Every body's gotta learn sometime (or do they?)
“Random thoughts for Valentine's day, 2004. Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap”.
The first lines (in voice over) of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Spoken by Jim Carey’s character, and if you haven't seen the film simply because that gurning goon is in it, then relent. It is one of the most original, perceptive, and, possibly depressing films of recent years. See it with someone you love tonight.
It paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity and of love in particular, centred around Valentine’s Day. "It’s our busiest time", declares the receptionist at Lacuna Inc., explaining why a desperate patient cannot get an appointment to have all memory of an unhappy relationship removed from her mind. This is the conceit of the film, using a far-fetched idea to probe some pretty accurate truths. Starting with the hype associated with this very day.
There is nothing remotely ‘romantic’ about St Valentine’s Day. If you’re single, you’re made to feel like an even bigger loser, and modern technology simply compounds the misery. Where once there was only an empty doormat, there are now so many channels, offering myriad possibilities for self-pity on this joyous day. Or if you’re a couple, you’re coerced into dutiful observance. ‘Romance’, by edict, whether you feel romantic or not. Which means, in my limited experience, being rushed through a rota system of dining out surrounded by other happy couples feeling they have to look especially soppy at each other all night to somehow feel the magic of the day. ‘McRomance’ indeed. Do you want fries with those sentiments?
The slick, unsentimental professionalism of Lacuna Inc erasing memories of love is a fitting counterpart of those cynical swine responsible for exploiting expectations of it on that day. A perfect arrangement, and so Valentine’s Day is Lacuna's busiest season. The bleakness continues. We scarcely encounter a happy couple in the film, but instead legions of the broken, desperate to recover from their experience by erasing their pasts. Andre Gide once said ‘Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.’ Lacuna Inc is there to sort this out.
The receptionist tells another disappointed patient, "I’m afraid you can’t have the procedure more than three times in a month. Those are our rules". It suggests a relentless and inexorable gravity of unhappiness in every love. Joel (Carey), surveying the fellow diners in a restaurant, wonders: "Are we like couples you see in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?". By that stage they were. Few of the flashback memories being erased suggest a happy, fulfilling relationship. They are both annoying. He is drippy and morose (and Jim Carey). She flighty, high-maintenance, and with a puerile penchant for trashy hair dyes. I'm not sure you can really fully identify with either. Which somehow makes them more Everyman and Woman, rather than shiny plastic Hollywood Rom-Com lovers. Which pushes the point home harder and more plausibly.
And so it breaks up, just before Valentines Day, and Clementine (Kate Winslet) has the operation. "Our files are confidential Mr. Barish so we can't show you any evidence. Suffice it to say, Miss Kruczynski was not happy and she wanted to move on. We provide that possibility". In revenge, Joel follows suit. "Will it give me brain damage", he asks. "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss". Nothing you’ll miss, and so a whole relationship, what he might ‘miss’ so painfully or desperately, is wiped away. But what’s so depressing in all this is the suggestion that love is doomed to follow a pattern, and that mistakes are destined to be repeated. The burned child is supposed to fear the fire. Not with love. The clinical procedure of erasure uses Sci-Fi ingenuity to explore a lamentable near universal truth.
This is the half empty perspective on the repetition pattern the film invokes. An optimist might look at it differently. If I could find one today (he's probably reading all his Valentine cards) he might discover more hope in the fact that, once they’ve had each other erased, Clementine and Joel meet again, and fall for each other again. This might give a more hopeful gloss to a very bleak picture. The new couple learn about what they have both done, and how they both felt about each other when they broke up and wanted to forget. They have all this information before them, and yet this is how the film ends (look away if you haven't seen it):
Joel: I can't see anything that I don't like about you.
The first lines (in voice over) of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Spoken by Jim Carey’s character, and if you haven't seen the film simply because that gurning goon is in it, then relent. It is one of the most original, perceptive, and, possibly depressing films of recent years. See it with someone you love tonight.
It paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity and of love in particular, centred around Valentine’s Day. "It’s our busiest time", declares the receptionist at Lacuna Inc., explaining why a desperate patient cannot get an appointment to have all memory of an unhappy relationship removed from her mind. This is the conceit of the film, using a far-fetched idea to probe some pretty accurate truths. Starting with the hype associated with this very day.
There is nothing remotely ‘romantic’ about St Valentine’s Day. If you’re single, you’re made to feel like an even bigger loser, and modern technology simply compounds the misery. Where once there was only an empty doormat, there are now so many channels, offering myriad possibilities for self-pity on this joyous day. Or if you’re a couple, you’re coerced into dutiful observance. ‘Romance’, by edict, whether you feel romantic or not. Which means, in my limited experience, being rushed through a rota system of dining out surrounded by other happy couples feeling they have to look especially soppy at each other all night to somehow feel the magic of the day. ‘McRomance’ indeed. Do you want fries with those sentiments?
The slick, unsentimental professionalism of Lacuna Inc erasing memories of love is a fitting counterpart of those cynical swine responsible for exploiting expectations of it on that day. A perfect arrangement, and so Valentine’s Day is Lacuna's busiest season. The bleakness continues. We scarcely encounter a happy couple in the film, but instead legions of the broken, desperate to recover from their experience by erasing their pasts. Andre Gide once said ‘Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.’ Lacuna Inc is there to sort this out.
The receptionist tells another disappointed patient, "I’m afraid you can’t have the procedure more than three times in a month. Those are our rules". It suggests a relentless and inexorable gravity of unhappiness in every love. Joel (Carey), surveying the fellow diners in a restaurant, wonders: "Are we like couples you see in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?". By that stage they were. Few of the flashback memories being erased suggest a happy, fulfilling relationship. They are both annoying. He is drippy and morose (and Jim Carey). She flighty, high-maintenance, and with a puerile penchant for trashy hair dyes. I'm not sure you can really fully identify with either. Which somehow makes them more Everyman and Woman, rather than shiny plastic Hollywood Rom-Com lovers. Which pushes the point home harder and more plausibly.
And so it breaks up, just before Valentines Day, and Clementine (Kate Winslet) has the operation. "Our files are confidential Mr. Barish so we can't show you any evidence. Suffice it to say, Miss Kruczynski was not happy and she wanted to move on. We provide that possibility". In revenge, Joel follows suit. "Will it give me brain damage", he asks. "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss". Nothing you’ll miss, and so a whole relationship, what he might ‘miss’ so painfully or desperately, is wiped away. But what’s so depressing in all this is the suggestion that love is doomed to follow a pattern, and that mistakes are destined to be repeated. The burned child is supposed to fear the fire. Not with love. The clinical procedure of erasure uses Sci-Fi ingenuity to explore a lamentable near universal truth.
This is the half empty perspective on the repetition pattern the film invokes. An optimist might look at it differently. If I could find one today (he's probably reading all his Valentine cards) he might discover more hope in the fact that, once they’ve had each other erased, Clementine and Joel meet again, and fall for each other again. This might give a more hopeful gloss to a very bleak picture. The new couple learn about what they have both done, and how they both felt about each other when they broke up and wanted to forget. They have all this information before them, and yet this is how the film ends (look away if you haven't seen it):
Joel: I can't see anything that I don't like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.
Joel: Okay
Clementine: [pauses] Okay.
Hope or despair? Your view may very well depend on what kind of Valentine’s Day you're having.
Hope or despair? Your view may very well depend on what kind of Valentine’s Day you're having.
After so many people had urged me to watch it, I saw ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ for the first time the other day. It made me feel sad – not despairing, not disillusioned, just sad. My reaction would doubtlessly have been despair had it ended with Carrey’s glum unshaven jowls cantilevered back into their rightful gurn, resolutely punching the sky with his gal at his side, two goofball soulmates against the world.
ReplyDeleteBut thinking it over again, on Valentine’s Day 2009 - which seems to have been hyped like no other (Helioholic, how right you are about all the ‘channels’ beyond the doormat (if you’re a bloke) and also the doorbell (if you’re a girl)) – now I feel like celebrating. My work colleagues yesterday (Friday 13th) were grim-faced as 1pm approached and the opportunity to do a quick dash to the shops. “Oh God I don’t know what to get him” wails one. “M&S are doing a bottle of rose a box of chocs and a pair of pants for a tenner” recommends another. “What are you doing for it, then?” my manager demands of me, hoping for an idea she can pass off with her husband as her own. The most depressing was a workmate (who married his childhood sweetheart) who came back from the puce-splattered battlefield of Clintons Cards empty-handed and slack-jawed with despair. “I spent an hour opening all these cards to read the poems inside and none of them said what I want to say to Becky” he moaned. Why is he determined to have a gormless copywriter act as his mouthpiece? “I saw one card that was really nice but it cost nine pounds and the wife’ll kill me if she found out I spent that much”… Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. There you have it in a nutshell. Valentines are simply papal indulgences to save you from the Hell of a partner scorned.
At the end of ‘Spotless’, is the glass half full or half empty? It’s a close call. This film quite brazenly situates itself on the fragile meniscus between those two states, in the same way its ‘cold light of day’ philosophies are played out in a phantasmagorical dream world. In my view all is not lost, there is hope in what it stands for. The best thing about the film is that the talented team who brought it to the big screen are clearly fed up with this idea of romantic love as portrayed in popular culture. It pulls the tablecloth from under the chins of tonight’s dining dead. What it doesn’t offer up is an answer, or an alternative approach to relationships, but this unsentimental film highlights the eternal question more movingly than almost anything else I can think of.
By Cupid's bumfluff beard, anon., you're giving the sad old helioholic a run for his money on the cynicism front. i do hope it's not catching. beautifully put and perceptive. i resisted the temptation to simply rant about VD (i even resisted cheap jaudiced anologies with the charming condition it shares with other consequences of Dan Cupid's little barbs), and you have nicely supplied the rest. yes, i half saw an advert for the M&S bargain love bucket, and pondered the logic of it. surely the recepient will have seen the ads too, and known to the penny what their love is worth. it is the shabbiest of impostures, and as the self-appointed watchdog of romance, i'm compelled to denounce it fulsomely. thanks for collecting this damning data for me.
ReplyDelete'goofball soulmates'. exactly. they are nauseating aren't they? do you think we are supposed to like them? people love the film, but can anyone like the characters? it's a really something to pull off. we see all their pettiness, selfishness, gauchness laid bare. we don't like them, but somehow we see our own weaknesses, the sort of stuff we'd like erased, stretched out on the table. as you say, what other film can explore the staples of popcorn fodder so brutily, and still somehow endear? it's a bloody comedy after all. i do wonder what it would be like without carrey. it was in his 'oh please take me seriously. i can do soulful. here's my moody, misunderstood likeable guy pout' phase. he appears to have gone back to gurning. a shame in a way, because truman show was also amazing. but i'm rambling. Eternal Sunshine is poised perfectly between gutter and stars. and Beck's version of the title song is sublime. i managed to not even mention the sunshine theme - that's for the other shop shut down for the winter.
'For this was seynt on Seynt Valentine's
ReplyDeleteday
When every foul cometh ther to choose
his mate'
Chaucer, The Parliament of Foules
Chaucer's take on the day doesn't seem to suggest that the already married or partnered are involved, eh. When did the sending/giving of messages & love tokens (pressed flowers?) become commercialized? Late nineteenth century?
Regards, J
that's an interesting point. i think the expectation, before the invention of romantic love, was that once you'd paired off, that was the end of romance. i'm ashamed to say i don't know when all that malarky started, but i would reckon the Victorians. that's when most modern rituals were commercialised. they were great ones for sentimental keepsakes, but maybe even they did not ordain that all lovers on this day make merrye and renew their pledges with overpriced tat. i suppose it's a trip to wikipedia to be misinformed authoritively.
ReplyDelete