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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