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shadowkatOr so said Nietzche at some point in his writings. The quote is from Beyond Good and Evil and is uttered by a character in the recent Charlie Kaufman film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Last night, I ventured out into the cold pouring rain to see a pre-showing of this film, courtesy of my friend cjlasky who'd gotten free tickets.
This in of itself is an adventure, partly because the rain in NY has a funny habit of falling sideways, almost as if the heaven's know that they have to get around umbrellas and canopies and rooves to get things wet. The other reason is the wind, which has a funny way of getting underneath your umbrella and turning it inside out. Using an umbrella in NYC is well tricky. I've broken ten umbrellas since I moved here 8 years ago. Walk more than five blocks, with wind? Count on being soaked.
Add to this that the theater was neatly tucked away in the West Village, which is hard enough to navigate your way through in broad daylight let alone at night in a down-pour. Needless to say? I almost got lost, dodging water puddles, traffic, and well slanting rain. Finally I lucked out, backtracking the way I'd come and saw the theater across the street.
Was supposed to meet cjlasky there at 5:50. I got there at 5:45, just five minutes early. Introduced myself to the people in charge and sat myself down in the nice, dry, warm lobby to wait. The theater itself was tiny, about six rows, comfortable blue velvet, a group of black leather arm-chairs in the back row that reminded me of dentist chairs. And a fairly large rectangular screen. Well soon it was 6pm. No cjl. I went out front to talk to the people in charge. They were starting the movie at 10 of 6 apparently, whether the rep showed or not. She was late too. Train problems. 6:10, no cjl. I was advised to go watch the movie, they'd send him in when he arrived. Fearing I'd somehow lost cjl, I shrugged my shoulders, gave his name, was given admittance and picked the best viewing seat I could find. Which was not an aisle. (The aisle seats were crappy.)
About thirty minutes into the movie, cjl appeared and eventually found his way to a seat close to me.
Now here's the interesting part - it wasn't until thirty minutes into the movie that we got the title and the opening credits.
What follows is my atypical style of reviewing movies and tv shows - which is picking an element that fascinated me and flipping it back and forth between different shows and mediums in a stream of consciousness manner. Here - what interests me is the idea of memory. What happens when you wipe away or erase a portion of the memory? When Angel wiped away Connor from the memories of everyone but himself - what effect did that have on those individuals? Is such a thing even possible without unraveling everything along with it? Same question about the addition of a memory - such as Dawn on BTVS, what did the addition of Dawn do to the memories of the people she was added to? When you add memory to a computer disk - it can corrupt or overload the disk, similarly when you remove something - if it's intergral to the program, that too disrupts the disk or corrupts it. So what does it do to the human mind?
Alfred Bester wondered about this in Demolished Man, where it was hypothesized that if you wipe clean a murder's memories you remove the inclination to murder. He did not, however pursue what happened once this was done. Bester was more concerned with the ethical quandry of doing it to begin with. Here, in Eternal Sunshine - Kauffman seems to wonder what happens when you do attempt to remove one person from someone's memories, what effect that has on the unconscious mind. Angel the Series - may end up exploring the same question but from another angle.
(Okay I think these are mild spoilers - I've resisted giving away the ending or entire plot, most of which you figure out within first half of the movie anyway.)
"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign’d."
-- Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard.
Eternal Sunshine starts with a sort of prologue about two people, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) meeting on a Long Island Railroad train from Montauk and driving home to her place. During this interlude, the two characters oddly connect. Clementine even asks Joel why he seems so familar to her. Both have an odd sense of deja-vue, but decide it's due to the fact that Joel frequents a Barnes and Nobles where Clementine works. Joel has gone to Montauk out of a funk, it's Valentine's Day, he's feeling lonely. Doesn't feel like he's done much in the last two years since breaking up with Naomi and can't quite remember why they even broke up. There's a great line in here about Valentine's Day by the way: "A Random Holiday Created By Greeting Card Companies to make people feel like crap." Or something to that effect. Then suddenly you're thrust backwards in time - about a week before Valentine's Day, where Joel is dealing with a recent break-up, with oddly enough Clementine, and discovers Clementine had all her memories of him erased. Enraged and emotionally devastated by this news, Joel proceeds to do the same thing with his memories of Clementine. The movie becomes an interesting and often times wacky exploration of what it means to have your memories of one particular person removed. How that affects you.
It's by no means flawless in its portrayal. Kaufman, the writer behind Adaptation and Being John Malkovich is as wacky and on-target as ever. But, something about the premise bugged both cjl and myself. Oddly enough it's the same thing that bugs me about Angel this season and bugged me about BTVS. What that is - is well, can you just remove or add one major ingredient to someone's memories without unraveling or changing all of them? Memory is a complex thing. A person or memories of a person or an event affect everything before or after that person. For instance - how we feel about a significant other relates to how we may currently feel about our parents, siblings, friends, etc. Remove the memories of that significant other - then you remove the feelings and inter-relationships that went with those memories. Same thing goes for removing the memories of a child, a beloved pet, or even a close friend. Neither ATS nor BTVS seem to have delved into what this really means for the characters - instead, as far as I can tell at least for BTVS - the addition or removal is used as a mere plot device to move story forward both thematically and plotwise. ATS may be delving into this at a later point, but I don't sense it in the current storyline as much more than a vague reference point.
To give Kauffman credit - he does show in Eternal Sunshine how the removal of Clementine from Joel's memories affects Joel's own life - literally erasing most of what he did in a two-year time period. Joel can't learn from the relationship - because he doesn't remember it and neither does she, and the inability to remember it - erases it, as if it did not exist. Even though everyone around them, does remember it and it does effect how they view Joel and Clementine. The erasure does not prevent the relationship from starting up again, what it prevents is the two people learning from the mistakes they made the first time. The effect of memory on who we are is touched on by Kauffman here, but not really explored beyond the boundaries of Joel and Clementine's love affair and therein lies the flaw.
Angel the series - is doing something oddly similar to what Kauffman did in Eternal Sunshine. The writers have systematically removed all memories of one key individual from every person's head, except Angel. It's almost the opposite of Kaufman's tale. Instead of Joel removing Clementine - it would be as if everyone who knew Joel, including Clementine, removed the memory of Clementine. This is what Angel does, he keeps the memory of Connor, but removes it from everyone else including Connor.
Both stories do refer to the song Oh My Darling, Clementine. ATS actually sings it. Eternal Sunshine merely refers to it as an offhand joke. Neither quite give us all the lyrics. Which I goggled out of curiousity this afternoon.
In the centre of a golden valley,
Dwellt a maiden all divine,
A pretty creature a miner's daughter
And her name was Clementine.
Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling Clementine
You are lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.
That's not all of it - it's about 12 stanzas. But enough to show the metaphor. Clementine - Kaufman explains in an exchange between the two characters, means forgiveness or Clemency. But how can you forgive or provide clemency if you can't remember?
Yet at the same time clemency and forgiveness means forgetting, letting go of the past in some contexts.
If memory is removed, then the request for forgiveness is as well. Kaufman asks an interesting question in his film - if we remove the memories, do we remove the emotional core of them or merely replace it with an empty gap that the person seeks to fill? How inter-connected are our memories? How vital to who and what we are? He doesn't quite answer the questions, so much as pose them. But he does mention that the quirky nature of memory isn't something that can be carefully mapped and removed without consequences - in the case of Joel and Clementine a repetition of the past in a new way.
I can't help but wonder if ATS may be doing the same thing? By removing their memories of Connor, did Angel doom his friends and possibly himself to repeating what had happened just in a new way? To fill the gap left behind, have they just found themselves subconsciously following the same pattern. He removed from them - not just the memories, but the abilty to learn from them. We see in Damage - that both Spike and Dana's memories provide them with the ability of coming to terms of getting clemency. Living with the memory of what they've both done or had done to them - gives them the ability to learn and grow. Removing those memories - wouldn't that just doom Spike to doing what he had done again? It may help Dana. But would it have helped Spike? Or how about Gunn who has had knowledge and I assume the memories that came with it downloaded into his brain - how does that change him? What about Fred? How would she conduct herself differently if she remembered what happened with Cordelia and Connor? Would she do some of the things she's done? Or Wesley? What would he do if he remembered the mistakes he made regarding Connor that lead to Lilah? How does the removal of Connor affect the changes in Wes? Playing god with something as intricate as memory seems to be a devil's gambit to me. Our memories in some regards are who we are. While there are things I'd rather forget, those things impact my relationships right now, my choices, my desires, my hopes, my dreams, to have them summarily removed - wouldn't that equally remove all the things affected by the memory, altering them and me along with them into someone else?
Overall Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is worth seeing, I believe. It examines the idea of memory removal from an interesting angle. Where it fails, if it fails at all, is dropping the analysis of memory and falling into a conventional romance.
I do recommend it however. Particularly for fans of absurdist cinema and Charles Kaufman in particular.
The actors - Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet do a lovely job bringing Joel and Clementine to life.
PS: I got my amazon books today. Harry Potter and the Philip K. Dick. They are currently sitting on my shelves waiting patiently to be read. Have to make it through Disorderly Knights and then Wicked first. Disorderly Knights is taking me an absurdly long time to read, I know.
Last night, I ventured out into the cold pouring rain to see a pre-showing of this film, courtesy of my friend cjlasky who'd gotten free tickets.
This in of itself is an adventure, partly because the rain in NY has a funny habit of falling sideways, almost as if the heaven's know that they have to get around umbrellas and canopies and rooves to get things wet. The other reason is the wind, which has a funny way of getting underneath your umbrella and turning it inside out. Using an umbrella in NYC is well tricky. I've broken ten umbrellas since I moved here 8 years ago. Walk more than five blocks, with wind? Count on being soaked.
Add to this that the theater was neatly tucked away in the West Village, which is hard enough to navigate your way through in broad daylight let alone at night in a down-pour. Needless to say? I almost got lost, dodging water puddles, traffic, and well slanting rain. Finally I lucked out, backtracking the way I'd come and saw the theater across the street.
Was supposed to meet cjlasky there at 5:50. I got there at 5:45, just five minutes early. Introduced myself to the people in charge and sat myself down in the nice, dry, warm lobby to wait. The theater itself was tiny, about six rows, comfortable blue velvet, a group of black leather arm-chairs in the back row that reminded me of dentist chairs. And a fairly large rectangular screen. Well soon it was 6pm. No cjl. I went out front to talk to the people in charge. They were starting the movie at 10 of 6 apparently, whether the rep showed or not. She was late too. Train problems. 6:10, no cjl. I was advised to go watch the movie, they'd send him in when he arrived. Fearing I'd somehow lost cjl, I shrugged my shoulders, gave his name, was given admittance and picked the best viewing seat I could find. Which was not an aisle. (The aisle seats were crappy.)
About thirty minutes into the movie, cjl appeared and eventually found his way to a seat close to me.
Now here's the interesting part - it wasn't until thirty minutes into the movie that we got the title and the opening credits.
What follows is my atypical style of reviewing movies and tv shows - which is picking an element that fascinated me and flipping it back and forth between different shows and mediums in a stream of consciousness manner. Here - what interests me is the idea of memory. What happens when you wipe away or erase a portion of the memory? When Angel wiped away Connor from the memories of everyone but himself - what effect did that have on those individuals? Is such a thing even possible without unraveling everything along with it? Same question about the addition of a memory - such as Dawn on BTVS, what did the addition of Dawn do to the memories of the people she was added to? When you add memory to a computer disk - it can corrupt or overload the disk, similarly when you remove something - if it's intergral to the program, that too disrupts the disk or corrupts it. So what does it do to the human mind?
Alfred Bester wondered about this in Demolished Man, where it was hypothesized that if you wipe clean a murder's memories you remove the inclination to murder. He did not, however pursue what happened once this was done. Bester was more concerned with the ethical quandry of doing it to begin with. Here, in Eternal Sunshine - Kauffman seems to wonder what happens when you do attempt to remove one person from someone's memories, what effect that has on the unconscious mind. Angel the Series - may end up exploring the same question but from another angle.
(Okay I think these are mild spoilers - I've resisted giving away the ending or entire plot, most of which you figure out within first half of the movie anyway.)
"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign’d."
-- Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard.
Eternal Sunshine starts with a sort of prologue about two people, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) meeting on a Long Island Railroad train from Montauk and driving home to her place. During this interlude, the two characters oddly connect. Clementine even asks Joel why he seems so familar to her. Both have an odd sense of deja-vue, but decide it's due to the fact that Joel frequents a Barnes and Nobles where Clementine works. Joel has gone to Montauk out of a funk, it's Valentine's Day, he's feeling lonely. Doesn't feel like he's done much in the last two years since breaking up with Naomi and can't quite remember why they even broke up. There's a great line in here about Valentine's Day by the way: "A Random Holiday Created By Greeting Card Companies to make people feel like crap." Or something to that effect. Then suddenly you're thrust backwards in time - about a week before Valentine's Day, where Joel is dealing with a recent break-up, with oddly enough Clementine, and discovers Clementine had all her memories of him erased. Enraged and emotionally devastated by this news, Joel proceeds to do the same thing with his memories of Clementine. The movie becomes an interesting and often times wacky exploration of what it means to have your memories of one particular person removed. How that affects you.
It's by no means flawless in its portrayal. Kaufman, the writer behind Adaptation and Being John Malkovich is as wacky and on-target as ever. But, something about the premise bugged both cjl and myself. Oddly enough it's the same thing that bugs me about Angel this season and bugged me about BTVS. What that is - is well, can you just remove or add one major ingredient to someone's memories without unraveling or changing all of them? Memory is a complex thing. A person or memories of a person or an event affect everything before or after that person. For instance - how we feel about a significant other relates to how we may currently feel about our parents, siblings, friends, etc. Remove the memories of that significant other - then you remove the feelings and inter-relationships that went with those memories. Same thing goes for removing the memories of a child, a beloved pet, or even a close friend. Neither ATS nor BTVS seem to have delved into what this really means for the characters - instead, as far as I can tell at least for BTVS - the addition or removal is used as a mere plot device to move story forward both thematically and plotwise. ATS may be delving into this at a later point, but I don't sense it in the current storyline as much more than a vague reference point.
To give Kauffman credit - he does show in Eternal Sunshine how the removal of Clementine from Joel's memories affects Joel's own life - literally erasing most of what he did in a two-year time period. Joel can't learn from the relationship - because he doesn't remember it and neither does she, and the inability to remember it - erases it, as if it did not exist. Even though everyone around them, does remember it and it does effect how they view Joel and Clementine. The erasure does not prevent the relationship from starting up again, what it prevents is the two people learning from the mistakes they made the first time. The effect of memory on who we are is touched on by Kauffman here, but not really explored beyond the boundaries of Joel and Clementine's love affair and therein lies the flaw.
Angel the series - is doing something oddly similar to what Kauffman did in Eternal Sunshine. The writers have systematically removed all memories of one key individual from every person's head, except Angel. It's almost the opposite of Kaufman's tale. Instead of Joel removing Clementine - it would be as if everyone who knew Joel, including Clementine, removed the memory of Clementine. This is what Angel does, he keeps the memory of Connor, but removes it from everyone else including Connor.
Both stories do refer to the song Oh My Darling, Clementine. ATS actually sings it. Eternal Sunshine merely refers to it as an offhand joke. Neither quite give us all the lyrics. Which I goggled out of curiousity this afternoon.
In the centre of a golden valley,
Dwellt a maiden all divine,
A pretty creature a miner's daughter
And her name was Clementine.
Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling Clementine
You are lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.
That's not all of it - it's about 12 stanzas. But enough to show the metaphor. Clementine - Kaufman explains in an exchange between the two characters, means forgiveness or Clemency. But how can you forgive or provide clemency if you can't remember?
Yet at the same time clemency and forgiveness means forgetting, letting go of the past in some contexts.
If memory is removed, then the request for forgiveness is as well. Kaufman asks an interesting question in his film - if we remove the memories, do we remove the emotional core of them or merely replace it with an empty gap that the person seeks to fill? How inter-connected are our memories? How vital to who and what we are? He doesn't quite answer the questions, so much as pose them. But he does mention that the quirky nature of memory isn't something that can be carefully mapped and removed without consequences - in the case of Joel and Clementine a repetition of the past in a new way.
I can't help but wonder if ATS may be doing the same thing? By removing their memories of Connor, did Angel doom his friends and possibly himself to repeating what had happened just in a new way? To fill the gap left behind, have they just found themselves subconsciously following the same pattern. He removed from them - not just the memories, but the abilty to learn from them. We see in Damage - that both Spike and Dana's memories provide them with the ability of coming to terms of getting clemency. Living with the memory of what they've both done or had done to them - gives them the ability to learn and grow. Removing those memories - wouldn't that just doom Spike to doing what he had done again? It may help Dana. But would it have helped Spike? Or how about Gunn who has had knowledge and I assume the memories that came with it downloaded into his brain - how does that change him? What about Fred? How would she conduct herself differently if she remembered what happened with Cordelia and Connor? Would she do some of the things she's done? Or Wesley? What would he do if he remembered the mistakes he made regarding Connor that lead to Lilah? How does the removal of Connor affect the changes in Wes? Playing god with something as intricate as memory seems to be a devil's gambit to me. Our memories in some regards are who we are. While there are things I'd rather forget, those things impact my relationships right now, my choices, my desires, my hopes, my dreams, to have them summarily removed - wouldn't that equally remove all the things affected by the memory, altering them and me along with them into someone else?
Overall Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is worth seeing, I believe. It examines the idea of memory removal from an interesting angle. Where it fails, if it fails at all, is dropping the analysis of memory and falling into a conventional romance.
I do recommend it however. Particularly for fans of absurdist cinema and Charles Kaufman in particular.
The actors - Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet do a lovely job bringing Joel and Clementine to life.
PS: I got my amazon books today. Harry Potter and the Philip K. Dick. They are currently sitting on my shelves waiting patiently to be read. Have to make it through Disorderly Knights and then Wicked first. Disorderly Knights is taking me an absurdly long time to read, I know.
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Thanks for the review, s'kat...
Date: 2004-02-04 01:37 pm (UTC)