Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by Michel Gondry

Cinerama, the pop group started by former Wedding Present frontman David Gedge, prophesied the new Jim Carrey movie in the song "Let’s Pretend":

From its heavy-hearted realization to that later witty, abashed discovery, "Let’s Pretend" describes the essence (if not the plot) of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film’s title comes from Alexander Pope, but it’s a surprisingly classical reference for a movie that so closely matches the direct eloquence of a pop song. However, nothing in the movie is straightforward or simple. It’s quite unorthodox, moving by leaps of association and shifts in time.

The style is not wholly inventive. It mixes desire, regret and the unknowable future like Chris Marker’s La Jetée, and D.W. Griffith proved almost a hundred years ago that movies could play with time and memory extravagantly and potently. (Cinerama took its name from the supposedly "modern" 50s innovation that Griffith had already anticipated when he masked some of the horizontal compositions of the 1916 Intolerance into wide, letterbox rectangles.) Yet Eternal Sunshine is special because its cinematic flashiness also glories in the contemporary sensibility of pop records. It shares with Gedge’s best songs lyrical terseness, rhythmic surprise and naked–almost embarrassingly personal–emotion.

A new stage of expression is made apparent in this movie directed by Michel Gondry and co-written by Charlie Kaufman. Both artists have demonstrated radical approaches to film form. Gondry’s music videos are among the most visually startling and Kaufman’s scripts take self-reflexivity to crazy extremes. Their methods are inconceivable without several decades’ influence of pop music attitude. As in Human Nature, Gondry and Kaufman’s 2001 collaboration, romance and psychology don’t follow the old rules; they’ve stripped screwball comedy of its pre-molded grooves. This unique team highlights the surprise and frustration that make up intimate experience. Their moviemaking approach recalls the rock-song approach–goofy yet poignant.

Eternal Sunshine uses a plot gimmick that erases a person–or a memory–from someone’s mind. Jim Carrey plays Joel Barish, a disorganized New Yorker who undergoes the deletion procedure offered by Lacuna Inc. He does it in response to Clementine (Kate Winslet), the bawdy, discombobulated woman he fell in love with who has already had him erased. Through this situation, Eternal Sunshine describes its characters’ mental processes. Like Human Nature, the film concentrates on all its characters’ yearnings. That’s the thing that rock ’n’ roll always got right–the thing that remains true through adolescence and into adulthood. When one lover tells another, "I’m not your concept," it’s clear that Gondry and Kaufman are past indulging the dreaminess of Tin Pan Alley pop. They’re as hyper-aware of the forms we pre-set for romance as someone (probably of their own generation) who expects their lives to follow a verse-chorus-middle-eight-break pattern. Gondry and Kaufman’s unique narrative form examines pop self-consciousness. I guess that intention makes it an art film, but it has irresistible, universal relevance.

Even at its most bizarre and arty, Eternal Sunshine rings familiar notes. The Rubik’s Cube sequence of Being John Malkovich (when Maxine and Lotte tumble through Malkovich’s memory, discovering his shames and obsessions) is what all of Eternal Sunshine is like. But Kaufman’s new script doesn’t just repeat his old. By extending the Rubik’s Cube idea beyond a sequence and into the film’s complete narrative, Kaufman mixes Joel and Clementine’s anxieties with the personal follies of the Lacuna staff. (As pseudo-scientists, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Tom Wilkinson enact a highly unprofessional triangle; their own wayward appetites interfere with Joel’s attempt to come to grips with Clementine’s departure.) The characters’ various humiliations overlap and chase one another, spinning fast and tightly intermixing into a farce about the emotional mishaps people have in common. In Eternal Sunshine Kaufman’s Rubik’s Cube is now the box that David Gedge was filling up with mementos and regret.

Despite all the cleverness Kaufman loaded into 2002’s Adaptation, it was a semi-obnoxious disappointment after Being John Malkovich. Portraying himself (and a fictitious twin brother, Donald) as a Hollywood hack was an insufferable act of self-aggrandizement, particularly since Kaufman deliberately–snidely–turned the movie into violent, commercial trash as a hipster’s inside joke. Adaptation epitomized Hollywood corruption, as did Kaufman’s next film, the Chuck Barris bio-pic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (better referred to as Excesses of a Dangerous Mind). Eternal Sunshine brings Kaufman back to the true idiosyncrasy of Being John Malkovich. That’s where he first copped to Alexander Pope. Craig (John Cusack) was at work on a marionette version of Pope’s Heloise and Abelard, his penchant for morbid romanticism expressed in a form that seemed silly only because it wasn’t exactly pop. Being John Malkovich became a masterpiece because it extended Craig’s morbidity among the rest of the characters, who together represented crazy, modern unrest.

The idea of Eternal Sunshine seems more intimate perhaps because it originated with Gondry, who turns out to be the ideal partner for Kaufman. Gondry’s genius (even more visionary than Spike Jonze’s) frames the entire film as an inherently musical expression. Joel’s pining for the elusive Clementine is a namable obsession, but it’s not easily resolved. Both lovers are afraid of the longings and needs called up by their being together. ("I’m just a fucked-up girl looking for her own peace of mind," Clementine frets.) These are the emotions ingeniously articulated by confessional pop music, from the Beatles’ "Norwegian Wood" to R. Kelly’s "A Woman’s Threat." Gondry, who possesses prodigious technique (juxtaposing f/x shots with nightmarish realism), plays these emotions at the right, blink-of-the-eye speed. Played wrong, Kaufman’s over-intellectualizing comes off as too much paranoia–and not what Johnny Rotten saw as common human dread, but what Devo made shrill.

Thankfully, Gondry playfully gives anxiety its due. The pandemonium that the Lacuna folk make of Joel’s memory reawakens his childhood, which Gondry shoots like the kids’-scale fairytale of Bjork’s "Human Behavior" and Sinead O’Connor’s "Fire on Babylon" music videos. He goes back to the first stirrings of intimacy. (Little Joel in his airplane pajamas cries for his mother: "I want her to pick me up. Strange how strong that desire is.") And adult heartbreak–Joel’s inability to recall a face, shown through repeated jump-cuts of the back of a person’s head–is conveyed with such candor that it’s always a fresh jolt.

Conventional ways of looking at lovers’ complaints, as in the old song "I Can’t Get You Out of My Head," will forever seem a sentimental joke after Eternal Sunshine. Pop sensibility has gotten us beyond that, and Gondry and Kaufman are perfectly keyed into the kind of brave anxiety that, through pop, has both isolated and united listeners. The team captures what scholar Angus Fletcher has called "a strong tension between verse and poetry"–that is, the tension between usually exaggerated pop emotions and genuine feeling. The actors are exemplary vessels for these ideas; each one–especially Carrey–is surprisingly soulful.

Recent movie love stories have deceived audiences that their complex feelings were being adequately represented. All the Real Girls, Chasing Amy, Before Sunrise were like bad pop records. Young faces and callow voices spoke in hollow tones. Those movies didn’t click with the best pop music the way Eternal Sunshine does. Gondry visualizes the elliptical, interior monologues that distinguish this pop period. When David Gedge sings, "I didn’t need anyone/Until the day that you came" in the Wedding Present’s breathtaking "Come Play With Me," the singer’s resigning himself to pathos inspires what Gondry, Kaufman and Carrey convey about Joel. They get that private expiation of great pop as when Gedge begins "Come Play With Me" confiding, "Take a look at this note/I can’t throw it away/Oh please read it/It’s something she wrote/Just to ruin my day/Now you understand..." Underneath, melancholy guitar strumming and a nervous drum tattoo eventually gives way to a storm of raucous hurt. In Eternal Sunshine, Gondry’s quick edits and cross-cutting from one troubled consciousness to another perfectly reconcile each characters’ plaintiveness.

Love is not idealized in Eternal Sunshine. Each person discovers that you hold to the memory of love because you value the experience–for your pleasure and for wisdom. Yet, out of all the havoc of confused lovers (Joel telling Clementine "constantly talking is not communicating"), Gondry, Kaufman and Carrey achieve true hilarity and rollicking sympathy. They further the hard-won realization of Gedge’s "Let’s Pretend."