Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Here is one that I have long avoided...I don't know, it might have been the long title, the enthusiasm of people I knew to be romantic or something like that. Well...indeed, it has a sweetly romantic beginning, it shows good romantic the-whole-world-is-a-mess when a tragedy has befollen me, it ends with a romantic touch. But it has a jumpy narrative line (the movie might be worth watching only for this) with almost as nice side story.
Let me tell you what happens:(Spoiler Spoiler) two people meet (in this case Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet - both doing a good job). And fall in love, have a relationship which feels like 'not the right thing for me at this moment'. And, what do you know, they can go through a funny little medical procedure to 'move over' erasing completely the other from memory. And they do it. [But], it just happens that they meet again and, what do you know, fall in love again and do the whole thing over and over for a while. Finaly they learn at some point that they did that and,w d y k, this time decide to try and go through it again. It is not a big fancy well thought decision but it makes me think that, why not, it may just be that normality and healthy realtion is exactly this one: meet, love, erase and do it again. We're doing this already so...why not. It may not seem like all the happiness in the world but think of it this way: even if we are erasing everything we would still like to go through it again. Could it be? What in the world am I saying? Naturly it could not.
Needless to say that the movie has a lot of success among people with a special someone whom they would never erase.
6 comments:
This is the most romantic love story ever. It is so sad how he tries to stop her getting erased, so he starts to hide her in all kind of corners in his memorie, where she actually in reality did´t appear. And how all the sitchings from the past, the present and the imagination become one movie with a red line is just wonderful.
@Tanja - the only thing that makes me wonder is why do they keep trying to erase their memories? It is not a 'have to' kind of thing so you can decide simply not to erase it rather than trying to hide the memory. Am I not romantic enough?
In any case...
It seems that erasing some part of memory may be actually possible. Not quite like in the movie but let's say the first step is done. One can find among today's news one about how researchers at New York University’s Center for Neural Science, succeeded in preventing the transfer of a fearful memory from short-term to long-term storage. For rats.
Relationship erasing is not that close (for humans) but still...who are you going to erase first?
Well, actaully in this movie you can´t change. I mean, the person that erases someone in his memory is kind of sleeping and has no contact to the outside world. The people the are erasing his memory need him to stay in that sleep, because otherwise the process would be interrupted.
So you make the decision to erase someone, and when the process is on there is no turning back. In the movie Jim Carry becomes aware of it and tries to wake up. I imagined it like when you become aware that you are dreaming and you want to wake up. But he can´t. So he tries to cheat the process. He remembers why he loved her and he decides he doesn´t want to forget her. That´s truly romantic, isn´t it? I found it so tragic....
It's a very smart movie, but it's a piece of fiction that tells something about reality, rather than representing reality. It's dishonest when people say 'they wouldn't change one single moment of their lives', or 'if they had to live their life over, they would do everything exactly the same'. Sometimes we do want to erase whole people, sometimes rightly so, and yet there's of course a gap in the movie. When he erases her, the only "sign" of something missing are the pages torn out of the diary. Otherwise he goes on living normally. But people, and objects, and signs are all related in an intricate system. Friends, parents, friends of friends, all the social fabric bears an imprint of one's life events. So there are 'gaps' in the script from the point of view of reality :-)
@sofiya - I was thinking that the technical side of the erasing was covered acceptably: it is not only the diary but also the letters the clinic would send to friends and family, also bringing every item that would remind one of the ex partner etc. The idea probably was exactly to 'find all knots of meaning connected to the former and cut them'. In this I generally agree with the view they are offering: it looks like a serious way to do it.
I would describe the gap that you point out in some other way. I think the view of erasing memories of events and people comes from seeing man as a Windows powered PC: all you can do is reboot or re-install. I have strong doubts this would work for actual people. We might have memory clutters and hang sometimes, the occasional blue-screen and a tone of glitches but we are always building on previous/current things. In a sense we always experience positive growth: we cannot remove stuff, we can just re-interpret in a new way. Moreover, for people to attempt it is to willingly sit on a smaller or bigger time-bomb that corrodes everything one does because of the implicit tension: if I can forget something I can forget anything, including what I experience right now. I have reason to believe that this kind of tension is not sustainable.
The reason I do not quite find this movie romantic has exactly to do with the fact that it is locked in this view of the world: at one point or another you will (rightly) want to forget someone and this is the funny thing that might happen. What about the romantic story when you do not want to erase memories but grow together out of the problem not by erasing or cutting the relationship but some other way that allows one to carry the whole weight of it one one's shoulders? I am not suggesting a way to improve the movie but I am scared of the possibility of being stuck in a worldview where only the thing I currently do is meaningful.
In a new development check this out:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/07/01/scimemo101.xml
Yet another solution to hide the symptoms of the problem.
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