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Eternal Sunshine directed by Michael Gondry This review first appeared in Third Way, November 2004.
The novelist David Lodge has argued that fiction has as great a role to play as science in humanity's dawning understanding of its brain: as neurology uncovers the mechanics, fiction uncovers what it's like to be inside a brain. Eternal Sunshine is grist to that mill. Fantasy though it is, the inner life of the human cranium has never been so well realised on screen. The visual depiction of memories - reliving them and seeing them erased - is unsettlingly vivid, the perfect realisation of Charlie Kaufman's compelling story of a man who arranges to have the painful memories of old love wiped, and decides too late (or is it?) to change his mind. Kaufman has become one of the few screenwriters whose name can (and deserves to) draw fans to a film, just like a director or actor. The mind is a recurrent theme in his films, from the fun he had in Being John Malkovich with the thought of what you could do if you found a portal into a celebrity's head, to Adaptation's superb visit into the mind of a screenwriter (called Charlie Kaufman) torn between sterility and selling out. Eternal Sunshine starts (in surely the longest pre-credits sequence ever) as a classic boy meets girl tale, though Joel and Clementine are perhaps a little scruffier and quirkier than the classic - impressively counter-typical roles for both a spikey Kate Winslet and a restrained Jim Carey. But it emerges that this has all happened before. Joel recently had a card announcing that Clementine had had him electronically removed from her memory after their love turned sour. He decides to do the same, and so most of the movie is the relationship played in reverse as the memories peel off, getting fresher and happier, until Joel realises he needs to keep his past. The story becomes a bizarre kind of romantic neurological thriller as Joel races through his evaporating memories trying to find a place to hide Clementine before she is lost and gone forever. Romantic comedy is the most cliché stuffed of all Hollywood merchandise, but it seems Kaufman wouldn't know what to do with a cliché if it came with an instruction manual. While other filmmakers try every formula in the book to keep us in suspense about whether the leads will end up together, the answer is obvious from the moment they first bump into each other in a New York departent store on a snowy Christmas Eve. Kaufman in contrast has started by showing us how they will get together again - and yet ends by pulling that certainty away. An earlier version of the script ended with them repeatedly deleting each other and starting again in a Groundhogdayesque prison of erasure and rebirth. Among many things, Eternal Sunshine is a Frankenstein story - anxiety about science playing God with humanity. But whereas Shelley feared the ability to construct bodies from scratch, Kaufman has moved on to deconstructing the mind. Although genetic engineering is our angst du jour, neurology and AI are infant sciences that are bound to mature. How long before one can remove trauma or erase abuse as if deleting files? From my experience the most alarming aspect of the film was that nobody seemed to be backing up. What of the fact that the couple are immediately drawn to each other again after the erasure? Does this suggest that there is a depth to the human soul beyond the reach of neuroscience; or simply that the technology was imperfect? Are they destined to be together - that odd Hollywood relic of New England puritanism; or is it just that two well matched people fit just as well second time around? The most fascinating theme of the film is the allure of the clean sheet: 'To let people begin again,' says Kirsten Dunst's receptionist 'It's beautiful. You look at a baby and it's so fresh, so clean, so free. And adults - they're like this messy tangle of anger and phobias and sadness, hopelessness. And Howard just makes it go away.' Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born? The title is from Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, the nun's yearning to be free from the pull of sinful memories - though of course in the contemporary west it is unhappy memories that one wants freedom from. But the two share common ground. The tragedy of Joel and Clementine is also the tragedy of facile religious restarts: the appeal of burying the past and instantly becoming a wholer, holier person is obvious, but always disappointing and sometimes dangerous. And can we in fact disown our past (as opposed to repenting it) without disowning ourselves? On the other hand, you could call the movie tragedy of unforgiveness. To bury the past is to be forced to relive it; to face it, forgive it, learn from it offers the prospect if not of eternal sunshine exactly at least that of weathering well. |
Kaufman wouldn't know what to do with a cliché if it came with an instruction manual |
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