Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Arielle and I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tonight. It’s very rare that we go out to see a movie on its opening night; it’s even more rare that we’d make the effort to see Jim Carrey in action (Bruce Almighty, anyone? I thought so.).
But, wow, am I glad we did. I think Charlie Kaufman could walk away from writing screenplays forever and, just from his work on Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and now this, he’d be welcomed into the pantheon with open arms.
I just love how Kaufman’s movies pull the rug of reality out from under the viewer’s feet. It’s a totally disorienting experience that challenges one to become more than just a passive set of eyeballs taking in the film.
This movie, as did the other two, encouraged me to constantly reassess my ideas of what was fact and what was fantasy. Without giving too much of the movie away, what troubled me most was the nagging thought that perhaps all of the memories that Carrey’s character, Joel, was trying to save were merely fantasies that he had cooked up in the first place. This seemed plausible to me, especially after the crumbling beach house scene where it appeared that Joel’s initial meeting with Clementine (Kate Winslet) was all the further that their relationship really ever progressed.
I’m still having trouble making the jump from that apparently accurate memory of Joel walking away to how they actually hooked up and ended up spending so much time together. The tangible evidence or their relationship – the two garbage bags worth of mementos that Joel brings to Dr. Mierzwiak’s office and Joel’s and Clementine’s tapes in which they recount their dislikes of each other – exists, and by the end of the movie I was pretty satisfied that things had occurred as Joel had remembered them, more or less, but part of me would like to believe that there’s something more.
