"Oh my darling, oh my darling/
Oh my darling Clementine/
Thou art lost and gone forever/
Dreadful sorry, Clementine…"– Huckleberry Hound
Now, where was I?This is not a movie review. More like delirious fan mail to scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman and the seven or eight people who watched his romantic sci-fi flick, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one terribly unremarkable Tuesday afternoon in a Makati mall. There aren’t many days you wake up, watch a movie and get your mind blown away. Seldom are the movies in this day and age of Jerry Bruckheimer that grip you by the scruff of your neck and slap you around. This was one of them.
I had an inkling as to what to expect. Brit magazine Uncut raves about Kaufman: "Charlie Kaufman’s universe is one-third Frank Capra and two-thirds Franz Kafka." Yeah, and with bits of Franz Zappa thrown in to create a sad, strange and screwed-up celluloid planet where oddness is the human condition. His works include quirky fare such as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Human Nature, among others. Eternal Sunshine is by far the quirkiest. Although getting 15-minute access to John Malkovich’s head and visiting the 71/2nd floor in Spike Jonze’s Being is one peculiar treat. Kaufman’s latest screenplay, which was directed by Michel Gondry (best known for Bjork and the White Stripes videos), is another invitation into that rabbit hole right under the antiseptic suburbs of reality. And moviegoers, like Alice, are asked to enter, be seated, and suspend their disbelief for a bit.
Eternal Sunshine revolves around lonesome loser Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), an impulsive and eccentric gal with kaleidoscopic hair, tangerine sweater and potato head figurines. They both try to obliterate each other’s memories courtesy of the Lacuna Inc. method. Not A Clockwork Orange’s "Ludovico Treatment," mind you, but far more sinister. It is a method that brings people a "revolutionary painless non-surgical memory erasing process." And it has this for a teaser: "REMEMBER, WITH LACUNA YOU CAN FORGET. The Lacuna Inc. has made giant strides in brain research. It has discovered a simple and effective way to remove problem memories. No longer do you have to live with life-debilitating memories. Live again, take the steps now!"
What a neat idea, it would seem at first. Many of us wish for a contraption that will expedite the process of forgetting – especially embarrassing episodes, fake plastic lovers, monolithic failures, or a life not worth remembering at all. But as the procedure erases memories upon memories, an unconscious Joel slowly recalls the sweet/stormy relationship that he shared with Clementine; realizes how much he still loves her; and then decides to keep those memories. Joel and Clementine’s endless scurrying across Joel’s dreaming mind to prevent their past from being obliterated smacks of 1984 and Brazil where lovers rage against a nameless force.
The movie is a trippy joyride on the highways of psychedelia right past the inter-states of confusion and grace which, believe me, is a good thing. I loathe masturbatory action flicks heavy on the explosives or car-chases and short on common sense – all that sound and fury signifying big bucks. Or how about romantic comedies where everything is manipulated, glossed over and has that Meg Ryan sheen to it? Or how about super-hero flicks that are a flimsy excuse for selling toys, T-shirts and future sequels? Eternal Sunshine is an attempt to restore what’s great about making movies.
Carrey, who reportedly worked for peanuts to appear in the Kaufman film, displays restraint (think the hammy actor’s appearance in The Truman Show) with just the right amount of the Riddler, the Grinch or the Man on the Moon squeaking through. Winslet as always (except for those sappy bits in Titanic) is a joy to watch. The two are quite compelling in this "love story in reverse," a warts-and-all type of romantic black comedy. And the movie as whole tells us that love can be seedy, sleazy, shitty, sinister and beautiful in spurts.
Now where was I?
Oh, the movie deals with memory, a very mysterious country. Are we simply the sum of all our memories? Was the novelist Milan Kundera right when he said, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of man against forgetting"? (Yes, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which begins with a communist traitor airbrushed out of a propaganda picture and away from the collective memory.) Was the poet T.S. Eliot right when he concurred that there is no past, present nor future but a steadily flowing stream of time? (Ergo, the dork you were in high school, the writer you are now and the hobo you will be in the future coexist in some weird inexplicable way.) Of course, the movie answers none of these. Besides, it’s up to us to figure things out for ourselves. It merely presents an alternative way of looking at memory and forgetting, how memory affects the fabric of everyday living.
Anyway, I love non-linear shit like Eternal Sunshine, Memento and other flicks that owe more to novelists and short story writers than to director Joel Schumacher. And with Eternal Sunshine, you come out of the theater slightly perplexed and unnerved. I hate neat endings. Life doesn’t have neat endings. There are no real endings to stories, or life in general (according to Doc Manhattan in Watchmen).
Kaufman’s screenplays do not duplicate life. (Even great movies in a sense do not hold a mirror to reality; heck, even documentaries are’"structured" in a way. If we want to watch real life, we could always look out the window. Then again, the picture is bound to be subjective, too.) Each of Kaufman’s movies gives us realistic characters trapped in the most unrealistic of situations. That, to me, says more about our lives than, say, stories of happy hookers meeting Prince Charming, or blonde bimbos in pink performing splendidly in a courtroom, or outcasts doing insipid acts against bullies that provoke "the slow clap."
It would have been appropriate if the eight people who watched Eternal Sunshine did that slow clap thing as the end credits rolled to the strains of Beck’s lonesome tune. (Other people were probably blasting their brains out in a theater showing Collateral at the time.) But it didn’t happen. There was only a quiet exit back to quiet lives. Anyway, they probably would’ve forgotten the movie the following day, in patented Charlie Kaufman fashion. Blessed are the forgetful.
Eventually, I will have no memory of ever writing this article. And I will have no memory of ever forgetting.
Now, where was I?