...
And yet, it's time to explore some true facts about the blue tang.
That curvy blue body hides a caudal spine, which extends out when threatened, slashing and wounding predators.
That makes Dory like the Wolverine of fish.
And that's not all. If consumed by humans, blue tangs may cause poisoning.
And some blue tang fish even have venomous glands in their fins.
Wow Dory is far less cute than Finding Nemo would have you believe!
Behind that angelic blue body and freckled big - eyed face lies a venomous monster...
ZeFrank I miss you and your true facts series
Come back to YouTube, COME BACK!!
But okay, let's go back to the whole memory loss thing.
Dory states that the source of her short term memory loss is hereditary.
DORY: I forget things almost instantly it runs in my family
This may be a simple reference to the old myth of goldfish memory:
the belief that fish are dumb and have short memory spans;
only able to recall events for about three seconds or so.
This though is... just not true.
Not A True Fact
about the Blue Tang
Fish actually have surprisingly strong memories
lasting for up to a year!
Carp that have been caught by fishermen have been seen
to avoid hooks for up to a year afterwards
Researchers even discovered that they can learn to associate
certain sounds with food and then remember it 5 months later!
There is ample evidence that fish are just as intelligent as mammals,
capable of the same intellectual feats as rats or mice.
They can learn their way around mazes; they can learn to recognise other fish
and they can remember prey from predator.
Thus we can't dismiss Dory's short term memory loss as just being symptomatic of her being a fish
So the question remains then: Can you inherit short term memory loss from your parents?
The answer here is, once again, is a big NO.
Short-term memory loss is typically caused in one of two ways:
drug and alcohol abuse or severe brain trauma.
Benzodiazepine drugs, typically used to treat panic attacks, if misused can cause amnesia induced side effects;
drinking a bunch of alcohol can cause blackouts which blocks the brain's ability
to transfer short-term memories into long term memory.
So if you go out the late night bender and can't remember what happened to you the night before,
congratulations! You just gave yourself anterograde amnesia!
A winner is YOU!
And chronic alcoholism can lead to Korsakoff's Syndrome,
where brain cells aren't able to produce enough energy
and as a result break down and cause permanent anterograde amnesia.
So unless Dory is regularly swimming her way out of a bourbon bottle,
it's not gonna do it.
Although, That would be a very different movie
* Dramatic music begins * New from Pixar,
An uplifting family friendly story of one fish's struggle to combat alcoholism
Coming this summer, Finding Dory - In The Gutter
*Just keep swimming, slowed down A LOT*
Rated R
On the other side traumatic brain injury, typically to the hippocampus
and surrounding cortices can also cause anterograde amnesia.
Or to treat a serious disorder like epilepsy or a tumor, patients will have parts of their brain removed.
These procedures successfully cure the disorder, but can often resolve in anterograde amnesia.
Notice though that none of these instances, Brain Trauma, Alcohol & Drug Abuse are hereditary.
In fact, there is no scientific proof that anterograde amnesia has ever been passed down genetically.
NONE!
Dory, unless she is a unicorn of biology quite simply is lying about the cause of her amnesia.
Which again, throws into question her having amnesia in the first place!
But that sounds crazy right, people faking an illness as extreme as amnesia!
But here's the thing, it's not as crazy as it sounds.
In fact it's so common that it even has a name.
Faking amnesia would be considered a type of 'Malingering',
in which people fake symptoms of an illness to achieve some goal.
Getting out of work, getting taken care of or in Dory's case, increasing your odds of survival in the dangerous ocean.
So, outside of the scientific inconsistencies in her story,
How do we prove, outright PROVE, that she's malingering?
Well, it's not as hard as you might think.
Most fakers tend to Ferris Bueller their symptoms,
over-exaggerate them by putting in extra effort to make them look sick.
FERRIS: "The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands."
Take for instance the "hand coin" test.
If I put a quarter in my RIGHT hand,
you can easily tell me which hand the coin is in.
Unless of course, you WEREN'T PAYING ATTENTION, XxPixarLover15! [Pissed MatPat is PISSED]
There's ALWAYS one of you; jeez, you think I do these videos for my health or something?
I'm doing this for YOU. [MatPat please calm yourself]
Anyway, to CATCH YOU UP, the coin is in my right hand.
Amnesiacs, though, can't remember which hand the coin is in and are forced to guess.
Meaning that, by the laws of probability, they'll guess correctly around fifty percent of the time.
Fakers, though, will exaggerate their bad performance.
They'll remember which hand the coin is in and to look sick, will deliberately choose the wrong one.
As a result, their tally of correct to incorrect guesses will be below chance.
They're throwing the test, but they're throwing it a bit too hard!
And when it comes to short-term memory loss, there's a BUNCH of proven scientific tests to catch you in the act.
These tests are referred to as symptom validity tests.
For example, the test of memory malingering, otherwise known as TOMM,
is a 50-question visual recognition test, where examinees are shown fifty drawings,
numbers, words or symbols for around three seconds each.
After all the drawings have been shown, the examiner then shows the examinees two different drawings:
one from the fifty previously shown and one new one.
The examinee is then asked to name which of the two drawings he had previously seen.
By purely guessing, an amnesiac would score fifty percent right.
And across all of these tests, it was found that suspected malingerers
scored worse than actual anterograde amnesiacs.
And that's not all:
malingerers tend to have a slower response time to questions.
They take great pains in answering,
as if they're struggling to figure out what the correct answer was.
(MatPat mocking) hmmmm, uhhhhh, oooooh, that's a tough one, erghhhh.
True amnesiacs, however, tend not to have that much delay between question and answer.
And finally, psychologists used what's known as the primacy effect to test so-called amnesiacs.
This is the tendency to more easily remember items from the beginning of a list rather than the middle.
So if I give you the numbers
8, 2, 9, 6, 3, 5, 5, 9, 6, 2,
you're most likely to remember the number 8,
because it was the first number of the bunch.
Fakers show this effect, people with amnesia don't.
Knowing all that, look at Dory.
Dory, like most malingerers, consistently answers questions wrong, far below mere chance.
Midway through Finding Nemo, a school of fish tries to give Dory directions by
showing her a number of different sea creatures.
However, Dory is unable to identify a single one,
failing to recognize a swordfish, a lobster and an octopus.
Now, you're probably thinking:
Hey MatPat, give Dory a break.
Maybe she can't remember what an octopus or swordfish are called.
She does have anterograde amnesia, after all.
Except, Dory previously has shown that she has quite a knack for remembering different aquatic life.
She easily identifies a shark, -
DORY: "Hey look, shark!"
- a whale, -
DORY: "O-oh, big fella! Whale!"
- even a seagull!
/Dory glares at the crab and holds it up for the seagulls to see./
SEAGULL: "Mine."
So how come right then and there, she's unable to come up with three very common sea creatures?
Sure, maybe she can't name one or two, but... all three?
It's almost like she's deliberately getting them wrong:
playing into her short-term memory loss, answering way below chance.
And in that scene, Dory agonizes over her answers: [Roll tape]
DORY: "Wait, um-"
MARLIN: (impatiently) "It's a swordfish!"
MOONFISH: "Where's the butter?"
DORY: "Oh-oh-oh! It's on the tip of my tongue."
Much like a malingerer would, she exaggerates her condition:
a telltale sign of a FAKER.
You want more proof? Look no further than all the times Dory gets Nemo's name wrong.
She calls him Fabio, Chico, Bingo, Harpo, Elmo...
Now the fact that Dory can't remember Nemo's name is consistent with anterograde amnesia,
but look closely at all the names she calls him:
they all end with an O, just like Nemo.
But someone really suffering from anterograde amnesia
would be just as likely to call Nemo... John [OMG what did you do to that poor fish],
or Paul [STAHP], or Ringo [JFC].
They would have no idea, no context, that his name would end with an O.
The very fact that Dory chooses names that are close to Nemo, but not quite,
is proof that she remembers his name and is deliberately struggling and trying to get them wrong.
Dory even recalls information in accordance with the primacy effect:
she memorizes the address for where Nemo is being held -
P. Sherman 42 Wallaby Way Sydney
- yet in her moving speech to Marlin at the end of the movie,
she struggles to remember the complete address, only able to identify the beginning -
just like a faker would.
DORY: "P. Sherman, 42- f- ugh... forty... two... ugh!"
In fact, throughout Finding Nemo, Dory shows inconsistent base knowledge:
when she meets Bruce the shark, she's not scared at all,
like she doesn't know what sharks are, or that they eat fish!
Yet later, after discovering a scuba mask,
she correctly identifies sharks below her.
DORY: "Hey look, shark!"
MARLIN: "No no no-!"
And then one more time, by the end of the film, she tells the sharks to remember not to eat fish.
ANCHOR: "Remember, fish are friends..."
DORY: "...not food! Bye!"
So which way is it, Dory? Do you remember what a shark is or NOT?
Do you remember that they eat fish or NOT?
'Cuz if you didn't know that they eat fish the first time you met 'em,
then you shouldn't remember hours and days later at the end of the movie when you see them again.
So which is it, Dory? Do you know whether sharks eat fish or NOT?
CHECKMATE!!
Checkmate, you fictional, computer-animated fish, you!!
WE GOTCHA!!! [MatPat calm down will you please--]
So you always thought Finding Nemo was a wholesome tale about a good-hearted father
finding his kidnapped son with the help of a lovable but simple-minded companion,
NOPE.
Let me break down what's really happening here.
Dory, completely alone, sees another lone fish, screaming about his missing child;
a kindred spirit, an easy mark.
Dory uses her perceived weakness to trick predators, like the shark, whale, jellyfish, anglerfish,
who all just buy what Dory's selling.
When Marlin attempts to get away from her, Dory immediately begins to cry,
emotionally manipulating the clownfish to take her along with him.
Over the course of the film, she pretends to slowly get better,
linking her perceived progress with Marlin.
Now, Marlin can't leave Dory out of guilt, because he thinks he's the only thing keeping her together.
And that is the true story of Finding Nemo:
how a con artist manipulated the emotions of a grieving father into letting her into his home.
But hey, that's just a theory...
a FILM THEORY!
Aaaaand... CUT!
If you like this video and want the TRUTH, tweet this at Dory herself.
Ellen DeGeneres, @TheEllenShow #ExposingDory
You know we tried the same thing with Leonardo DiCaprio and sent him literally THOUSANDS of tweets...
and he never responded. Thanks alot for the appreciation in us helping you get an Oscar... Leo.
Who knows though, maybe this time a big celebrity will take notice and give this video the response it deserves.
Or if you don't like pestering a celebrity voice actor to get information about a fictional character conspiracy theory,
then click here! It'll take you to the wisecrack channel, which I talk about a bunch during these end cards,
but it's because it's one of my favorite channels on YouTube right now.
Seriously, Jared over there, the main writer, does some incredible videos
that are both hilarious and super interesting.
They just did a phenomenal video on Deadpool that blew my mind like, five times, I kid you not.
Definitely worth a watch.
Please, if you're interested in checking them out, click here, and tell 'em that MatPat sent ya.
And with that, I'm done for the day.
Next time, I'm tackling something a bit more... sweet.
See ya then.
[Thanks for reading my subtitles!!]