In fact they have met before and were in love, but it ended badly and they both had the memory erased. He goes home with her and they sleep together. A solemn, worried man named Joel ( Jim Carrey) takes a train for no reason and at a station encounters Clementine ( Kate Winslet), who thinks they've met before. Indeed, it's a film built around Meet Cutes, some not so Cute. All we know is that an obscure company in Boston offers to erase your memories of a particular person or anything else. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," like "Malkovich," invents a fantastic device for its peculiarities, and wisely declines to explain it. These sound like topics for a class in evolution or neuroscience, but Kaufman and his directors structure them like films that proceed quite clearly along paths we seem to be following, until we arrive at the limits of identity. He attempts no less than to dramatize the ways in which our minds cope with our various personas and try to organize aspects of our experience into separate compartments we can control. Kaufman's first film as a director, " Synecdoche, New York" (2008), is his most challenging. In George Clooney's " Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002), he shows the game show creator Chuck Barris leading a double life as a deadly CIA assassin (Barris believes this story is factual). Nurture theories of our behavior: Do we start this way, or do we learn it? Jonze's "Adaptation" (2002) contrasts the physical evolution of orchids (which assume fantastic forms to earn a living) with identical twins, one who writes from his nature and the other from his nurture. Michel Gondry's "Human Nature" (2001) is concerned about the Nature vs. His screenplay for Spike Jonze's " Being John Malkovich" (1999) involved a way to spend 15 minutes inside the mind of another person. Kaufman, the most gifted screenwriter of the 2000s, is concerned above all about the processes of thought and memory. Consider how much information about evolution he embeds in his screenplay for " Adaptation." Kaufman has that knack of painlessly explaining his subject right there on the screen. She quotes as she's trying to impress a boss she loves. The audience needn't know that many may know no more than she does when she calls the author Pope Alexander. This passage comes well into a very long poem which I doubt the character Mary would have memorized. The world forgetting, by the world forgot.Įach pray'r accepted, and each wish resigned… In his screenplay for the film, Charlie Kaufman has a character quote some lines by Alexander Pope: They box up all tangible evidence of the memories (photos, gifts, mementos, diary entries), file them away, and then get into. Mierzwiak and his irresponsible, pot-smoking staff (Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and trainee Elijah Wood) schedule consultations with customers to target bad memories. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) supplies this service through Lacuna, an obscure company promising to improve your life by sifting out signs of things you wish you had not experienced. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the characters have that option-they can have their unwanted memories erased. It is as if those memories have been deleted. But what a blessing awaited me! Several places of personal significance had been demolished and replaced with strange new structures that mean nothing to me at all! This has had an interesting effect-I never dwell on those memories anymore. The prospect of revisiting those memories again made me pause before relocating to this place. It's a joy to have this mini-tour of the past every day.īut the place is also crowded with painful memories of a failed friendship, broken trust, and humiliation. And there-a sprawling lawn where my first rock band survived a disastrous performance. And there-the cafeteria where I consumed mass quantities of grilled peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Over there-the classrooms in which I tried to comprehend Donne, Dostoyevsky, and Derrida. I don't believe in ghosts, but the ol' alma mater is haunted with memories. Recently, I set up shop in a new office on the campus of the university I attended several years ago. If you could, what memories would you delete?