![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Or 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.
( Mild Spoilers for Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and up to ATS 5.11 )
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.
( Mild Spoilers for Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and up to ATS 5.11 )
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.
