If I'd seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before I wrote some
of the more recent Half Cocks, I'd have written them the same but
they'd have made more sense.

The director, Michael Gondry, made the very poignant video for
Radiohead's Knives Out. Joel, Jim Carrey's character in Eternal
Sunshine, is basically the Thom-Yorke-as-a-mouse figure from that
video: small, helpless and sad, watching things fall apart around him
(the things in question being his own memories of Clementine, his
former girlfriend, which are being erased while he sleeps).

The most directly affecting thing about the movie is the visual trope
that is used for each memory's erasure. Joel journeys through his own
memories, re-enacting them at the same time as Clementine is
subtracted from them. We see her fade out, go out of focus, turn a
corner and disappear, or get pulled into the obscurity outside of the
spotlight that falls on Joel's inner self as he travels from scene to
scene. The trauma of losing Clementine (you are lost and gone
forever…) is made horribly and vividly concrete, all the more so as
Joel starts to rebel against the annihilating darkness and runs hand
in hand with her from one temporary memory-haven to another.

As couples-therapy, the film takes a fairly predictable line. The
memory-erasing plotline heads backwards in time, starting with the
messy end of the relationship and recursing towards its charmed
beginnings, so that Joel gets to see both how things went wrong and
what it was that made the relationship work in the first place. As
Joel seeks regions of his memory where the erasing process won't reach
Clementine, she encourages him to go deeper, to seek out scenes of
primal humiliation where his eidolon of her can be safely stowed away.
As he does so, he is confronted with the sources of the feelings of
guilt and self-hatred that undermine his adult relationships. Because
Clementine (or Joel's internal simulacrum of her) is there with him
this time around, she is able to forgive and console the wounded child
who has been driving her so completely round the bend as a grown man.

It turns out that the questions Joel has to face about himself and his
relationships are the perennial head-scratchers: why am I so uptight?,
and why do I put up with this crap?. One's ego-ideal would be
simultaneously more forgiving and more resolute: all in all, more
steadfast in the truth (especially when dealing with a wild child like
Clementine - or Iris Murdoch…).

In relationship hell - that is, in real life - your efforts to be more
resolute are invariably twisted into further expressions of your petty
hang-ups, your efforts to forgive into further demonstrations of
weakness. The root of the problem is alleged to be insecurity,
although I personally blame women and their seemingly limitless
propensity for emotional origami. Be that as it may, Eternal Sunshine
blames insecurity too; and, just to drive the point home, gives us a
scene where Joel's mum catches him having a wank.

I love the optimism of the film's ending, an optimism that somehow
manages to take fatalism into account and still come out on top.

Everyone in Eternal Sunshine is either attractive or interesting,
although nobody really manages to be both (I like looking at Kate
Winslett, but wouldn't stand for thirty seconds of the crap her
character comes out with. Or, at least, my ego-ideal wouldn't. Not
that the opportunity is likely to arise, in either case).

Jim Carrey demonstrates the willingness to play a character against
the audience's sympathies that makes him such a good and serious
clown. If we're convinced that Joel's relationship with Clementine
merits the second chance it looks like it's going to get, it isn't
necessarily because we think he's a nice guy who deserves it. That, in
itself, is class; and Eternal Sunshine, like Gondry's music videos,
combines classiness with a child-like emotional directness,
intellectual subtlety with wrenchingly vivid imagery.

Special mention has to go to Beck's tremendous version of "Everybody's
gotta learn some time", which adorns the soundtrack and for which
Eternal Sunshine could be seen as an extended music video. I never
knew the song was that great - it is, to borrow a line of Dennis
Potter's, like one of the psalms of David.

Dominic
-- 
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov