sunshine with a speckled mind

i just walked home from watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Lucy and i am not quite sure if i really like it in terms of the way it was filmed -- those online-brain-scanning technology is rather annoyingly crude; Elijah Wood was behaving like a twat; and somehow the interleaving scenes did not seem to be held together enough.... yet, i do quite like the underlying themes....

Jim Carrey Joel wakes up to a new world erased of Clem... just as Clem has forgotten who he is.... they meet again, by coincidence on the same beach where they met for the very first time and fall in love with each other.... could it be that there is something basic that attracts them despite their supposedly 'erased' memories of each other? what triggered the desire to erase each from the other's memory in the first place?

the whole 'forgetting' process began when Clem returned late one night, drunk and looking pathetic and an annoyed Joel thoughtlessly said something regrettable igniting what was a slowly degenerating relationship into flames. the kind of incidents that provoked people's 'realisation' that they didn't really understand each other as they thought they did and decided that maybe they weren't suitable for each other.... so, perhaps it is better to erase the whole experience altogether. that's probably what many of us feel like when something awful happens... when we feel ashamed or when life didn't turn out the way we had imagined it should....no? wouldn't it be just great if we could wipe away all the mess and icky things about our lives so we can just live with the clean, happy, spotless history of our existence?.... perhaps... but simply erasing these specks of dirt from our memory do not seem to suffice.... Joel and Clem meet again and fall in love with each other, with the same people they supposedly wanted to forget.

script-writer Charlie Kaufman tries to suggest that the idea of having a 'spotless' mind could be a far cry...and perhaps there is something more basal. you do not just forget.... even if you really could... he plays with that idea of 'mind-maps'; that a lot of our memory is linked to an infinite number of things in infinite ways. it is the mind-map of associations involving Clem that we need to erase from Joel's memories. but in the process of such map-association deletion, Joel rediscovers his love for Clem and tries to hang on to those gradually diminishing Clem-related memories. in his desperate awareness, he realised that these 'mind-maps' are not made of 'fixed' mindless Pavlovian-bell-rings-dog-salivate-like associations. they are fluid and very malleable. how often do we find ourselves trying to recall incidents that we 'fill-in' bits that we aren't too sure of....or link it with other plausible events that may or may not have actually happened? Joel somehow discovers this loop-hole in the underlying Lacuna Inc. 'trade-craft' while he desperately tries to save Clem from being erased in his 'conscious' 'remembering' ... meanwhile Dr Howard Mierzwiak's team of 'memory-erasers' are getting distracted and loses Joel's Clem-associated-memory-map. a desperate situation develops which necessitates the master-minder's involvement in completing the whole 'forgetting' procedure.... Dr Howard Meirzwiak's appearance once again rekindled the adoration from his secretary, Mary, whom Stan, one of the eraser-team-member, fancied. Mary's (after being stoned) disinhibited revelation of her infatuation for Howard opened up a can of worms and multiple revelations unfold; for herself whose infatuation had once undergone a similar process of 'deletion', for Stan who had no knowledge of this past history, and subsequently for Clem and Joel, who were unwittingly made to face their once-discarded memories.

in the given second-chance, Joel realises that there is something that is so emotionally strong about his experiences with Clem which he didn't want to lose. his poignant utterance of "it's ok" to the Kate-Winslet-Clementine attempting yet another escape from being frustrated with the inevitable mundane-ness that surfaces in a relationship every-so-often, the ugliness in each of us, the boring hermit we sometimes become etc. was what struck a chord. it is when we confront these different sides of ourselves and others that we come to terms with those spots of specks that make us who we are.... perhaps the very essence we can't erase....

Charlie Kaufman could very well also have been inspired by LeDoux's 'Emotional Brain' (or similar ideas by other Emotion-researchers e.g. Damasio)... and got to the last pages where an 'ancient brain map' laid bare in words from one of the researchers in the field....see, much of what we now appreciate as the spongey blob of white-matter called the cerebral cortex is actually quite 'new' and anatomically termed the neo-cortex (it is what very much distinguishes us from other non-human primates apparently).... what lies beneath is the primitive brain and its circuitry that is also shared, in very similar ways, by many mammalian species. there are basal pathways through which some memories are believed to be resistant to 'forgetting'. ..... the 'mind-maps' metaphors can be appreciated as synonymous for the 'neo-cortically-linked-cognitive' memories -- memories that one is usually quite conscious of and can be quite easily describe or even manipulate, while those indescribable memories which tug your emotional heart-strings are proposed to be linked to the more primitive part of the human brain... these are memories likely to be more strongly formed for an ancient survival need.

could this be what Kaufman tried to convey between the lines and beneath the surface of the love story..... these unforgettable basal feelings.... and hence the recurrent love experiences...?

perhaps it is just a satirical take on our desire for that perceived Eternal Sunshine of a spotless mind (Alexander Pope)....the world does not really forget, by the world forgotton...memories do not reside merely in ones 'mind-maps'.... they are shared, intersubjectively constructed and chronicled in various forms...

(i am sorry for this rather sketchy review that is potentially full of shit... it's 3:30am here and i'm hitting the sack... kindly tolerate any typos/agrammatical nonsense spewed...i just had to write it down before i forget...)

[some after-thoughts]
F suggested, with reference to my qualms about the apparent 'crude' brain-technology used in the film, that the very features of the 'props/tools' could be part of the whole 'feeling/idea' about this Lacuna Inc. -- that it is some form of illicit 'drug', spliff etc.... that induces a different state of consciousness...that somehow appeases my prejudices a little.... hmmm.

posted by ~overacuppa~ on Friday, 4 June, 2004 at 03:47 hrs