Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I final­ly watched Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind last night. I’ve been want­i­ng to see it pret­ty much since it came out, but it was one of those things that I nev­er real­ly got around to doing. In any case, while I want to watch it at least one more time before I cod­i­fy my thoughts on the thing. The best time to spit it out should be now, while it is fresh in my mind. If you’ve not seen the movie, please don’t go past the jump.

There real­ly isn’t a whole lot to say about the con­struc­tion of the film prop­er. Gondry does­n’t put out crap, and while I’m not the biggest fan of all of his con­trivances, he is still a mas­ter­crafter. The sets must’ve been incred­i­bly tough to con­cep­tu­al­ize and dress, so I’d like to give a huge shout out to the Pro­duc­tion Design­er Dan Leigh and… Holy Shit. No way. Ron von Blomberg was main set dec­o­ra­tor! I worked quite close­ly with Ron on Into the Fire. Sweet. Well he did a fan­frick­ing­tas­tic job.

The only parts I did­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like in regard to film con­struc­tion were the blur­ry faces and the forced per­spec­tive scene. I don’t think the blur­ry faces were appro­pri­ate and I don’t think the forced per­spec­tive was thought out and imple­ment­ed well enough. But I’m just crotch­ety.

I real­ly iden­ti­fied with Jim Car­rey’s char­ac­ter Joel. Not com­plete­ly, but almost. I can’t ever fath­om why I would want to have parts of my mem­o­ries wiped away, no mat­ter how painful. In the movie they are painful because they are mem­o­ries of great joy and great care. So get­ting rid of those would make life so bland. I’m sure there are peo­ple out there who would glad­ly do some­thing like that. But I could­n’t.

I also won­der a bit about the mech­a­nism of the mem­o­ry-era­sure. Joel knows in his mind that his mem­o­ries are get­ting erased. He is con­scious men­tal­ly while uncon­scious phys­i­cal­ly. So I won­der, why does­n’t he remem­ber the era­sure pro­ce­dure when he awakes, and by proxy remem­ber try­ing to hold on to his mem­o­ries of Clemen­tine? This is almost as tricksy as cop­ing with time trav­el para­dox­es.

I did­n’t like the mem­o­ry-Clemen­tine’s last men­tion of Mon­tauk because it seems a lit­tle too deus ex machi­na. I’d’ve rather had him head on out there because he had some deep sub­lim­i­nal urge. In a way I guess he does, but it sort of comes across as a hyp­not­ic sug­ges­tion in the movie. I also don’t know why real-Clemen­tine was even out there on that day. Her pres­ence is not explained, unless it is explained and I’ll catch it on a sec­ond run through.

Also, the tapes. The tapes are very impor­tant, because they are the things that they should’ve told each oth­er. They are the things they both love and hate about the oth­er per­son. Even if they did­n’t want those things to change, they need­ed to be spo­ken. Say­ing “I think you are smart but not edu­cat­ed and I don’t think I can talk to you about books” might hurt, but it lets you at least try to work through the feel­ings. So I’m glad they got to lis­ten to at least a bit of each oth­er’s tapes. So since they might be try­ing it again, per­haps they’ll not fear the crit­i­cal com­ments.

So I real­ly liked the movie. It makes me wish I had some sort of extend­ed rela­tion­ship with a girl, which in turn makes me depressed because I don’t know if that is pos­si­ble, but I like the movie any­way. It lets me live a bit vic­ar­i­ous­ly-emo­tion­al­ly but it also engages the log­ic parts of the brain. So it makes you use the whole brain to both think and feel your way through it. It sort of reminds me of the first time I watched the Matrix. You just can’t quite get your head around it the first time around, and that is a good thing. Always a good thing.