Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 1844578356, 9781844578351

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BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.palgrave.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video ‘Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Andrew M. Butler

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

For Jostein, solnyshko. © Andrew M. Butler 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Front cover design: Patricia Derks Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), © Focus Features LLC; Liar Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997), Universal Pictures Company/Imagine Entertainment; The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), Paramount Pictures/Scott Rudin Productions; Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994), © Wingnut Films; Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/Paramount Pictures Corporation/Lightstorm Entertainment; Iris (Martin Walsh, 2001), © Fox Iris Productions/ © InterMedia Film Equities/© BBC Films; A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006), © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.; Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), © Polygram Holding; Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002), © Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.; Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008), © Kimmel Distribution LLC; The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, 2006), © Société Nouvelle des Établissements Gaumont/© Partizan Films/© France 3 Cinéma; Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, 2007), © New Line Productions Inc./© Junkyard Productions LLC; Paycheck (John Woo, 2003), Davis Entertainment Company/Lion Rock Productions; Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), © Blade Runner Partnership/© The Ladd Company; Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (Renée April, 2002), © JVS GmbH & Co.; Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990), Carolco International; Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), © RKO Radio Pictures Inc.; Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), © Remember Productions/© Team Todd/© Newmarket Capital Group Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed in China This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978–1–84457–835–1

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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1 Actors and Auteurs

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2 Science Fiction

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3 The Comedy of Remarriage

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4 The Puzzle Film

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5 Mourning, Melancholy and Trauma 72 Coda

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Notes

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Credits

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the patience of the baristas, bartenders and barflies at various cafés, the New Inn and the Two Doves. My thanks also go out for help and distractions to Gemma Rowe, Ben Parkinson, Colin Odell, Debbie Moorhouse, Paul March-Russell, Rob McPherson, Tim Long, Mitch Le Blanc, James Kneale, Steve Kerry, Rowland Goodbody, Lisa Claire, Mark Bould, Caroline Bainbridge and executive editor Jostein Albrigtsen Aspelund.

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Introduction There is a moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) when a character Mary Svevo (Kirsten Dunst) quotes the poem that gives the film its title: How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d[.]1

Mary is an employee of Lacuna Inc, a company that specialises in erasing unwanted memories from its clients’ brains, and on several occasions she recites a quotation that could give the corporation a motto. She ascribes the poem, Eloisa to Abelard (1717), to Pope Alexander, forgetting for a second that it is in fact by Alexander Pope. But she has forgotten something else, as she makes a pass at her boss, Dr Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson): not only have the two of them already had an affair, but also her memory of this has been wiped. The germ of the script for Eternal Sunshine came from the French artist Pierre Bismuth. Bismuth was born in Paris in 1963 of North African heritage, and studied visual communication in Paris at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where in part he was taught by tutors who had been radicals in the student-led rising of May 1968. In 1983, he began to study at the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin, where he became influenced by the artist Joseph Beuys, known for his use of ready-mades and found objects in his work, as well as for performance art. Bismuth moved back to Paris to set up a studio and has lived in Brussels since the start of the 1990s, aside from a five-year spell from 2000 in London when his work was exhibited in the Lisson Gallery. His art attempts to engage with capitalism and the consumerist

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images produced by capitalism, for example the ‘Newspaper’ series (1991–2001) that reproduces front pages with a double version of their main photograph, ‘Collages for Men’ (2003) in which pornographic models are covered by cut-out white paper clothes and ‘Respect for the Dead – The Magnificent Seven’ (2003) that projects films such as Dirty Harry (1971), but stops them after the first character’s death. Bismuth asked director Michel Gondry what would happen if he were sent a card telling him that someone ‘“had you erased from her memory. Please don’t try to reach her.”’2 Gondry discussed this with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and they decided to make a film about a relationship that had gone sour. They pitched the idea to a studio, as Being John Malkovich (1999) was in post-production and as Kaufman was commissioned to write what was to become Adaptation. (2002). Eternal Sunshine was thus delayed; in the meantime, Gondry directed Kaufman’s script of Human Nature (2001).3 What emerged was a complex and challenging narrative, musing upon the nature of memory and melancholia, part science fiction, part romantic comedy, and won Kaufman, Gondry and Mary has had the memory of her affair with Dr Howard Mierzwiak erased

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Bismuth the Academy Award and BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay in 2005, as well as Movie of the Year for the AFI and the Saturn Award for Best Science-Fiction Film. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet were also nominated for various acting prizes. The narrative of the film’s central characters, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), is echoed by Mary and Mierzwiak’s failed romance. Mary does not know the context for her quotation, Eloisa to Abelard, a heroic verse epistle that drew on a 1713 translation of letters between Abelard, a philosopher and theologian who had an affair with his star pupil, Eloisa. When she becomes pregnant, they secretly marry and she enters a nunnery for safety; Abelard is attacked and castrated. Eloisa has become a bride of Christ while remaining in a loving relationship with a mortal man. She is in an impossible situation and will only be reunited with him after both their deaths. Donald B. Clark suggests that ‘death, the only solution to her conflict, is revealed by the imagery to be erotic satisfaction.’4 Kaufman had read and liked the lines – ‘I read her letters to Abelard. I find them rather exceptionally moving’5 – and had used this story for Craig Schwartz’s street puppet show in Being John Malkovich. Clementine’s first name offers an allusion to a death in its echo of ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’, a parody of a folk song about the loss of a lover. In the words of the chorus: Oh my darling, oh my darling, Oh my darling, Clementine! Thou art gone and lost forever Dreadful sorry, Clementine!

Some of the details of the song suggest that it is ironic – her size nine shoes made from herring boxes, for example, as well as the ridiculousness of a splinter causing her to trip over and drown in a river – but there is a repetition of the fact of her death. The song inspired the title of John Ford’s Western My Darling Clementine

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(1946), which uses the music, and Huckleberry Hound’s off-key singing in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons from 1958 onwards. Joel claims not to know the character at the start of the movie, although he sings a couple of bars of it in his remembered/imagined childhood kitchen and then, when he is being bathed in the kitchen sink alongside her, his mother sings the tune too. ‘I’ve never seen you happier, Baby Joel’,6 Clementine tells him. In the scene when they first meet – towards the end of the film – Joel sings the song and says ‘My favorite thing when I was a kid was my Huckleberry Hound doll. I think your name is magical.’7 An instrumental version of the tune plays on the soundtrack as Joel listens to the tapes he recorded as part of the erasure process. The name, as Joel points out on their unwitting reunion at the start of the film, means ‘merciful’ – indeed ‘clemency’ – and forgiveness is significant in the context of death and mourning. While Eternal Sunshine is not about lovers parted by death, Clementine’s decision to have Joel erased from her life – and his subsequent decision to erase her from his – leaves them as if they Joel retreats to happy memories of being bathed in the kitchen sink as a child

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are dead to each other. Joel, at least, whose reactions the film focuses on, is left mourning her, in a mood that borders on melancholia. Joel’s name means ‘YHWH is God’ and is shared with the second of the twelve minor Old Testament prophets, but it is also an allusion to the author Joel Townsley Rogers, whose The Red Right Hand (1945) is the novel that Clementine was reading at the start of film, although this is trimmed from the final version. Barish seems like a Freudian case study, especially in the confessional tapes he makes of his memories of Clementine. We learn of the experiences that led him to the decision to use Lacuna Inc. Because there is a kind of subjective duration of time in the film, much of the narrative is depicted in reverse order, heading back to Joel’s childhood – or at least memories of it. This is complicated by the opening scene in which Joel and Clementine appear to meet but are being reunited and the actions of Lacuna Inc that threaten to destroy Joel’s identity. The film thus also fits into the genre of the puzzle film, in which the audience is forced to work to untangle the narrative. This is not a standard-issue Hollywood narrative. My discussion of the film is divided into five sections, but the limits of print are such that a decision had to be made about the order in which these were placed. It would only be appropriate to read them in a different sequence. After an analysis of the personae the two main stars bring to Eternal Sunshine, I place the film in the ongoing intertwined careers of Kaufman and Gondry. The next three sections discuss genres: science fiction; romantic comedy; and the puzzle film. The makers of Eternal Sunshine have played with the ways in which the film fits and does not fit into a number of genres. The final chapter is more thematic, focusing upon the psychoanalytic aspects of the film, mourning and melancholia, before moving onto more recent accounts of trauma. The film draws upon and rejuvenates a number of genres. In an era of effects-heavy blockbusters that seem to be male power fantasies, it offers a version of science fiction that is grounded in psychologically complex characters with real human problems,

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encouraging reflection from the viewer rather than just astonishment at the visuals. It also allows the romantic comedy to move into new territory, although for the last century that subgenre has been tracking the ongoing shifts in the relations between the sexes and has not always been as fixated on happy endings as might be assumed. It marks stages in Gondry and Kaufman’s careers, as critically acclaimed film-makers who do not necessarily make hit films at the box office. While Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly and The Onion all rated it in the top ten best movies of its decade, it grossed about $70 million worldwide on a budget of $20 million, making it a modest hit. Gondry has continued to make feature films, alongside documentaries, and Kaufman has sought more creative control, both by directing and then by financing his own films. Equally it is significant in the careers of Winslet and Carrey, especially in giving Carrey a chance to grow as an actor beyond the crowd-pleasing antics of his previous films.

Joel and Clementine’s first meeting is a reunion

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1 Actors and Auteurs A film is clearly a collaboration between a large number of people – the lengthy end credits of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind going some way to demonstrate this. While film criticism has sometimes focused on the director when auteur-inflected – situating the film within Michel Gondry’s career – and a more literary approach would be to focus on the scriptwriter as the source of meaning – say, recurrent themes and style in the work of Charlie Kaufman – films are often sold on the strength of their actors. Although some films have posters saying ‘From the producer of –’ or ‘From the director of –’, and Kaufman was a sellable commodity on the back of Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation. (2002), a star actor is a more common way of preselling a film. In casting Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine benefited from the publicity that the two stars generated. Each actor brings the baggage of his or her previous roles to a new project, a certain expectation on the part of the audience. Oddly, Carrey is largely cast against type here, which risked alienating the audience by failing to give them what they expect, and Winslet felt as if she was, but that underplays the agency that her earlier characters grasped in settings where opportunities for women were more limited. Before examining the careers of Kaufman and Gondry, I want to look at the baggage that the earlier work of Carrey and Winslet brought to their roles. Jim Carrey Canadian Jim Carrey stands in a tradition of film character comedian actors whose performances both sell and transcend specific films. As Philip Drake argues: ‘More than perhaps any other genre, pleasure in comedian comedy relies on our pleasure in watching the star performance.’8 Mixing verbal comedy with physical presence,

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they frequently acknowledge the audience, by breaking the fourth wall or with an extradiegetic look; in The Mask (1994), the masked Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey) looks at and speaks to the audience, declaring ‘it’s show time’ and very clearly performing and acknowledging that he is performing. According to Steve Seidman, the character comedian would already be familiar to that audience through work in other media – initially theatre, music hall, vaudeville and radio, but more recently television or stand-up – and thus on some level be a known quantity.9 The comedian actor is placed within a film in a number of semantic frames simultaneously: 1 as a fictional character within a given narrative and diegesis; 2 as celebrity and star familiar from news stories and interviews; 3 as recurring actor who has played other roles in other films (and in other narratives); and 4 as a physical body whose mannerisms we recognise.10 In Eternal Sunshine, Carrey ‘is’ Barish – or indeed a number of Barishes according to their position in the story, bitter, spotless or sadder and wiser.11 Carrey would be familiar to audiences from coverage of red carpets at premieres and award shows and his earlier star vehicles such as the Ace Ventura films (see below). Dave Kehr suggests that Carrey is ‘the first major American comic to grow up with television in his bloodstream’,12 noting the significance of the medium in many of his movies, from the alien being educated by TV in Earth Girls Are Easy (1989) to TV as womb in The Truman Show (1998). After struggling in stand-up comedy and gaining a few small roles in films such as The Dead Pool (1988), Carrey became part of the ensemble cast of Keenen Ivory Wayans and Damon Wayans’s sketch show In Living Color (1990–4). His debut leading feature role, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), establishes the Carrey persona as goofy outsider who never takes those in authority seriously. He pulls and twists his face, throws his body around (and ventriloquises his bottom) as well as speaking in

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Liar Liar (1997): Carrey’s smile is part of his performance style

Carrey had to tone down his normal style for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Truman Show (1998) was a more serious role

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exaggerated and nonsensical tones. He is always performing to an audience, real or imagined. When Lt Lois Einhorn (Sean Young) – eventually exposed as the villain – says, ‘Spare me your routine, Ventura’, it can become easy to empathise. In The Mask, special effects transform Carrey into a three-dimensional cartoon character as he dons a magical mask and causes chaos across a city. The sense that the masked version of the character is giving free vent to his desires is undercut by his hyperactivity when not masked. Although in Batman Forever (1995) Carrey had licence to overperform as The Riddler, he allowed ‘himself to be upstaged by Tommy Lee Jones’s more flamboyant performance’13 as Two-Face. As with the career of fellow character comedian Robin Williams, Carrey also took on more serious roles. In The Truman Show, there is a childlike element to his portrayal of Truman Burbank, unwitting reality show star at the centre of a stage set. By keeping his mannerisms in check, he enables the audience to empathise and it is this aspect of his persona that helps us care about Joel’s plight in Eternal Sunshine. In the Andy Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon (1999), he transforms himself into the comedian, his excessive performance anchored within the earlier character comedian’s personae. Carrey must reel himself in for the more reflective scenes, especially in the later sequences. The Majestic (2001) is an uneasy homage to Capraesque patriotism set against the Hollywood blacklists; Peter Appleton (Carrey) is accused of communist sympathies and crashes his car on his way out of town. Suffering from amnesia, he ends up in a small town, mistaken for a missing war hero. Carrey’s performance makes his character likeable and has all his desires gratified even after his inadvertent deception is revealed. In these films, there is a tension between his star persona and the rather more buttoned-down character that he is required to represent. It is very much this depressive counter to the mania that Michel Gondry was to exploit in Eternal Sunshine. His relatively subdued performance seems all the more so in comparison to, say, Liar Liar (1997) where for much of the film Carrey stays at fever

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pitch. The combination of gurning, his Jerry Lewis-like movements and his smile is ‘a key signifier in Carrey’s idiolect’.14 A part such as Joel might be in tension with his pre-existing star persona. As Henry Jenkins points out: Most film performances maintain some degree of distance between the star’s image and the film’s character, though certain types of film (comedy, musical) focus audience attention on that gap while others (social problem films, melodramas) efface it as much as possible.15

There is often a shift of gear between ‘acting’ and ‘performance’, the realism of the plot and the comic, knowing exaggeration of the carnivalesque star turn. In some cases, there is an attempt to naturalise and frame the performance – a split personality, possession, the gigs of Andy Kaufman within Man on the Moon (and the films within films of Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind offer a similar alibi for Jack Black), but Carrey’s Fletcher Reede in Liar Liar seems equally unhinged in the courtroom and outside it, under a spell and not. Pleasure derives from his comic performance. Kate Winslet British-born Kate Winslet had won a Best Supporting Actress BAFTA for her role as Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1995), but it was playing upper-class Rose DeWitt Bukater who falls in love with working-class Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the blockbuster Titanic (1997) that made her an international star. Rose’s sexual awakening opens up the possibility of a life beyond marriage – although as Alexandra Keller notes, ‘Rose has led an adventurous but expensive life’.16 Keller argues that Rose is one in a line of ostensibly feminist protagonists in Cameron’s films: ‘Winslet’s high-spirited, loogey-hocking wannabe heiress (or, more to the point, don’twannabe heiress) is as independent, smart, idiosyncratically beautiful, sexy, powerful, (fill in another complimentary adjective here […]) as Cameron’s previous leading women.’17 For Keller, Rose

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Poster for Heavenly Creatures (1994)

Titanic (1997) made Winslet a household name

In Iris (2001), Winslet delivered a more liberated performance, but within an historical context

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ends up reinforcing the values of patriarchy and the ruling class. Nevertheless, this ensured Winslet was a box-office draw, allowing her more freedom in her choice of roles as well as attracting audiences to Eternal Sunshine. Before Titanic, and after, as she returned to lower-budget films, she has tended to be in historical dramas: as Juliet Hulme in Heavenly Creatures (1994), based on the real-life Hulme–Parker murder of Parker’s (Melanie Lynskey) mother (Sarah Peirse); as a mother finding herself in 1970s Marrakech in Hideous Kinky (1998); in the aforementioned Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility; as Hester Wallace in the World War II drama Enigma (2001) and as the young author Iris Murdoch in Iris (2001). Prior to Eternal Sunshine, her contemporary roles were rare – the exceptions being Holy Smoke (1998), in which she portrays a young Australian who is rescued from an Indian cult against her will by her family and The Life of David Gale (2003), as Bitsey Bloom, a tough journalist. Most of her roles have involved conflict between her character’s desires and the decorum of their era. In her film debut (Heavenly Creatures), her character has a tempestuous relationship with Pauline Parker, disapproved of by both their families, and the girls retreat into a fantasy world of their own imagining, Borovnia. The tone grows darker as their friendship is forbidden, culminating in the murder of Parker’s mother. The character is clearly capable, like Clementine, of asserting her own desires and protecting them when others condemn them – although this is Joel’s imagined version of Clementine rather than a direct depiction of the character. The same is true of Julia in Hideous Kinky, who takes her children away from their neglectful poet father in London to Marrakech, in search of her own enlightenment. The exotic open spaces and Moroccan people are very different from the barely lit interiors of a sinking ship in Titanic, although Julia does have recurrent nightmares of running down darkened alleyways and corridors in search of lost loved ones. As Ruth Barron, in Holy Smoke, and as Iris Murdoch, she is firmly in charge of her desires. Barron is forced to meet with P. J. Waters

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(Harvey Keitel), who has been employed to deprogramme her from the cult, but she is able to use her sexual allure to allow him to seduce her. As this is a film by Jane Campion, a feminist director, what risks being a male wish-fulfilment fantasy is instead about a woman assuming agency. Again, in Iris, it is her character who decides that she will start a physical relationship with John Bayley (Hugh Bonneville), along with others both male and female. The characters she has played have been far from passive, even in films set in eras when women were expected to be subservient to men. This pattern continues in Eternal Sunshine, when she is the one who chooses to start a relationship with Joel and refuses to be limited or defined by him. It is implied that she is unfaithful to him – although Joel accuses her in his testimony to Lacuna Inc of having sex simply to feel wanted because she is insecure. Her changing hair colour – especially the striking blue, orange, red and green – make her stand out and represent the antithesis of any feminine (and dated) modesty, and show she is in charge of her appearance. Just as Carrey’s characters’ extroversion often mask an inner insecurity, so Joel senses that her persona disguises the fact that she is ill at ease. With the film’s focus on Joel’s drama, we rarely get to see Clementine on her own rather than through Joel’s perceptions. She does decide to start a relationship with Patrick (Elijah Wood) and then decides to break it off, and she also decides when she is and is not in a relationship with Joel. Charlie Kaufman Kaufman was born in New York in 1958 and educated at West Hartford, Connecticut, Boston University and New York University. After a brief period working for a newspaper in Minneapolis, he moved to Los Angeles, contributing to comedy programmes such as Get a Life (1991–2), The Edge (1992–3), The Trouble with Larry (1993), Misery Loves Company (1995), The Dana Carvey Show (1996), Ned and Stacey (1996–7), as well as writing film scripts such as an unproduced adaptation of American science-fiction writer

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Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977). Kaufman felt the existing adaptations ‘pilfer Dick’s ideas and the crudest part of his stories – the science-fiction stuff – and they throw away the gold, which is the quirkiness’.18 The different levels of reality, with ambiguity as to whether each of the imagined diegeses should be regarded as true – did this happen or was it a hallucination? – and the use of the author as a character can be traced in both Dick and Kaufman’s works. Dick’s protagonists, like Kaufman’s, are never heroic, usually slightly at odds with mainstream society and their wives or girlfriends are rarely sympathetic and frequently belittle them, with Dick’s male characters tending to turni to a feisty, younger female for solace. The protagonist also confronts an older, more successful patriarch, too ambivalent to be labelled an antagonist, similar to characters Kaufman imagined for his films. Kaufman has admitted that ‘Dick has certainly been very influential on my work […] I like the fact that his science fiction isn’t really science fiction at all.’19 In 1997, Kaufman was commissioned to adapt the memoir of television producer and self-alleged CIA assassin, Chuck Barris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984). This eventually became George Clooney’s directorial debut. Barris (Sam Rockwell) alternates Kaufman wrote an adaptation of A Scanner Darkly (2006). The film was eventually made by Richard Linklater, but from a different script

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between introverted and extroverted, with Clooney intercutting brief testimonies from real people who knew Barris with the rather tall tales of murder. Kaufman was reportedly unhappy with Clooney’s version, and decided to try to keep more creative control in future. The Kaufmanesque juxtaposition of reality and performance remains, however, with Barris haunted by studio sets that recall his childhood and his killings. Television clips are intercut with film narrative. Even in Clooney’s version it remains ‘obvious that he [Kaufman] has only one subject, the mind, and only one plot, how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams’.20 While Kaufman – certainly if we believe his alter ego Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. – is suspicious of genre, his ‘work and approach to filmmaking has been transformed into its own genre’.21 From his outsider, frustrated, protagonists, we gain the sense that ‘We are others to ourselves – separated, divided, alienated’.22 This is the case with puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) in Being John Malkovich, whose puppetry gives him a grace in performance he does not have in real life. Working as a file clerk, he discovers a portal that gives access into the head of actor John

In Being John Malkovich (1999), the award-winning actor’s mind can be entered via a portal behind a filing cabinet

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Malkovich. As Malkovich, he becomes attractive to co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener), but she is also sexually excited by Craig’s wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) as Malkovich. Malkovich becomes Craig’s ultimate puppet and Maxine his lover, but the achievement of his desires sours when she becomes pregnant. Jonze and Kaufman reunited for a second film, Adaptation., an apparent dramatisation of Kaufman’s struggles to write a screenplay of Susan Orlean’s bestseller, The Orchid Thief (1998). Kaufman inserts himself into the script alongside a (fictional) twin brother, Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage), who is killed during the course of the film. Charlie’s anxieties about avoiding formulae are balanced by Donald’s embrace of them, along with the dictates of script guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox). The film undercuts the kind of cliché that Kaufman despises. Each of these three films adapts the biographies of real people – Barris, Malkovich and other Hollywood stars, Orlean (Meryl Streep) and the eponymous thief (Chris Cooper) – and autobiography – Charlie Kaufman most obviously, but Schwartz and Barris as surrogates for him and Barris’s memoir. The real/nonreal uncannily blurs. Kaufman is himself a character in Adaptation. (2002)

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Meanwhile, Kaufman made the first of his two collaborations with Gondry. Human Nature is loosely inspired by a Franz Kafka short story, ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917) in which a chimpanzee, Red Peter, talks about how he learned to imitate human beings and became a vaudeville entertainer. The film’s equivalent of Red Peter is Puff (Rhys Ifans) who had been raised as an ape and is trained by Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), himself brought up by strict, behaviourist parents. Nathan romances Lila Jute (Patricia Arquette), who had run away to the woods because her body was covered in thick hair. The characters are subject to the influences of nurture and nature, fighting for free will and agency against both. In Eternal Sunshine, their second collaboration, Kaufman uses a number of intertexts – the Pope reference I have already discussed, but Clementine’s allusions to Margery Williams’s The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) and Rogers’s The Red Right Hand are cut from the finished film, although the latter is acknowledged in the closing credits. Rogers’s novel is a hallucinatory one, narrated by Dr Harry N. Riddle Jr who is not quite a witness to the disappearance and possible murder of oil millionaire S. Inis St Erme. The novel hints that Riddle is the murderer: ‘it didn’t mean that, just because I was a doctor, he [an expert in murderers] would find a murderer in me’.23 The word ‘lacuna’ appears on the second page of the novel – ‘was there something darker than a mental lacuna and a moment of sleepwalking on my part?’24 – and Riddle and St Erme’s fiancée are unknowingly near neighbours in New York, like Clementine and Joel. Theatre director Caden Cotard’s (Philip Seymour Hoffman) attempt to stage an epic play of his own life is central to Synecdoche, New York (2008), Kaufman’s directorial debut. Such a detailed attempt to represent the world echoes the life-size map in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) ‘“on the scale of a mile to the mile!” ’,25 which has never been unfolded because it would cover the land, ‘ “So we now use the country itself as its own map.” ’26 The film was a critical but not a financial success.

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Meanwhile he has worked on a crowd-funded animated version of his pseudonymous Anomalisa (2005), written as Francis Fregoli for composer Carter Burwell’s Theatre of the Ear, with Duke Johnson and Kaufman directing. The intention is to be free of studio interference and have artistic freedom – although the bloated nature of Cotard’s everlasting performance may caution against this. Michel Gondry For four films Kaufman had worked with directors who, like David Fincher, Brett Ratner and McG before them, had cut their filmic teeth in music videos. Jonze had made videos for Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, Beastie Boys, R.E.M. and Björk, among others; Gondry for Björk, Kylie Minogue, the White Stripes, the Chemical Brothers, Radiohead and more. Gondry was born in Versailles on 8 May 1963 and had made short films and played in a punk band with his brother, Oliver. Gondry formed a second band, Oui Oui, with school friend singer-guitarist Étienne Charry in 1983, and it is the films he made for this band that brought him to the attention of Icelandic Synecdoche, New York (2008): the author dramatises his own life

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singer-songwriter Björk; together they made ‘Human Behaviour’ (1993). The song was an attempt to empathise with the animal point of view of humans, with a stop-motion animation hedgehog and a person dressed up as a toy bear. Gondry blends live action, models, animation and back-screen projections to create a fairytale-like feel. Gondry’s meticulous results are often produced in camera rather than relying on computer trickery. Carol Vernalis notes that Eternal Sunshine ‘divides into segments that work like inset music videos, each organized by unique visual and aural principles’.27 A glance aesthetic means that we must note and interpret repeated images of alcohol, birds/flight, American flags, ice and so on, even when they may only be on screen for a couple of frames. Yet, in the age of the digital, Gondry appears resolutely analogue, and this aesthetic carries on into his films and documentaries such as Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2005), L’Épine dans le Coeur (The Thorn in the Heart, 2009) and Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013). He also collaborated with artist Pierre Bismuth on The All-Seeing Eye (The Hardcore Techno Version) (2008), a film from a camera that rotates within an apartment, where the furnishings and other decorations disappear one by one, leaving an empty white cube. The film was shown in galleries and at the BFI Southbank with a rotating projector: The careful alignment of projected space and space of projection makes the two rooms appear almost spatially coextensive, encouraging viewers to feel that they have entered the set. [… It] is not immediately apparent that the set is a scaled-down model.28

Among the objects in the ‘room’ was a television set, showing a clip from Eternal Sunshine. Human Nature was Gondry’s feature debut, although he had rewritten a script for The Green Hornet in 1997. Gondry used similar techniques to those in his video productions, with some of the sequences in the woods echoing ‘Human Behaviour’ and the use of 8mm stock for flashback sequences. Roger Ebert notes the film’s

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‘manic whimsy’,29 and the movie is playful – as well as thoughtful – risking self-indulgence. While Eternal Sunshine is hardly more streamlined in plot terms, the style shifts serve the narrative. Several of the chase/escape sequences for Joel and Clementine seem to echo the metamorphoses from Gondry’s ‘Smarienbad’ (1998) commercial for Smirnoff – a young couple are pursued in a surreal chase through a bar, a hotel bedroom, a boat, trains, in cars across a desert, a street and the same bar, each edit melding via a shot through the vodka bottle. La Science des Rêves (The Science of Sleep, 2006) was an original screenplay by Gondry, inspired by a story told to him by the then ten-year-old actor Sam Nessim. Returning to Paris after the death of his father, Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal) falls in love with Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The realistic mise en scène is juxtaposed with worlds constructed from cardboard or cellophane, real experiences drifting into dream imagery. In Be Kind Rewind, a film written by Gondry that turns into a star vehicle for character comedian Jack Black, a video-rental store faces closure. Jerry (Black) accidentally erases the videos and so he and the clerk The Science of Sleep (2006) blurs fantasy and reality

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Matt (Mos Def, who had been in Block Party) recreate the Hollywood movies on camcorders with amateur actors. These ‘Sweded’ movies within the movie are the film’s highlights and an over-saccharine ending is avoided by a sense of ambiguity over the store’s future. Gondry then made ‘Interior Design’, a segment of the portmanteau film Tokyo! (with Leos Carax and Boon Joon Ho, 2008). Inspired by Gabrielle Wood’s graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York, Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and Akira (Ryô Kase) are a young couple trying to find an apartment in Tokyo. As Akira appears to be finding success with his sf films, Hiroko feels alienated and invisible, metamorphosing into a chair. There is a disjunction here between the sense of fulfilment she feels as something that is sat on and the extreme passivity this suggests. Akira’s sf film is glimpsed briefly, and should be taken less seriously than Matt and Jerry’s efforts in Be Kind Rewind. Gondry then embraced Hollywood with The Green Hornet (2011), a bromance superhero film co-written by and starring Seth Rogen. Despite attempts to subvert the genre, it is full of 3D effects,

Gondry, here on the set of Be Kind Rewind (2007), often adopts a lo-fi aesthetic

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stunts and noise. Peter Bradshaw suspected ‘Gondry’s original conception, [was] weeded out and blandified by the studio’.30 It is very different from The We and the I (2012), largely set on a bus on the last day of school in the Bronx. The naturalistic conversations between teenagers – about their days, their pasts and their immediate and longterm futures, chatting each other up, falling out, sending text and video messages and so on – are intercut with flashbacks, mobile-phone footage and a cardboard model of the bus. The tragic ending risks seeming like the intrusion of too much reality into a rather more mundane scenario. His most recent film at the time of writing is L’Écume des jours (Mood Indigo, 2013), an adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel Froth on the Daydream (1947), co-written by Luc Bossi. The wealthy Colin (Roman Duris) meets Chloé (Audrey Tautou) at a party and they fall in love, but after they marry, Chloé falls seriously ill and can only recover if she is surrounded with flowers. In the meantime, Gondry has been attached to an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969). As in Dick and Kaufman’s work, Gondry’s films blur reality and fantasy, and all three invite philosophical responses to their art. Another French director, Jean-Pierre Gorin, co-founder with JeanLuc Godard of the Dziga-Vertov Group (1968–72) of radical filmmakers, had met with Dick in 1974 to discuss adapting the novel, but had been unable to raise the finances. Others have tried over the following decades, including Tommy Pallotta, the producer of A Scanner Darkly, and Celluloid Dreams in association with Electric RoboCop is one of the films that has to be remade in Be Kind Rewind

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Shepherd, the production company of Dick’s estate. In April 2014, Gondry suggested in an interview to Télérama that he did not think it had the right dramatic structure for a film,31 although a few days later he told a website that ‘Ubik wouldn’t be his next film […] but he did give us a hint as to what his next project might be. It is, he said, “A kids’ story about a road trip in France.”’32 It might yet be that Gondry will return to science fiction.

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2 Science Fiction While Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not just a sciencefiction film – no film ever belongs to just one genre – it does fit within the parameters of the genre. The origins of sf lie in the work of writers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and others, with its formalisation as a genre in the pulp-fiction magazines of the early twentieth century. One of the French cinema pioneers, Georges Méliès, produced a number of films that could be seen as science fiction, including Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902). These trick films exploit the simple special effect of what would happen if filming is interrupted and an object placed before or removed from the field of view before recommencing. This technique has been exploited both physically and digitally by Gondry in his films and videos, with cast and crew sometimes removing or adding objects (including costumes) between shots or when out of shot – when Joel sees himself in the Lacuna Inc office, this was achieved by Carrey changing costumes and running around the back of the camera before it panned to where he was sitting. The sequence in the childhood kitchen is achieved through sets, camera angles and forced perspectives. Various versions of Joel’s disintegrating memories, such as the decaying of the beach house, are sometimes achieved through stop-motion photography. J. P. Telotte suggests that Méliès developed an aesthetics that ‘delighted in a new-found plasticity and fragmentability, a sense that our technologies were making it possible to compartmentalize, rework, and reshape our world’.33 This encapsulates the sf film – a series of strange effects that acts as a spectacle. Part of Gondry’s technique is to abandon continuity editing at various moments, thus disorienting the viewer’s map of the diegetic space; match cuts can move a character from place to place or present to past, from the

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Charles River to Grand Central Station, apparently seamlessly. The camera moves from the bookstore with Joel to the Eakins’ house; later the interior of the bookstore is visible from the restaurant, as if they are a continuous space. Gondry sometimes also uses a tight focus on Carrey, blurring out and distancing him from the background, or uses artificial light on him while his surroundings are darkened. While written sf is the literature of ideas, in science-fiction film at times the ‘spectacle seems to overpower the speculation’.34 The science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, someone both Kaufman and Gondry have attempted to adapt for the cinema, attacked such films: ‘For all its dazzling graphic impact, Alien (to take one example) had nothing new to bring us in the way of concepts that awaken the mind rather than the senses.’35 This was written in the context of him feeling left out of the production process of Blade Runner (1982), and is perhaps blind to the pleasures of the spectacle and the sublime in their own right. Susan Sontag had already argued that ‘in place of an intellectual workout, they can supply something the novels can never provide – sensuous elaboration’.36 Ideally the imagery triggers some kind of thought process, allowing the real world to be viewed with fresh eyes. Science and Technology John Brosnan begins his history of the sf film by ‘stating that science fiction must involve science in some way. It is not fiction necessarily about science but fictions that invariably use science as a basis for extrapolation.’37 This should be contrasted with Sontag’s view that ‘Science fiction films are not about science’,38 although her insistence that ‘They are about disaster’ seems less relevant to Eternal Sunshine other than on the level of the personal disaster. Science is less important to science-fiction film than the characteristics of scientists and the implications of their discoveries or inventions. Scientists are frequently represented as absent-minded at best and mad at worst, and it is the impact of the technology that develops from their

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discoveries that normally forms the mechanism of the science-fiction plot. The scientist at the heart of Eternal Sunshine is Dr Howard Mierzwiak, an apparently kindly figure offering what appears to be a much-needed service, but who is also paternalistic and has used his invention to cover up his affair. Science-fiction film foregrounds technology and, through the spectacle of that technology, foregrounds the technology of representation and the act of looking. Some effects efface themselves and attempt to be invisible, whereas others – in part because of their sheer impossibility – announce themselves as being special, often pausing the narrative flow to allow for a moment of wonderment. In the sequence in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the characters watch the arrival of the alien mothership in awed silence, some of them dropping to their knees as if to pray. However, Gondry’s special effects aspire less to a quasirealism, if anything adding to the spectacle by ensuring that cardboard models could not be mistaken for reality in La Science des Rêves, The We and the I and, for comic reasons, Be Kind Rewind. On the one hand, technology must be dangerous to the protagonists as plots demand problems and complications – the creation malfunctions or cannot be controlled, the Earth (or another location) is threatened, the technology allows someone to terrorise others and so forth. Bruce F. Kawin, comparing sf to horror film, suggests that the latter works to discredit curiosity by demonstrating its dangers. He claims that science fiction is more open to otherness than horror: Both horror and science fiction open our sense of the possible (mummies can live, men can turn into wolves, Martians can visit), especially in terms of community […] Most horror films are oriented toward the restoration of the status quo rather than toward any permanent opening.39

There are things with which humans are not meant to meddle; the horror narrative punishes characters who step out of line. Sf, in

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general, has a more approving relationship with the quest for scientific knowledge and of difference: it ‘is open to the value of the inhuman, one can learn from it, take a trip with it’.40 Christopher Grau asserts that ‘Eternal Sunshine, unlike some science-fiction films, is not in love with the new technology it showcases.’41 I would argue in fact that much sf film is ambivalent about technology – with the exception of spaceships and other transportation, which are often futuristic substitutes for cars, trains and aeroplanes – despite its deployment of technology in the production of the images. While Gondry embraces a lo-fi aesthetic at times, the list of effects technicians on the credits of Eternal Sunshine and other films demonstrates some reliance on CGI – the way in which the people vanish from Grand Central Station suggests more than start-stop filming. On the other hand, because plots demand spectacle, the technology may appear wondrous – the creation transports the protagonists through space or time, transforms them or creates marvels. In Being John Malkovich, for example, the portal between the back of the filing cabinet, Malkovich’s perception system and the

The portal into Malkovich’s brain in Being John Malkovich

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New Jersey turnpike is hardly explicable by science. The film has much in common with fantasy, whether in terms of the magic associated with much of that genre or with wishfulfilment for its characters or its audience. The contingent genres of horror and fantasy have attracted psychoanalytic readings; this book will continue that tradition. Amnesia and Anamnesia The technology in Eternal Sunshine is focused on memory and artificially induced amnesia. The exploration of memory is a theme that has been especially prominent within sciencefiction film for the last thirty years or more, with Blade Runner an early example. The androids or replicants have been implanted with artificial memories in order to give them an emotional base. Rachael (Sean Young), for example has no idea that she herself is not human. For some of the replicants, their ‘memories’ are represented in photographs, insistent proof of the existence of their pasts, and it is unclear whether the pictures on Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) piano are from Rachael’s or his own family history. There has been speculation over the years that Deckard is also a replicant and does not know this. The implication is that without a past to anchor us, we are adrift in the present. Joel is certainly traumatised when he wakes up without part of his past and Clementine does not seem to be making rational decisions. Blade Runner was based upon Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), a novel by Philip K. Dick, whose stories sometimes Paycheck’s memory-erasing machine was inadvertently echoed by the one used by Lacuna Inc in Joel’s apartment

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also deal with false memories and may have been an influence on Kaufman. In ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (1980), a spaceship’s computer attempts to keep Victor Kamming, one of its passengers, occupied with false memories as the cryogenic equipment has failed. The computer draws on real memories, but each one in turn becomes traumatic. By the time the passenger reaches his destination, he believes reality to be a hallucination. In this case, Kamming’s underlying psychological make-up breaks through whatever memories have been grafted onto him, suggesting that there is a sense of identity that is not linked to memory. Encounters with people and objects that he has known trigger recall of earlier behaviour patterns. This also seems to be the case in Eternal Sunshine, where Joel becomes the shy and nervous but attracted suitor when seeing Clementine again. As Frederika Shulman argues, ‘Artifacts […] transmit who and what we are via social and cultural myths, memories and practices. Even if such objects are relegated to the status of repository of memory they necessarily convey a history

Deckard and Rachael both have their memories in Blade Runner (1982)

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much larger than themselves.’42 This explains why the memoryerasing process has both an inner and outer component. Clients are instructed to gather together any objects that are connected with the loved one: photos, clothing, gifts, books, CDs and journal entries. A personalised mug or a potato doll is an uncanny double of Clementine; Joel’s encounters with such objects will conjure up Clementine. Similarly, Patrick’s gift of some jewellery, which Joel has bought for but not given to Clementine, make her begin to fall in love with the technician. An object offers anamnesia, unforgetting. Shulman notes ‘even though these objects have been displaced from their original context in Joel’s collection, the memories they embody remain ever present’.43 The jewellery is not enough to convince Clementine fully – Joel as object is missing – nor is it immediately clear how Joel and Clementine’s return to Montauk is triggered. For Joel, it may be the bird-house mobile hanging in his bedroom window that has an association with the beach house. Objects as triggers are also present in Dick’s story ‘Paycheck’ (1953), filmed by John Woo in 2003. Here an electronic engineer works on a secret project under a contract that requires his memory to be wiped afterwards, and his payment turns out to be a number of everyday objects. Each of these objects leads him out of trouble with the secret services and towards a better financial reward. Woo’s film transforms a minor Dick story into a thriller, with a memory-wiping helmet that was inadvertently echoed by the one in Eternal Sunshine: Memory in commodity form: the personalised mug is a concrete memory of Clementine

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‘this machine they had on his head is exactly the one they designed for Eternal Sunshine’.44 False or occluded memories were also central to ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (1964) – a very loose inspiration for the two versions of Total Recall (1990, 2012). Doug Quail approaches Rekall, Inc, to purchase the memory of a vacation on Mars. In rewriting his memories, it transpires that Quail has actually been to Mars, and the collision of real with falsified memories will cause psychological breakdown. They overlay his memories with an unlikely wish-fulfilment experience, where Quail has saved the Earth from an invasion by mice-like aliens, only to discover that this too appears to have happened. Again, the filmed versions are action thrillers rather than philosophically nuanced examinations of identity. Yugin Teo argues that the replicant memories of Blade Runner, the implanted but authentic memories of Total Recall, the recorded memories of Strange Days (1995) and the induced amnesia of Dark City (1998) are driven by ‘the commodification of memory, with the use of technology in creating false or prosthetic memories’.45 But Teo underplays the role of objects – shared or gifted commodities – in the memory-erasure process in Eternal Sunshine. Lacuna Inc is a business not a charity. Mary insists to a client that three times in one month is too many erasure processes, but from this it is clear that Lacuna Inc will sell the service more than once. The Fantastic In Eternal Sunshine, we move between the imagined world of the diegesis and worlds imagined or remembered within the diegesis. We have to make strategic decisions about the reality status of the various scenes we are watching: is this meant to be real or imagined? We have to distinguish between the Joel who is going have his memories wiped (or has had them wiped) and the Joel of his memories. Joel himself is sometimes aware of the memory-erasing procedure and Clementine – more precisely Joel’s image of Clementine – sometimes knows she is part of his memories, hiding from the erasure. We witness Joel’s

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memories, his visit to (or his memory of his visit to) Lacuna Inc, Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Patrick, Mary and Howard erasing his memories and so on. Joel also appears as himself in some of these sequences, interacting with Howard. Joel’s hyper-fictional memories collide with the fictional erasing procedures at which he is present. He cannot see all of the scenes – he waits in the car when Clementine is in her apartment, Mary resigns from Lacuna and Stan and Hollis (Deidre O’Connell) interact outside Joel’s apartment – but these could be figments of his imagination. We see his memories from outside – in Being John Malkovich we do see what Malkovich sees. Sometimes we are unable to decide the status of what we are watching. This undecidability of what is real or imagined is characteristic of what Bulgarian-born literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov labels the fantastic. He describes as marvellous those stories in which cloaks of invisibility, seven-league boots and selective memory-wiping are to be considered possible. The reader engages in a willing suspension of disbelief – in film terms the diegesis is to be taken as real. In other narratives, such unlikely objects or events have a rational explanation – it was all a dream, a hallucination or a con trick. Todorov labels this genre, a little awkwardly as it echoes a rather different Freudian term, ‘the Uncanny’. When the audience cannot decide between marvellous and uncanny interpretations, we are in the realm of the fantastic. Todorov chose Henry James’s novel The Turn of the Screw (1898) as his key, perhaps even his only, exemplar, with more familiar genre fantasies notably absent. The work of David Cronenberg, David Lynch and Terry Gilliam fit in this category, and Kaufman’s script for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind does not want to confirm Barris as assassin or impostor. Sf may be marvellous: The initial data are supernatural: robots, extraterrestrial beings, the whole interplanetary context. The narrative movement consists in obliging us to see how close these apparently marvellous elements are to us, to what degree they are present in our life.46

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At the same time, since science offers potential rational explanations, sf may be uncanny. The ambiguity allows for fantastic readings. Alongside Joel’s image of Clementine, we also have his image of Clementine’s self-image. In the Shooting Script for Eternal Sunshine, Clementine’s favourite book is The Velveteen Rabbit, a story of a toy rabbit who becomes real through being loved: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) hovers between memoir and fantasy; Clementine’s dolls are Freudian uncanny doubles of herself

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‘by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly.’47

By the end of the tale, the worn-out toy has become a real rabbit. Gondry did not feel this scene worked; ‘It’s a pivotal moment, but it wasn’t playing,’48 Kaufman admitted. In the re-edited speech, Clementine talks about her dolls: ‘My favourite is this ugly girl doll who I call Clementine and I keep yelling at her, “You can’t be ugly, be pretty.” It’s weird. Like if I can transform her, I would magically change too.’ This holds out the hope that love can uncannily make her real – although this is Joel’s Clementine talking and there may be no such doll. At the end of Eternal Sunshine, after their reconciliation, we see Joel and Clementine on the beach at Montauk. It is ambiguous as to whether this is a subsequent excursion, part of their unknowing reunion, one of Joel’s memories or a memory that may well be erased. There is no certainty that Joel has had the erasing device removed and the ending could be a wish-fulfilment fantasy. The ending is open rather than closed. Once a hallucination has been experienced, it may not be clear when it has ended. This is not the only science-fiction film where we may entertain such doubts. Deckard falls asleep at his piano in Blade Runner, so all of the events that follow may be a wishfulfilment dream, in Videodrome (1983), Max Renn (James Woods) is seen donning the virtual-reality headset but not removing it and at the end of Total Recall, the characters speculate that they might be part of Quaid’s dream. It might be noted that all of these films are about male dreams and rememberings – Joel appears to be the only male character to have his memory erased in Eternal Sunshine.49 In fictional works, we make a distinction between the shared world of the creator and their audience and the world depicted within the text, the diegetic world. When characters dream, hallucinate or themselves look at films, television programmes, plays or books, we have a further world, fiction within the diegesis. It is tempting to see these different frames as being like nested Russian

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dolls, one inside the other – reality, fiction, metafiction – but with the realisation both that there may be metametafictions and beyond – dreams within dreams within dreams, a vertiginous mise en abîme – and the worrying possibility that the audience themselves may not be privileged observers but are themselves fictional characters. This is dramatised in Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires, 1973) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999), when characters using what we would now call virtual reality discover that they themselves are part of a fictional world. Dick was renowned for such set-ups, for example, Time Out of Joint (1959), in which Ragle Gumm, an apparent layabout who solves a daily newspaper competition ‘Where will the Little Green Man appear next?’, discovers the whole town around him has been constructed to contain his trauma. This offered loose inspiration for Andrew Niccol’s script of The Truman Show, in which Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is unwittingly at the heart of a television reality show. The audience for Eternal Sunshine may well bring this memory of Carrey’s oeuvre to the film. Aside from the vanishing text and blurring faces, each ‘level’ of world within Eternal Sunshine looks very similar – (fictional) real Quaid dreams of a life on Mars in Total Recall (1990) – but it isn’t necessarily a dream. Or maybe it is …?

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New York and Montauk, (fictional) remembered New York and Montauk – because the film-makers are using identical camera and editing techniques to depict them. The film depicts both reality and illusion within its diegesis or diegeses. The paintings of René Magritte are similarly metafictional, for example, La Condition humaine (The Human Condition, 1933) that depicts a painting of a landscape on an easel in front of a window, through which part of that landscape is visible. As I have argued As the painting-within-a-painting is made of the same materials as the painting itself, how can we tell that any painting by Magritte – or any artist, for that matter – is not a painting-within-a-painting, with the borders of both coinciding? Both paintings are constructed from the same paint and are painted on the same surface; it hardly makes sense to talk of a primary and secondary painting.50

How can we tell that a scene is real rather than part of Joel’s memories or imagination? In the end, none of it is reality – in Eternal Sunshine, these are all parts of a film. Gondry’s use of hand-held or The Truman Show: Truman is part of his own fantasy – and television’s

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slightly moving cameras in Joel’s real life, memories and imagination and in scenes from which he is absent does not offer a convenient means of distinction. The ending, whether real or fantasised, is a familiar generic one for the sf film, where the protagonists leave the city with its alienations of law, order and capitalism and retreat to the utopian countryside – in Blade Runner, Deckard and Rachael fly off into the sunset from a rainy, dark metropolis, possibly to live happily ever after and in Brazil (1985), Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) and Jill (Kim Griest) drive to a bucolic, pastoral world, although the closing shots undermine this. The precogs in Minority Report (2002) and the lovers Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) and Dr Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman) and their friend Shorty (Paul Giamatti) in Paycheck all find a better life outside the city, while John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) in Dark City makes the conceptual breakthrough to discover where he really is by reaching Shell Beach and being reunited with Emma/Anna (Jennifer Connelly). Pleasant times for Joel and Clementine on the beach at Montauk, at the eastern side of the Hamptons, take them away from New York. Love can be found in the green world outside the city.

The end of the beach is ambiguous – reality, memory or fantasy?

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3 The Comedy of Remarriage Like most popular genres, such as science fiction, comedy is regarded with a degree of suspicion by critics, perhaps because of a long-held suspicion that its pleasures are too easily acquired. It is perceived to be merely entertainment, offering no serious commentary on the human condition. Aristotle’s Poetics argues ‘comedy aims at representing men as worse than they are nowadays, tragedy as better’,51 but the prejudices against comedy still hold two millennia on. Aristotle’s extension of Plato’s model of art as mimesis links comedy to the ugly and the deformed, rather than to the beautiful, with a class-based division of tragedy invoking the fall of great men, whereas comedy is either more plebeian or involves people from outside the city (who are thus supposedly uncouth). A product of a more democratic age, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does offer many pleasures, some of them comic, as well as spectacle, but it also allows an exploration of human nature and desire. While the nuances of narrative structures will be discussed in the next chapter, in this I want to discuss some of the subgenres of comedy, in particular, romantic comedy and the comedy of remarriage. Traditionally, narratives begin with a disruption of the social order – something inconveniencing the protagonist, ideally deriving from a flaw in their character – and end with a social ritual, depicted or implied, restoring the rule of law. In tragedy, this tends to be a funeral; in comedy, a marriage, both restoring the rule of law and serving the needs of patriarchy. The Romantic Comedy One subgenre of comedy is the romantic comedy. The situation where two people argue with each other until they finally realise that they are in love is not original to film – Beatrice and Benedick in

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William Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (c. 1598) and Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1813) spring to mind – but the genre had flourished with the sound cinema of the 1930s. Writers, directors, actors and audiences took pleasure in pushing the possibilities of synchronised sound to the limits, glorying in rapid, sharp and even overlapping dialogue. Tamar Jeffers McDonald sees the characters’ speech as part of the seduction process: ‘While sex was postponed, the couple had to engage in verbal foreplay which substituted for, forecast and enticed the other towards, the final act.’52 The Motion Picture Production Code forbade the depiction of on-screen sexual intercourse, so it was necessary for it to take place off screen and ideally post-film. The film might follow the characters to the altar or to the bedroom door, but no further. At the same time, the form was not necessarily conservative – it put strong female leads such as Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne into positions of quasi-equality with or even superiority over the male characters. Romantic comedy traces the shifting power relations between the sexes, sometimes granting more power to the men, sometimes to the women. The process of coupling may be questioned – as it is in Eternal Sunshine with Clementine’s (apparently rehearsed) speech that men are not there to complete her and Joel’s cruel assertion that she offers to have sex with people so that they will like her. Romance as fulfilment implies a sense of a lack in the lovers. The cynicism of the 1970s has largely given way to a more traditional, even more conservative, resurgence of romantic comedy where happiness for the man outweighs the needs of the woman – as it might with Joel. Marriage is once more seen as completion and, despite the introduction of gay, bisexual and transgender characters, mainstream romantic comedy remains focused on heterosexual relationships. Steve Seidman notes that there are several variations of sexual confrontation in the Hollywood romantic comedy: ‘carefree female versus misanthropic male, decadent male versus sexually repressed

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female, husband versus wife, ex-husband versus ex-wife [… but the romantic comedy] reaffirms marriage as a culturally important institution’.53 Despite the outrageous behaviour of Reede in Liar Liar (1997), his ex-wife Audrey (Maura Tierney) and son Max (Justin Cooper) take him back. Clementine and Joel fit best into the first of these variants – although Clementine insists in her apartment that she is going to marry him, there are two moments that echo the words of the marriage service. Joel, when returning to his apartment, says ‘Oddly enough, I do’ to Clementine and she responds, ‘I guess that

‘I do’

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In search of a missing bone in Bringing Up Baby (1938)

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means we’re married’54 and later, recalling their trespass at the Laskins’ beach house, Joel says ‘I wish I’d stayed. I do.’55 The two ‘I dos’ perform the ceremony that make them husband and wife. The strictures of the Motion Picture Production Code emphasised the tension between desire and consummation of desire in the romantic comedies of the classical Hollywood period. While Susan Vance (Hepburn) and David Huxley (Cary Grant) can play any number of games in Bringing Up Baby (1938), desire can only be symbolised obliquely through Huxley’s lost (dinosaur) bone and even when Henri Rochard (Cary Grant again) has married Catherine Gates (Ann Sheridan) in I Was A Male War Bride (1949), the consummation of their union is postponed. But the relaxation of the Code and decline of the studio system during the 1960s reduced the taboo against fornication. Brian Henderson argues that: romantic comedy is about fucking and its absence, this can never be said nor referred to directly. [… Romantic comedy] implies a process of perpetual displacement, of euphemism and indirection at all levels, a latticework of dissembling and hiding laid over what is constantly present but denied.56

By 1978 – and certainly by 2004 – there was little problem representing sex. It can be assumed that Joel and his earlier girlfriend Naomi have had a sexual relationship, we are discreetly shown Joel and Clementine, Joel makes it clear that Clementine has fucked other people, presumably including Patrick, and Mary has had sex with both Stan and Howard. Even so, moments of Joel and Clementine getting together are delayed – the scene cuts from Clementine going to get her toothbrush so that she can go back to Joel’s place to a post-erasure moment, the erasing processes themselves delay matters and then, when reconciliation seems likely, the tape of Joel’s recollections hurts Clementine. Delayed gratification remains a part of the narrative. In romantic comedy, a distinction has emerged between casual and committed sex, one just a way of getting someone else to like you and being about personal pleasure and the other a more empathic,

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shared connection. Henderson divides romantic comedy into old and new love – the former of married couples whose marriages are under strain, the latter of people meeting for the first time, becoming friends and having sex: ‘In comedies of old love, the unspoken question is “Why did we stop fucking?” In comedies of new love, it is “Why don’t we fuck now?” ’57 In post-classical Hollywood, there seems little reason to stop or against starting. The Green World In a number of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, the characters have to leave the repressed and uptight city to go to the countryside to resolve their relationships. The usual rules of decorum are suspended in favour of a free-flowing set of desires, from which new relationships emerge. Northrop Frye argues ‘the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as the normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world’.58 Freed from the dictates of work and the opinions of neighbours, the lovers are able to choose their best match, liberated from common sense. The green worlds in Eternal Sunshine are Montauk Beach and, to a lesser extent, the frozen Charles River near Boston. Joel’s former lover, Naomi, remains unseen, behind in the city, as he goes to the carnival space of a party on a beach. Clementine breaks into his standoffish mindset and helps herself to his chicken, breaking the bounds of decorum, but also sharing an act of communion. It is on the perilous ice that Joel and Clementine really come together – he risks hurt to let himself fall in love – and Clementine realises that Patrick is not the one for her. However, it is back at the beach that their reunion takes place. In the tangled time scheme, the memory of their first meeting is also the moment when remembering Joel and remembered Clementine decide to reunite, but the movement between worlds is preserved. As part of Frye’s association of genres (comedy/romance/tragedy/irony and satire) with the cycle of the seasons (spring/summer/autumn/winter), the green world allows for

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The beach operates as a green world where Joel can learn to play

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‘the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter’,59 but the irony of Eternal Sunshine with its Valentine’s Day and November settings, the frozen river and the snow-covered beach questions this triumph of romantic comedy. The Comedy of Remarriage Some of the reviews of Eternal Sunshine locate it as an example of Stanley Cavell’s genre of the comedy of remarriage. David Edelstein suggests Kaufman’s revisioning of the screwball genre is The Awful Truth turned inside-out by Philip K. Dick, with nods to Samuel Beckett, Chris Marker, John Guare – the greatest dramatists of our modern fractured consciousness. But the weave is pure Kaufman. No one has ever used this fantastic a premise to chart the convolutions of the human brain in the throes of breakup and reconciliation.60

A. O. Scott notes Edelstein’s linkage and claims that Kaufman is using the genre to explore ‘a set of ethical puzzles and epistemological conundrums of the sort illuminated in the work of sages like Plato, Emerson, Wittgenstein and Kant’.61 Scott’s reading of Cavell argues that Eternal Sunshine echoes the 1930s and 40s comedies of remarriage that advocate we strive through grace, self-knowledge and luck to be true to our loved ones rather than to be perfect for them. In Eternal Sunshine, what appears to be new love is in fact old love. The encounter at the beach and on the train at Montauk is of two people who had already been together for two years and have erased the memory of their relationship. Their actual first meeting on the beach as remembered by Joel serves to be the location for their conversation about getting back together again – or, rather, Joel deciding that he wants to reunite with Clementine. The fact that Clementine is either the seducer, or imagined to be the seducer, in fact looks back to the 1930s screwball romantic comedies: ‘Much like classic screwballs such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), the film reveals

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how the pursuit by the female aggressor works to liberate the stuffy, reserved or reticent male partner.’62 The tension here is that while the female character is the active agent of the narrative, the film becomes about the man’s emotions. Cavell repeats Henderson’s distinction between old and new love, ascribing it to Frye: New Comedy stresses the young man’s efforts to overcome obstacles posed by an older man […] to his winning the young woman of his choice, whereas Old Comedy puts particular stress on the heroine, who may hold the key to the successful conclusion of the plot.63

The heroine is likely to be married, may be disguised as a boy and ‘may undergo something like death and restoration’.64 Cavell identifies and discusses a number of films from the 1930s and 1940s – It Happened One Night (1934), The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), The Lady Eve (1941) and Adam’s Rib (1949) – where the narrative drive ‘is not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again’.65 The films centre upon a number of pairings that are being driven apart by a quarrel, despite the fact that the couples have ‘known one another forever, that is from the beginning […] before history’.66 They have – or create – a childhood together, as if they are sister and brother who have discovered sexuality together, although presumably the literalness of this has to be limited by the incest taboo that that would break. Cavell suggests that these films are reworkings of the sort of narrative present in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (c. 1611), told as fairytales in the context of the 1930s Depression when there was a group of actors (Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck and Merle Oberon) of appropriate age and skill to play the married heroine. The rural Bohemia of The Winter’s Tale is the Shakespearean green world identified by Frye, and Cavell sees such spaces in his comedies of remarriage:

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this locale is called Connecticut. Strictly speaking, in The Lady Eve the place is called ‘Conneckticut,’ and it is all but cited as a mythical location, since nobody is quite sure how you get there, or anyway how a lady gets there.67

The choice of that location may be to do with the perceived ease of marriage there – in The Red Right Hand, the novel read by Clementine in the Shooting Script, the narrator notes ‘Even people who lived in New York all their lives are apt to think of Connecticut an elopers’ paradise, perhaps because Greenwich is the first railroad station in that state, and its name is confused with Gretna Green’,68 suggesting that the choice of location for the comedies of remarriage is dictated by assumptions of easy marriage. Montauk and the Charles River offer green worlds for Eternal Sunshine and it is a mystery as to how Clementine knows to go to the beach after the erasure processes; when she is in her apartment with Patrick while Stan is erasing Joel, she suggests first going to Montauk and then to the Charles River; in the pretend goodbye scene in Joel’s imagination she whispers to him ‘Meet me in Montauk’, although this is not in the Shooting Script.69 Christopher Grau notes that the comedy of remarriage features ‘a separated couple ultimately getting back together through rediscovering why they fell in love in the first place. Eternal Sunshine follows that pattern, but with the novel twist of memory removal facilitating the “reunion.”’70 This is a little misleading – given it is either a flawed erasure process or coincidence that leads to the reunion in Montauk. Grau focuses on the morality of forgetting; while the removal of traumatic experiences might lead to greater happiness and be a utilitarian process, it would be a false kind of living. As in the science fiction of Dick, an authentic experience of dystopia is preferable to an ersatz illusion of utopia. Grau argues ‘our concern with knowing the truth comes into tension with our desire for happiness’.71 Remarriage, although Grau does not state this, is presumably best built upon uncomfortable truths rather than comfortable lies that may, in time, crack.

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Michael J. Meyer explores the ethics of reconciliation in remarriage. He attempts to locate Eternal Sunshine within Cavell’s genre but notes that a marriage is necessary first for remarriage to occur: ‘between Joel and Clementine there is neither marriage nor divorce nor remarriage’,72 missing the film’s uses of the marriage vow, ‘I do’. To sidestep this issue, Meyer redefines marriage as a close, committed friendship rather than as a legal institution that is often sanctioned by a religious ceremony. Remarriage is here a recommitment to the friendship, in the knowledge that it is a risk. The happy ending that marriage would imply is an uneasy one, not to be trusted. Meyer rightly pays attention to Mary – ‘a tragic if ultimately avenged subplot’73 – whose relationship with Dr Mierzwiak may be repeated through ignorance of her past and does not lead to reconciliation. Her lack of knowledge leads to poor judgment in this relationship, averted only by the arrival of Dr Mierzwiak’s wife, Hollis. There is an imbalance in their case, of course, as Mary is ignorant and Mierzwiak has knowledge of their affair; Joel and Clementine are both ignorant of what has happened. Meyer argues that their remarriage reconciliation puts an ‘emphasis on self-aware and mutual acceptance of personal and shared anxiety regarding the couple’s past and future friendship’.74 There is for Meyer an assertion that successful marriages are made from friendships built upon trust. William Day is critical of Meyer’s account, suggesting in effect that he has misunderstood by omitting ‘the central feature of the genre, the couple’s ongoing remarriage conversation’.75 Day notes the speechless nature of the coda set on Montauk beach that Meyer offers as ‘a symbolic spatial location for ethical transformation’, identifiable with Cavell’s (and Frye’s) green world.76 The reconciliation has happened on the beach: once in Joel’s unconscious mind and once in their unknowing reunion. The status of the coda is problematic – is it analeptic, proleptic or purely imaginary? Day argues that Eternal Sunshine’s ‘contribution to the genre is the story of coming to discover what it means to have memories together as a

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way of learning how to be together’.77 They must remember where they have gone wrong in the past and not expect to not go wrong in the future. In working through his memories of Clementine, Joel creates the childhood they never had together. We see him killing a bird while dressed up in a Superman cape, fighting with other children, pretending to smother her with a pillow and then, as an adult, he’s digging on the beach, having a snowball fight, being smothered by Clementine and pretending to be dead. Clementine, sliding between a possible childhood playmate of Joel and her adult self, gains a long blonde wig, which makes her resemble Joel’s mother (Debbon Ayer). Patrick also tries to be playful, donning googly glasses, but this misfires. Play has to be sincere rather than performed. Cavell’s comedies of remarriage end with the reconciliation of the central characters and a recommitment to the social structure. But where a relationship has failed once, there is no guarantee that it will not fail again. Clementine’s acceptance of Joel can feel like damning with faint praise, they acknowledge each other’s faults but that does not mean that they can live with them; as Clementine says, ‘You will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.’78 Marriage, if it happens, might be a reward for the characters or it might be a punishment – recalling the ambiguous ending to Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), where the protagonist Lucy Snowe’s potential husband might be lost at sea. As Brontë wrote in a letter: every reader should settle the catastrophe for himself, according to the quality of his disposition, the tender or remorseless impulse of his nature. Drowning and Matrimony are the fearful alternatives. The Merciful […] will of course choose the former and milder doom – drown him to put him out of pain. The cruel-hearted will on the contrary pitilessly impale him on the second horn of the dilemma – marrying him with ruth or compunction to that – person – that – individual – ‘Lucy Snowe’.79

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Brontë may well be being ironic here, but in Eternal Sunshine there is no guarantee that this is a happily-ever-after moment or, indeed, as examined in the previous chapter, that the ending is real or in Joel’s head. The tangled narrative structure of the film suggests it could also be placed within the genre of the puzzle film.

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4 The Puzzle Film Given the sheer numbers of narratives told, it is hardly surprising that listeners, viewers and readers should recognise recurring patterns. Aristotle, in Poetics, insisted that ‘ordered arrangement of incidents […] is plot’.80 Tragedies should have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’.81 Aristotle describes the beginning as potentially being in isolation, the middle as what comes next and the end ‘naturally follows something else either as a necessary or as a usual consequence, and is not itself followed by anything’.82 Drama should observe three unities – of action (a main plot with little or no subplots), of place (a single location) and of time (the action should only last a day). In a tragedy, a tragic flaw in a high-ranking character leads to their fall. Tragedy requires reversal of fortune and recognition of this reversal. Simple Narratives Narratives usually begin by introducing the central characters and tracing the relationships between them. Goals and desires are identified, but an incident disrupts their achievement, leading to conflict between the characters. The protagonist makes a decision that will define them as a person and determine the probable conclusion of the narrative; in particular, there is an initial, inconclusive struggle between protagonist and antagonist. For a period, the protagonist’s goals are seemingly unobtainable and the antagonist has the upper hand. Finally the hero prevails against the odds – the happy ending – or fails – the unhappy ending. This pattern echoes Tzvetan Todorov’s ‘ideal’ narrative [that] begins with a stable situation which is disrupted by some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a

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force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established; the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are never identical.83

In Todorov’s pattern opposing forces come into conflict and the situations are repeatedly reversed. What is obvious about Eternal Sunshine, however, is that the narrative does not observe Aristotelian unities. The action takes place in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, but also covers events over the previous two years and back to Joel’s childhood, something in the region of forty years. The characters move around New York State, up and down the length of Long Island. Events, while related, are not depicted in order. This could mean that the established equilibrium is not unsettled – Joel and Clementine have already met and have already fallen out. In some drafts there was a more explicit sciencefictional frame extending the time line of the film: There’s this old lady with a manuscript. She goes into a publisher’s office [but they are not interested and she leaves …]. And you pull out and you see that it’s New York or something, and the whole city is criss-crossed with these plastic tubes. [… Her book is] called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and that’s the end of the opening sequence. Then you have the card that says ‘50 years earlier,’ and you go into the story as it is.84

The old woman is Clementine, still married to Joel, and it is made clear that they have repeatedly had their memories erased and gone back to each other over decades. Narratologists distinguish between the order of events as they occur and the order of the events as they are related. For example, the Russian Formalist critics of the early twentieth century, including Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky, identify fabula, the chronological order of events, from syuzhet, and the order in which such events are depicted. To borrow E. M. Forster’s distinction

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between story and plot – ‘the king died and the queen died’ is the fabula of story, whereas ‘the king died and the queen died of grief’ is closer to plot. ‘The queen died of grief because the king died’ is even clearer in terms of cause and effect. The fabula of Eternal Sunshine include Joel going to a party in Montauk, meeting Clementine, a relationship with her, an argument that splits them up, first Clementine then Joel getting memories erased, a reunion in Montauk and an agreement to give things another go. This is a familiar enough narrative – the comedy of remarriage – made new by its non-linear order. Classical Hollywood Narratives The linear plot is central to the industrial phase of Hollywood film production. While early cinema tended to be episodic – a series of spectacles strung together – a streamlined linear structure evolved, centred on a clearly defined protagonist with a recognisable goal, with whom the audience would be encouraged to identify. The achievement of the goal would be delayed or frustrated, and the protagonist would struggle with an antagonist, but in the end would succeed or clearly fail. In more complicated narratives, there would be an additional plot, centred on romance, in which a heterosexual relationship would be played out. While the two plots were in theory independent, they would also be interdependent and resolving one thread would resolve the other. The narrative structure, as well as shots, editing, costume, make-up, props and (in the sound era) dialogue and sound effects, relates the elements of the fabula. The uncertainties in the film propel the viewer forward through the narrative: ‘It is the task of classical narration to solicit strongly probable and exclusive hypotheses and then confirm them while still maintaining variety in the concrete working out of the action.’ 85 Classical film is closed, apparently singular in meaning. The classical narrative tends to lead to what J. R. R. Tolkien, in discussing fairy stories, called the eucatastrophe; there is:

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the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ […] it is a sudden and miraculous grace; never to be counted on to recur [… It] is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.86

Even if the characters do not reach a conventional happy ending – the illness, say, proving to be terminal – there is catharsis. However, while this might be the dominant mode of narrative, even within the classical era there were counter examples. The flashback structure of Citizen Kane (1941) seriously disrupts the linear order, even as each vignette carries on the narrative of Kane’s (Orson Welles) life. Countless films noirs begin with a character drinking in a bar or in a jail cell, looking back. The plot begins at the point of chaos and disequilibrium, and then through analepsis shows what led to it. Post-classical Hollywood cinema of the 1970s embraced what I have called the amphicatastrophe – the ambiguous ending neither positive nor negative, lacking resolution or restoration.87 In Blade Runner as originally envisaged and reinstated in the so-called Director’s Cut (1992) and Final Cut (2007), there is no retreat to a rural idyll with a female replicant as narrative reward, instead there is uncertainty. Eternal Sunshine offers both kinds of alternatives – beginning midchaos and yet not resolving the protagonist’s ambitions. And yet, the plot can be normalised. At the start of the film, Joel is a single man in the rut of going to work who takes a sudden decision to go to Montauk. His life becomes chaotic but is resolved by his reunion with Clementine. A new equilibrium is attained. We could extend our Dickian scepticism or embrace the Todorovian uncanny and ponder whether the whole film does not take place in Barish’s head – perhaps echoing Arthur Miller’s conception of Death of a Salesman (1949), a play Kaufman references in Synecdoche, New York. The film as mental process may in the end maintain those Aristotelian unities, although it would be a stretch. A similar stretching and maintenance process is at work in David Bordwell’s analysis of what he calls ‘forking-path narratives’,

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that seem to break with the classical Hollywood narrative structure while recuperating it. Films such as Sliding Doors (1998) and Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998) – ‘proceed from a fixed point – the fork – and purportedly present mutually exclusive lines of action, leading to different futures.’88 These films have a number of linear narratives, sometimes intercut, sometimes one after the other. Eternal Sunshine would not really belong in such a classification – we see repeated events, but these are distinct perceptions rather than repeated alternative iterations. Joel does not perceive worlds where he has or has not lost Clementine. Bordwell assumes the film is training us to understand it: A film, while moving inexorably forward (we can’t stop and go back), must manage several channels of information (image, speech, noise, music). It must therefore work particularly hard to shape the spectator’s attention, memory, and inference-making at each instant.89

This again assumes a closed interpretation. The Puzzle Film Film is now more open. Our consumption has shifted from a viewonce experience in a cinema to repeated television screenings, multiple video, LaserDisc, DVD and Blu-ray viewings (and pauses and – being kind – rewindings), on-demand services, torrent downloading, YouTube pirating and transmedia spread. Whereas the cinema viewer is at the mercy of the projectionist, trapped in the frame-by-frame displays of images and sound, contemporary consumption need not be linear. Warren Buckland notes that ‘in today’s culture dominated by new media, experiences are becoming increasingly ambiguous and fragmented; correspondingly, the stories that attempt to represent those experiences have become opaque and complex.’90 Todd McGowan has argued that ‘the digital threat (embodied by videogames, virtual reality, the Internet, and so on) has led to the restructuring of cinematic time’.91 Indeed, since the 1990s,

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some films have offered more complex storytelling. Buckland’s coinage of the term ‘puzzle film’ is intended to describe these. Reviewing Happy Endings (2005), Alissa Quart drew upon the language of the World Wide Web, suggesting the director has ‘learned to stop worrying and love his web browser, connecting one scene to the next through happenstance and linking text.’92 Roger Ebert picked up her term ‘hyperlink cinema’ for his review of Syriana (2005), describing ‘movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how [… they] are connected.’93 The acknowledged precursors to such works include the films of Robert Altman and Alan Rudolphe, with more recent examples Pulp Fiction (1994), Crash (2004) and Gomorrah (2008). In Eternal Sunshine the threads of the various characters connect fairly speedily. Some films play games with their audiences, withholding information, blurring lines between real and imagined/delusional diegeses, springing tricks and twist endings. Thomas Elsaesser labels these ‘mind-game films’, noting their interest in the nature of memory, consciousness and parallel worlds: Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001, a remake of Amenábar’s Abre los Ojos, 1997), and Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (1998).94

Another example is Memento (2006), with distinct blocks of narratives presented in reverse order, intercut with a more straightforwardly chronological narrative. By the end of the film, the rug has been pulled out from under our feet – what we thought we knew about the amnesiac protagonist Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) killing Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) is not what we thought we knew. If humans are defined by their memories, then Shelby is constantly redefined; he says ‘I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.’ As an insurance agent, Shelby knows that memory is unreliable:

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Memento’s backwards narrative makes it a key example of a puzzle film

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‘Memory can change the shape of a room, it can change the colour of a car. And memories can be distorted. They’re just an interpretation, they’re not a record.’ In contrast, we are inclined to trust Joel’s memories, even as the world is distorted as the memories are erased. Elsaesser also notes that such films are explorations of schizophrenia, paranoia and amnesia; certainly in Eternal Sunshine there is amnesia, deliberately induced, but there is also the sense of paranoia as Joel spots the van that is following him and in the later scenes when Dr Mierzwiak and Stan seem to be chasing him through his memories. The fact they are out to get him – to rephrase an old cliché – doesn’t mean he’s not paranoid. Elsaesser notes that ‘Usually some conspiracy – instigated by a powerful father figure – lies at the bottom of it.’95 Here there are a number of male conspirators, including Dr Mierzwiak, but it should be noted that Joel himself must be partially to blame. Chris Dzialo locates Kaufman’s narrative structures somewhere between simple and complex, dramatising a struggle between the linearity he suggests that Kaufman’s characters crave and the complicated time schemes they occupy. Kaufman has ‘a particularly strong yearning to break free from projector time, which is irreversible, linear, and simple’.96 Indeed, he ‘wants to “change” classical Hollywood storytelling and the way it is experienced to make it more complex, like flipping back and forth through a screenplay’,97 although this sounds more like reading a novel than embracing the digital narrative. Eternal Sunshine offers a sense of the temporal becoming spatial; there is ‘the constant referencing of Joel’s brain as a “map” of memories’.98 Such a map defines Joel’s personality and mental health, and when he begins to resist Lacuna Inc he runs away into his past as if he is running through space. Lacuna Inc. is trying to ‘replace the actual, flawed, complex narrative of Joel’s consciousness with a new, ideal, simpler one, in the form of an easy-to-read computerized map’.99 As Clementine is erased, Joel brings her back into synecdochal existence by calling out ‘Tangerine’, one of her hair colours. This would appear to anticipate Synecdoche, New York and

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its Borgesian attempt to remap the playwright’s world in an epic play. The map can never be accurate enough. However, Dzialo admits that the pull of cause and effect is strong enough for Kaufman that a sense of the linear cannot be lost altogether – the characters still need their motivations for their actions, however obscured. Atemporal Films and the Death Instinct While Todd McGowan also discusses space and notes Karl Marx’s spatialisation of the working day in Grundrisse (1858/1939),100 he is more interested in the temporal aspects of recent films. He cites the fractured chronology of films such as Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Eye of God (Tim Blake Nelson, 1997), Following (Christopher Nolan, 1998), Go (Doug Liman, 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), Ju-On (Takashi Shimizu, 2002), 11:14 (Greg Marcks, 2003), The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estra (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005), Shi gan (Time, Kim Ki-duk, 2006), I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007), and The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh, 2009).101

and describes these as atemporal films. They embrace the cyclical and the repetitive, which McGowan relates to Freud’s concept of the death instinct, although he refers to it as the death drive: ‘the aesthetic structure of this atemporal cinema has its basis in the logic of the death drive.’102 The death instinct is something postulated in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920) as an addition to the erotics of the pleasure principle – the demands for gratification of the libido were held in check by the reality principle (which is to say, the will, societal pressure and basic repression), but Freud believed that there was too much displeasure in the system. Freud notes how trauma victims – whether survivors of train crashes or war veterans – seem to repeat their horrific experiences in their dreams rather than repressing them. Freud describes the actions of a young child, deeply attached to his mother, although he rarely cried for her at night. The child had

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the habit of throwing some of his toys away from him, shouting ‘o-o-o-o’ as he did so. He did something similar with a wooden reel that had a piece of string attached to it; when this disappeared out of sight, he hauled it back, crying ‘da’. He was overjoyed by the toy’s reappearance and Freud suggests that the child was making an instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.103

The cry when disposing of the toy was a version of the German word ‘fort’, meaning ‘gone’, the triumphant ‘da’ meaning ‘there’. The child restages the disappearance of his mother – a traumatic event – and then experiences pleasure at her staged return. McGowan notes that Clementine ‘is never a fully present object on the screen […] she is constantly on the verge of or actually disappearing’.104 Joel restages the disappearance of Clementine as she vanishes in the bathroom when they split up (to reappear in his kitchen), repeatedly on the street, in one of the playful pillow smothering scenes, in the snow on the beach, in the bookstore, in the Laskins’ house on the beach and then, briefly, again when she storms out of his flat during the second break-up. The grieving, blue-haired Clementine meanwhile feels that ‘I’m lost. I’m scared. I feel like I’m disappearing.’105 In an anxious memory sequence when Joel is under the kitchen table and seen by Clementine but largely ignored by his mother, Joel has a large yoyo not unlike that of the child Freud observed. McGowan suggests the death instinct – and thus the atemporal film – is structured on the repetition of failed desire: Desire is predicated on the belief that it is possible to regain the lost object and thereby discover the ultimate enjoyment […] In contrast, the drive locates enjoyment in the movement of return itself – the repetition of the loss, rather than in what might be recovered.106

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Joel’s inability to give Clementine what she desires brings them closer together; when Patrick repeats Joel’s actions (in what is presumably a rare moment of her being fully present), Clementine finds him repulsive. McGowan observes that the cracks on the frozen Charles River – which Joel fears will not support Clementine and his weight – might be the result of expansion, indicating ‘that the ice has solidified and thus become safe for bearing increased weight’.107 A crack is a lacuna, and it might be that the cracked memory is stronger than the unerased one – when Patrick is lying on the ice, it is pristine but may be weaker. Joel is content on the river, stating ‘[I could] die right now, Clem. I’m just … happy. I’ve never felt that before. I’m just exactly where I want to be.’108 The erotics of life and death are intertwined – and this memory, that he wants to preserve transforms into a shot of them lying on Grand Central Station’s concourse. When Patrick repeats Joel’s lines,109 this is not what she wants to hear from him, nor that she’s ‘kind and beautiful and smart and funny and nice’,110 the word ‘nice’ being Joel’s signature adjective. Patrick reminds her uncannily of the repressed Joel. In the extraordinary rhetoric of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud discusses how amoebae seem to be programmed to selfdestruct at certain times and how fish swim back up river to breed Joel’s Fort-Da game?

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Joel’s perfect moment on ice …

… but Patrick cannot satisfy Clementine’s desires

Joel can die happy – and losing Clementine is a kind of death

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Gondry’s camerawork offers spectacle through switching characters between locations

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and die: ‘Certain fishes, for instance, undertake laborious migrations at spawning-time in order to deposit their spawn in particular waters far removed from their customary haunts.’111 Freud suggests that humans, too, may feel that they will die at an appropriate time – and thus survive until then – and that there is this compulsion to return to an earlier state of being and to repeat earlier actions. Dr Mierzwiak describes the erasure process as ‘a kind of rebirth’, it is a return to the womb – akin to Murdoch’s return to the womb of the Shell Beach in Dark City or Evan’s (Ashton Kutcher) desire to die in the womb in the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect (2004).112 Joel returns to an earlier state of being – to before the trauma of the split – and relives the events of the relationship, seemingly compelled to repeat. He is not alone in this – Clementine also falls in love with him again, Mary falls in love again with Mierzwiak and tells a client that undergoing the process a third time is not recommended. McGowan is right to suggest that ‘What becomes clear as the film advances is that memory erasure does not fulfil its promises. Which is to say that it functions just like every other industry within the capitalist economy.’113 Measurable, regulated time is a product of the capitalist economy in which the labourer sells his time and the consumer has time to purchase commodities – such as the erasure of time from their memory. Lacuna Inc does not provide the service it claims to offer. Indeed, the logic of capitalism is that it should not satisfy desire because it needs the repeat business. Joel and Clementine are compelled to relive their relationship, with an acknowledgment of their potential for mutual antagonisms.

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5 Mourning, Melancholy and Trauma William Paul notes that of Jim Carrey’s ten starring roles prior to 2000, ‘three […] feature split personalities, one actually clinical, the other two released by fantasy conceits; while two […] suggest the possibility of an underlying personality at odds with what we see’.114 To watch him in what Thomas Elsaesser was to label a mind-game film is an invitation to contemplate schizophrenia, paranoia and amnesia. Although Carrey seems to offer us various case studies, it is problematic to analyse fictional characters as if they were patients, although that did not stop Sigmund Freud from discussing Hamlet or the Brothers Karamazov. Furthermore, Freudian psychoanalysis is largely disregarded and even discredited by contemporary psychology and neuroscience, although it remains part of film studies. Kaufman is probably familiar with some of the ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis and may have used them in creating his characters and the situations they find themselves in. In this chapter, I wish to draw upon the work of Freud, Karl Abraham, Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva to discuss mourning and melancholia, before closing with a brief look at more recent models. Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham Joel’s depression recalls Freud’s descriptions of melancholia in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), which drew upon the work of the Jungian Karl Abraham. For Freud, melancholia is ‘a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings’.115 Carrey conjures much of this in his dejected performance – his exhaustion in bed, his laborious throwing back of the bedclothes over a stiff, mannequin-like body, his unshaven appearance with long hair and his low tone in the

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Joel exhibits mourning and melancholia

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voiceover – and it is there in the murky blue, grey and brown palette of Ellen Kuras’s cinematography. While he cries, at this point he is emotionally dead although we do not know why. Reaching the station, he spots a train on the opposite platform and runs across to catch it as the doors close. In our retrospect, it is as if Clementine is dead to him. Freud links melancholia to mourning: ‘Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction that has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.’116 Mourning is a psychological condition that has a physical effect upon the sufferer. The mourner or melancholic turns away from the external world into their psyche, with the ego internally identifying with the abandoned loved one.117 Freud associates this internalisation with secondary narcissism, distinguishing between two forms of self-love. Primary narcissism is an instinctive survival mechanism present in all humans, where the individual’s needs become paramount. Parents encourage and threaten this self-regard, by declaring how wonderful the child is or by controlling the child. The ego emerges from the child’s psyche both by a focus on people and objects external to him or her and by developing an ego-ideal – which is to say an image of the person he or she aspires to become. Secondary narcissism in mourning derives from the withdrawal of desire from the object world, for example, in the traumatic move away from the mother. Mourning is part of the normal process of psychosexual development; Freud also observes it in the behaviour of schizophrenics. The Joel of the psyche is struggling to control his personal mental world, which is (apparently) under threat from the processes of Lacuna Inc, and we see this environment decay and fall apart – words vanish from the bookshop, faces are erased, the house on the beach falls to bits. The apocalyptic imagery recalls the selfpreservation fantasies of one of Freud’s case studies, Daniel Schreber, who became convinced that the world was going to end in a cataclysm 212 years later, perhaps with an ice age or with an

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earthquake. Schreber deluded himself that he was the last man left alive; even on recovering, he kept looking for evidence that the disaster had happened. Freud suggests such senses of catastrophe are common within the cases of paranoiacs: ‘The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjective world has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love from it.’118 This sense of catastrophe may explain the closing sequences of the film, the two lovers playing in the snow on the beach. In Freud’s account of secondary narcissism, mourning not so much internalises the loved one as eats them: ‘The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself […] by devouring it.’119 This is a return to the first – oral – phase of psychosexual development, which the subject should have left behind. Abraham sees this consumption as a kind of reassurance ‘“My loved object is not gone, for now I carry it within myself and can never lose it” ’,120 that marks the completion of the work of mourning. Joel attempts to incorporate Clementine into his psyche, trying to find somewhere Lacuna Inc cannot reach, although she keeps vanishing; these lacunae may be the work of his own psyche in the work of mourning rather than the actions of Dr Mierzwiak and Stan. Freud and Abraham’s accounts of mourning and melancholia describe regression along the path of psychosexual development – the child begins with oral gratification, moves into the anal phase and then finally reaches the genital phase. In mourning, the adult returns to the oral phase. While the method of the Lacuna process is nowhere explained – Dr Mierzwiak describes it as a form of brain damage – it is clear that it is a rolling back of experiences, as Joel tries to hide Clementine by returning to a childhood long before he met her. It rains inside his present day (imagined) apartment and he retreats under an occasional table; as this becomes the kitchen table he had hidden under as a child, she becomes Mrs Hamlyn, a friend of his mother. Clementine shows him her (clothed) crotch, apparently to console him – or, rather, he fantasises this – but his reaction is, ‘Yuck.’ The child’s first glimpse of a naked woman may be traumatic; Freud suggests it

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confirms the child’s fantasy that the woman is castrated and that anyone can be castrated. The number of occasions that we see Joel and Clementine eating – at their ‘first’ meeting Clementine helps herself to his chicken; as he hides under his childhood kitchen table his mother is preparing salad and string beans (with suggestively-shaped butternut squash in the back of the shots); Joel later eats a cookie from the table; they have various Chinese takeaways and restaurant meals – may also suggest that Joel has regressed to the oral phase. Joel’s glimpse of Clementine’s pants – ‘Yuck!’

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The relationship between Joel and Clementine seems to interweave love and hate. What was once Joel’s love for Clementine turns into hate, but there is enough residual love for her to prevent open and direct sadism. Joel seeks erasure rather than a further confrontation with the post-erased Clementine. The incorporation of (an image of) Clementine allows the confrontation with a fantasised woman, with any aggression to her being self-directed and any masochism being an attack on (an image of) her. Clementine, meanwhile, is unaware of this work of mourning, as she has forgotten him. We are not privy to her process of emotions, although we see her rejection of Patrick – assuming that this is not another projection by Joel. I have already mentioned the moment when Joel runs between platforms at the start of the film, a reversal of melancholia into mania.121 This might be an impulse generated by the fantasised voice of Clementine in his head heard during the erasure process (‘Remember Montauk’), but it is hardly the cure that mourning or melancholia demands. Melanie Klein Austrian-born Melanie Klein studied under and was psychoanalysed by Abraham, and specialised in infant development. Klein theorises that the newly born child develops two drives: love for the good breast that is feeding them and hate for the bad one that is not. The newly born child’s image of the mother splits, to prevent the good being contaminated by the bad; at the same time there is a fear of retaliation by the bad breast. Klein writes that I believe that oral-sadistic impulses towards the mother’s breast are active from the beginning of life […] the frustrating breast […] is felt to be in fragments; the gratifying breast, taken in under the dominance of the sucking libido, is felt to be complete.122

As the ego unifies, there is the realisation that both breasts are part of the same person, that the gratifier and the frustrator are identical.

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Joel relives childhood play

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At this stage, the father is perceived as being merely an extension of the mother; in Joel’s memories of his childhood there is no sign of any father. The developing child feels guilt and grief deriving from their hostility to the bad mother, and moves into a depressive phase of development, accentuated by being weaned from the breast. This helps the individual to develop emotions such as sympathy and empathy. Klein argues that ‘an inner world is being built up in the child’s unconscious mind’,123 enabling them to deal with the external world. The child compares its image of the world with the reality – to the degree that these can be separated out – and Klein observes that ‘there is a close connection between the testing of reality in normal mourning and early processes of the mind’.124 Joel’s regression to childhood – his hiding under the kitchen table, the sadistic and masochistic play with other children, the playful suffocation of Clementine and the killing of a bird – dramatises his return to the earlier state of drives. Julia Kristeva Freud’s ideas have been attacked outside psychoanalysis, but also within. Julia Kristeva, in Black Sun (1987), both challenges and develops Freud’s ideas. Her work largely focuses upon the development of female subjectivity within the male-centred Freudian model. She posits a phase prior to the Oedipus complex in which the child still has a special, close relationship to the maternal and has yet to become an individual subject through the acquisition of language, structure and culture. The child moves away from desire for the mother to loyalty to the father: For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the lost object is recovered as erotic object.125

Kristeva argues that Freud identifies in melancholia a form of grief for that lost/killed mother: ‘Freudian theory detects everywhere the

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same impossible mourning for the maternal object.’126 This mourning is dealt with through cannibalistic fantasies, although it is perhaps difficult to believe that Kristeva takes Freud’s and Abraham’s accounts of melancholia entirely seriously, paraphrasing the processes as: ‘I love that object […] but even more so I hate it; because I love it, and in order not to lose it, I imbed it in myself; but because I hate it, that other within myself is a bad self, I am bad, I am non-existent, I shall kill myself.’127

Drawing on a sonnet by Gérard de Nerval, ‘El Desdichado’ (1853) – ‘the black sun of melancholia’ – Kristeva repeatedly connects melancholia to such a celestial body, asking: ‘Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?’128 This saturnine, black sun is perhaps a mirror image of the Eternal Sun of the title of the film – an image also associated with a sense of loss. The depressed narcissist is not mourning a (maternal) object but something unrepresentable, the Thing, which is associated with the maternal. Joel is seeking his lost Clementine, in the hopes that this will complete him, although she herself is clear that she is not such a balm: ‘Joel, I’m not a concept. I want you to just keep that in your head. Too many guys think I’m a concept or I complete them or I’m going to make them alive.’129 At the end of the film, she reminds him ‘I’m not a concept, Joel. I’m just a fucked-up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind.’130 In the Shooting Script but not the finished film, Joel’s father tells him not to waste his time like he has;131 the loss of Clementine could be compensated for by an identification with a father figure, although here Joel has imagined a father that rejects such an identification. Rather than allying himself with his father, Joel conflates Clementine and his mother; in the Shooting Script he says: ‘I want mommy. […] I don’t want to lose you, Clem […] I want my mommy. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose …’132

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When Clementine shows ‘baby’ Joel her underwear, she is a substitute for a mother Joel perceives as neglectful. The seductive Clementine Kruczynski might be the father figure Joel is seeking, after all. She is the initiator of their sexual encounters. In their breaking into a (memory) house – that most (un)homely of spaces – on Montauk beach and pretending that it is theirs, Clementine says she ‘prefer[s] to be Ruth [rather than David] but I’m flexible’.133 This is Joel’s projection rather than reality, of course, but this crossing of gendered/sexed identities recalls both Being John Malkovich and romantic comedies such as Bringing Up Baby and I Was a Male War Bride. In their version of the story of Eloisa and Abelard, it seems to be Joel that is Eloisa and Clementine that is Abelard. Her behaviour, her indulging of her own whims, are perhaps evidence that she is also a melancholic, as depression can flip into mania. Havi Carel argues Clementine refuses to ‘accept the loss and pain entailed by any emotional investment in a transient love object. But […] she renounces mourning by applying manic defences.’134 Her constant self-deprecation and rejection of niceness, her hair colour choices, her drinking and the allegations, at least, of promiscuity may all be part of her symptoms. Carel begins his analysis of the film by narrating her story and a more radical version of the film, of course, Joel’s mother (Debbon Ayer) always seems to be on the edge of the memory

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would have been to tell it from Clementine’s point of view. Instead, we have male definitions of women. Kristeva’s analysis of melancholia is particularly focused on women, and in one case study she describes a depressed woman’s decision to get pregnant in order to have someone who wanted her, in practice becoming over-protective of the child. Clementine, too, wishes to become pregnant, insisting that she would be a good mother during the argument at the flea market that is the start of their break-up. Equally, Mary is interested in babies, seeing the erasing process as being a kind of rebirth, with Mierzwiak allowing people to be (re)born: ‘Such a gift Howard is giving the world […] To let people begin again. It’s beautiful. You look at a baby and it’s so fresh, so clean, so free.’135 In the Shooting Script, we learn from Mary’s tapes that she has had an abortion at Dr Mierzwiak’s behest, with him saying it was for the best but this may be an example of his domineering behaviour that has him permit or forbid desire.136 While women in the film may initiate sexual activity, it is men who regulate reproduction. Trauma Freud’s work on the sexual basis of human behaviour may have been based upon his clinical experiences, but he was writing in the early days of psychology. His work attracted hostility then, due to his controversial opinions about sexuality, and a century of work in psychology has further questioned his theories. New theories of psychology may have made his ideas obsolete; further case work has discredited his observations; and scientific discoveries about brain chemistry, biology and neurobiology, the impact of hormones and genes and so on have enriched our understanding of the mind and personality. Freud had intended to alleviate the symptoms of mental disorders, using first hypnosis and then the talking cure. This has been supplemented by further forms of therapy, physical interventions in the brain, the use of electric shocks and experiments in pharmacology. We now have a better idea of how memories are made – the input from the perception systems, its initial encoding by

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the brain and then the way in which information is consolidated, whether for the short or long term. If the traumas of the late Victorian age and World War I formed the backdrop to Freud’s hypothesising, the increasing stress levels and proliferating diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder make the need to remove distressing, disturbing and disruptive memories ever more important. It seems likely that memories and emotions are connected, and that ‘emotional memories are more difficult to forget than unemotional memories’.137 Certainly this is what Dr Mierzwiak insists: ‘There is an emotional core to each of our memories – As we eradicate this core, it starts its degradation process.’138 Unfortunately, intentional forgetting is hindered by those very emotions that seize control of an individual’s behaviour. It is not easy to voluntarily regulate one’s own mind, whether through determination, psychoanalysis, meditation or mindfulness. The effort is sometimes made to ‘rewire’ the brain by making new associations – as a new phone number wipes out the memory of the old one, so a new set of associations may minimise the old ones. The brain-mapping method that we see in Eternal Sunshine would need to be more complex if it were to work in reality. According to Antonio R. Damasio, ‘Human experiences, as they occur ephemerally in recall, are based on records of the multiple-site and multiple-level neural activities previously engaged by perception.’139 It seems as if specific memories are not stored in one place, but in different parts of the brain. It is perhaps tempting to think in terms of the back-ups on a hard drive, or the way in which a single file might be fragmented across that drive, but in any case erasure would seem to require more than simply eradicating specific cells. If memories are associational, associated with other memories or with emotions, removing a trauma ‘cleanly’ is likely to be a complex task. To change those memories is to change the person. The good news for Joel, however, is that it seems there are more places in which he can hide Clementine, and the sense that they will remember Montauk is greater.

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Willi Butollo et al. have experimented with dialogic exposure therapy in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. They work on the principle that the self is ‘an entity that reconstitutes itself from moment to moment on the basis of current and past experience’,140 meaning that there is no one authentic self as it keeps changing. By downplaying past experiences, however, the self can be aided to change for the better. Dialogic exposure therapy requires the patient and doctor to discuss the process, which puts the patient at ease and confirms that the process is safe and confidential. As Dr Mierzwiak says to Joel when he has inadvertently learned about Clementine’s erasure, ‘[O]ur files are confidential.’141 The patient needs to understand their symptoms, ideally with a model for how both the symptoms and the therapy work in order to use their own resources to affect change. At that time, cognitive behavioural therapy methods can be deployed. Perhaps if Dr Mierzwiak had focused on this, there would have been no need for the machine. Recent experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of a version of this technique: ‘A patient is continuously confronted with the original memories of trauma in order to open up a window of memory updating (termed memory reconsolidation). This renders the memory susceptible to positive modification.’142 In an experiment on mice, scientists used a modifying agent that turned a particular gene off, enabling them to modify older memories. Fikri Birey’s account of this – albeit probably for journalistic rather than scientific reasons – explicitly namechecks Eternal Sunshine. Perhaps Joel’s experience of trying to hide Clementine in his memories is simply a series of confrontations with her, and the reliving of the trauma of the break-up is part of the attempt to render his memory open for change. But if medical science has now reached a point where a romance can be erased from memory, the question remains of whether it should be.

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Coda In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the philosophy of Charlie Kaufman marries almost perfectly with the aesthetics of Michel Gondry. Gondry’s ability to shift between registers plays mind games with the audience, deliberately confusing what is real and what is memory. In casting Jim Carrey as Barish, they have an actor with both a history of manic performances and of representing mental instability. The audience on an initial viewing must expect a moment of performing mania, but this is almost always kept in check. The mania is displaced onto Clementine. Writing of Carrey’s earlier performances, William Paul notes that ‘it is only the conventions of romantic comedy that finally allow Carrey integration, either through dedication to a woman or, […] dedication to the family’.143 The expectations of the romantic comedy genre map onto the expectations of adulthood – the status quo and patriarchy are restored. The Todorovian fantastic of Gondry’s direction allows for an element of doubt that echoes Kaufman’s ambivalent feelings about genre. At the risk of being unfair to both genres, Eternal Sunshine transcends sf and the comedy of remarriage: it comments on, rejects and modifies each genre. It is of, but does not belong to each genre. The endings – ‘the move to the country’, ‘marriage’ – are both generic imperatives and need to be read with a degree of irony or ambiguity. Writing of Human Nature’s ending, Kaufman argues that: The problem with traditional movies is they usually have to have it one way or the other: happy or sad. For those people who need it, we have a happy ending, but for people who want to look deeper, the movie is saying, yes, love is real, but the road to it is complicated and you’re going to make terrible messes along the way and you need to go on anyway.144

Kaufman does not insist on consolation nor catharsis in Eternal Sunshine.

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‘Ok’

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Notes 1 Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2004), p. 84; cf. Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, in Geoffrey Tillotson (ed.), The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 336–7. 2 Michel Gondry, ‘Introduction’, in Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. vii. 3 Rob Feld, ‘Q & A with Charlie Kaufman’, in Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 133. 4 Donald B. Clark, Alexander Pope (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1967), p. 66. 5 Rich Cline, ‘The Corners of My Mind: Interview with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’, Shadows on the Wall, shadows.wall.net/features/sw-eter. htm. 6 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 75. 7 Ibid., p. 101. 8 Philip Drake, ‘Low Blows?: Theorizing Performance in Post-classical Comedian Comedy’, in Frank Krutnik (ed.), Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 194. 9 Steve Seidman, Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981). 10 Drake, ‘Low Blows?’, pp. 187–98. 11 Valerie Tiberius, ‘Bad Memories, Good Decision, and the Three Joels’, in Christopher Grau (ed.), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 62–79. 12 Dave Kehr, ‘The Lives of Jim Carrey’, Film Comment vol. 36 no. 1 (January–February 2000), p. 12. 13 Ibid., p. 14.

14 Drake, ‘Low Blows?’, p. 192. 15 Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 132. 16 Alexandra Keller, ‘“Size Does Matter”: Notes on Titanic and James Cameron as Blockbuster Auteur’, in Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar (eds), Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), p. 145. 17 Ibid., pp. 145–6. 18 Jamie Russell, ‘Future Perfect’, Sight and Sound vol. 14 no. 11 (November 2004), p. 79. 19 Ibid. 20 Roger Ebert, Synecdoche, New York (5 November 2008), www.rogerebert. com/reviews/synecdoche–new–york– 2008. 21 David LaRocca, ‘Introduction: Charlie Kaufman and Philosophy’s Question’, in David LaRocca (ed.), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), p. 3. 22 Ibid., p. 9. 23 Joel Townsley Rogers, The Red Right Hand (London: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 95. 24 Ibid., p. 6. 25 Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London: Nonesuch Press, 1939), p. 556. 26 Ibid., p. 557. 27 Carol Vernallis, ‘Music Video, Songs, Sound: Experience, Technique and Emotion in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, Screen vol. 49 no. 3 (Autumn 2008), p. 284.

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28 Alison Butler, ‘A Deictic Turn: Space and Location in Contemporary Gallery Film and Video Installation’, Screen vol. 51 no. 4 (2010), p. 309. 29 Roger Ebert, Human Nature (12 April 2002), www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ human–nature–2002. 30 Peter Bradshaw, ‘The Green Hornet – Review’, Guardian (14 January 2011), www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jan/ 13/the-green-hornet-review. 31 Télérama, ‘Michel Gondry: “Ça m’énerve quand on pense que je suis un hipster”’ (2014), http://www.telerama. fr/cinema/michel-gondry-ca-m-enervequand-on-pense-que-je-suis-unhipster,111668.php. 32 Ryan Lambie, ‘Exclusive: Michel Gondry “Still Working” on Ubik Adaptation’, Den of Geek, http://www. denofgeek.com/movies/ubik/30379/ exclusive-michel-gondry-still-workingon-ubik-adaptation#ixzz33gxerkI6. 33 J. P. Telotte, A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age (New Haven, CT and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), p. 76. 34 Ibid., p. 104. 35 Philip K. Dick, ‘Universe Makers … and Breakers’, in Lawrence Sutin (ed.), The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 105. 36 Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), p. 212. 37 John Brosnan, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978), p. 9.

38 Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’, p. 213. 39 Bruce F. Kawin, ‘Children of the Light’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 247. 40 Ibid. 41 Christopher Grau, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 64 no. 1 (Winter 2006), p. 127. 42 Frederika Shulman, ‘The Objects of Memory: Collecting Eternal Sunshine’, Philament vol. 5 (2005). 43 Ibid. 44 Feld, ‘Q & A with Charlie Kaufman’, p. 134. 45 Yugin Teo, ‘Love, Longing and Danger: Memory and Forgetting in Early Twenty-first-century Sf Films’, Science Fiction Film and Television vol. 6 no. 3 (Autumn 2013), p. 349. 46 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland, OH and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), p. 172. 47 Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit, Or How Toys Become Real (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929), p. 9; Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 57. 48 Feld, ‘Q & A with Charlie Kaufman’, p. 140. 49 Examples of females undergoing amnesia include Overboard (1987), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and Mulholland Drive (2001). These are hardly sf. 50 Andrew M. Butler, ‘LSD, Lying Ink and Lies, Inc’, Science Fiction Studies vol. 32 no. 2 (July 2005), pp. 275–6.

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51 Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in Aristotle, Horace and Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 33. 52 Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (London: Wallflower, 2007), p. 60. 53 Seidman, Comedian Comedy, p. 62. 54 This line appears on p. 115 of the Shooting Script – much later than in the film. 55 This line would be on p. 105 of the Shooting Script – before the phone call ‘I do’, but after the filmed version. It is on the next page of the Shooting Script that Clementine (does not) say, ‘Meet me in Montauk’. 56 Brian Henderson, ‘Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?’, Film Quarterly vol. 31 no. 4 (Summer 1978), p. 22. 57 Ibid., p. 21. 58 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 182. 59 Ibid., p. 183. 60 David Edelstein, ‘Forget Me Not: The Genius of Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, Slate (18 March 2004), www.slate.com/ articles/arts/movies/2004/03/forget_ me_not.html. 61 A. O. Scott, ‘Charlie Kaufman’s Critique of Pure Comedy’, New York Times (4 April 2004), www.nytime.com/ 2004/04/04/movies/04scot.html. 62 Lesley Harbidge, ‘“A New Direction in Comedian Comedy?”: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Punch-Drunk Love and the Post-Comedian Rom-Com’, in Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn

(eds), Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), p. 184. 63 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 1. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., p. 2. 66 Ibid., p. 31. 67 Ibid., p. 49. 68 Rogers, The Red Right Hand, p. 41. 69 Cf. Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 141. It isn’t there. I keep looking. 70 Grau, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory’, p. 131. 71 Grau, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory’, p. 124. 72 Michael J. Meyer, ‘Reflections on Comic Reconciliations: Ethics, Memory, and Anxious Happy Endings’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 66 no. 1 (Winter 2008), p. 82. 73 Ibid., p. 77. 74 Ibid., p. 84. 75 William Day, ‘I Don’t Know, Just Wait: Remembering Remarriage in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, in LaRocca, The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, p. 151. 76 Meyer, ‘Reflections on Comic Reconciliations’, p. 87. 77 Day, ‘I Don’t Know’, p. 150. 78 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 129. 79 Quoted in editorial apparatus of Charlotte Brontë, Villette, eds Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1990), p. 662. 80 Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, p. 39. 81 Ibid., p. 41.

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82 Ibid. 83 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 111. 84 Feld, ‘Q & A with Charlie Kaufman’, p. 142. 85 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 165. 86 J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin, 1964), p. 60. 87 Andrew M. Butler, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth: The Messiah and the Amphicatastrophe’, in Michael P. Berman and Rohit Dalvi (eds), Heroes, Monsters and Values: Science Fiction Films of the 1970s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), pp. 179–96. 88 David Bordwell, ‘Film Futures’, SubStance vol 31 no. 1 (2002), p. 89. 89 Ibid., p. 109. 90 Warren Buckland, ‘Introduction: Puzzle Plots’, in Buckland, Warren (ed.), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), p. 1. 91 Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 7. 92 Alissa Quart, ‘Networked: Don Roos and Happy Endings’, Film Comment vol. 41 no. 4 (July–August 2005), p. 48. 93 Roger Ebert, Syriana (8 December 2005), www.rogerebert/reviews/ syriana–2005. 94 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Buckland, Puzzle Films, p. 15. 95 Ibid., p. 25. 96 Chris Dzialo, ‘ “Frustrated Time” Narration: The Screenplays of Charlie

Kaufman’, in Buckland, Puzzle Films, p. 109. 97 Ibid., p. 125. 98 Ibid., p. 118. 99 Ibid. 100 McGowan, Out of Time, p. 22. 101 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 102 Ibid., p. xii. 103 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), p. 15. 104 McGowan, Out of Time, p. 94. 105 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 59. 106 McGowan, Out of Time, p. 11. 107 Ibid., p. 87. 108 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 66. 109 Ibid., p. 87. This line is much earlier in the finished film. 110 Ibid., p. 73. 111 Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 37. 112 McGowan, Out of Time, p. 74. 113 Ibid., p. 98. 114 William Paul, ‘The Impossibility of Romance: Hollywood 1978–1999’, in Steve Neale (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: BFI, 2002), p. 123. 115 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), p. 244. 116 Ibid., p. 243. 117 Ibid., p. 249. 118 Sigmund Freud, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account

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of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), p. 70. 119 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 249. 120 Karl Abraham, ‘A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders’, in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), p. 437. 121 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 253. 122 Melanie Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, in Juliet Mitchell (ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein (London: Peregrine, 1986), pp. 180–1. 123 Melanie Klein, ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in Mitchell (ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein, p. 148. 124 Ibid., p. 147. 125 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 27–8. 126 Ibid., p. 9. 127 Ibid., p. 11. 128 Ibid., p. 3. 129 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 96. 130 Ibid., p. 129. 131 Ibid., p. 88. 132 Ibid., pp. 68–9. 133 Ibid., p. 105.

134 Havi Carel, ‘The Return of the Erased: Memory and Forgetfulness in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis vol. 88 no. 4 (August 2007), p. 1077. 135 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 71. 136 Ibid., p. 107. 137 B. Keith Payne and Elizabeth Corrigan, ‘Emotional Constraints on Intentional Forgetting’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology vol. 43 (2007), p. 786. 138 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 38. 139 Antonio R. Damasio, ‘Time-Locked Multiregional Retroactivation: A Systems Level Proposal for the Neural Substrates of Recall and Recognition’, Cognition vol. 33 (1989), p. 44. 140 Willi Butollo et al., ‘Feasibility and Outcome of Dialogical Exposure Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Pilot Study with 25 Outpatients’, Psychotherapy Research vol 24 no. 4 (2014), p. 515. 141 Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, p. 33. 142 Fikri Birey, ‘Memories Can Be Edited’, Scientific American (2014), http://www.scientificamerican.com/ article/memories-can-be-edited/. 143 Paul, ‘The Impossibility of Romance’, p. 123. 144 Charlie Kaufman, ‘Interview with Dave Franklin’, Human Nature: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2002), p. 111.

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Credits Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind USA/2004 Directed by Michel Gondry Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on a story by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth Produced by Steve Golin Anthony Bregman Executive Producers David Bushell Charlie Kaufman Glenn Williamson Georges Bermann Director of Photography Ellen Kuras Production Designer Dan Leigh Edited By Valdis Oskarsdottir Music Jon Brion Costume Melissa Toth Associate Producers Linda Fields Hill Michael A. Jackman Casting By Jeanne McCarthy © 2004 Focus Features LLC Production Companies Anonymous Content and This is That

CAST Jim Carrey Joel Barish Kate Winslet Clementine Kruczynski Gerry Robert Byrne Train Conductor Elijah Wood Patrick Thomas Jay Ryan Frank Mark Ruffalo Stan Jane Adams Carrie David Cross Rob Kirsten Dunst Mary Tom Wilkinson Dr Mierzwiak Ryan Whitney Young Joel Debbon Ayer Joel’s Mother Amir Ali Said Young Bully Brian Price Young Bully Paul Litowski Young Bully Josh Flitter Young Bully Lola Daehler Young Clementine Deirdre O’Connell Hollis

Unit Production Manager David Bushell First Assistant Director Michael Hausman Second Assistant Director Scott Ferguson Assistant Unit Production Manager Ray Angelic Post-Production Supervisor Michael A. Jackman Executive in Charge of Post-Production Jeff Roth Production Coordinator Erica Kay Production Accountant Andy Wheeler Location Manager Gayle Vangrofsky Second Second Assistant Director Peter Thorell Additional Editors James Haygood Paul Zucker Jeffrey M. Werner Supervising Sound Editor Philip Stockton m.p.s.e. Sound Designer/ReRecording Mixer Reilly Steele Camera Operator Chris Norr First Assistant Camera Carlos Guerra

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Second Assistant Camera Braden Belmonte “B” Camera Operator Peter Agliata “B” Camera First Assistant Stanley Fernandez Jr. “B” Camera Second Assistant Christopher Raymond Camera Loader Angela Bellisio 24 Frame Playback Supervisor Joe Trammell 24 Frame Playback Darren Ryan James Domorski Still Photographer David C. Lee Script Supervisor Mary Cybulski Sound Mixer Thomas Nelson Boom Operator Tommy Louie Utility Sound Technician Kira Smith Set Decoration Ron Von Blomberg Assistant Art Directors Scott P. Murphy Hinju Kim Assistant Set Decorator Natalie N. Dorset Art Department Coordinator Addy McClelland

Leadperson Michael Leather On-Set Dresser Ruth Deleon Set Dressers Roman Greller, D. Scott Gagnon, John Roche, Brian Buteau Assistant Production Coordinator Christian Brockey Production Secretary Philip DeRise First Assistant Accountant Brian Cantaldi Payroll Accountant Hillary R. Meyer Accounting Assistant Kristy Hamer Assistant Location Manager Christopher Marsh Location Assistant Currie Person, Kat Donahue, Dan Tresca Makeup Artist for Mr. Carrey Allen Weisinger Hair Stylist for Mr. Carrey Francesca Paris Hair and Makeup for Ms. Winslet Noriko Watanabe Wigs Peter Owen Key Hair Stylist D. Michelle Johnson

Assistant Costume Designer Jill Kliber Wardrobe Supervisors Lisa Frucht, Deirdre N. Williams Costumer for Mr. Carrey David Page Additional Costumer Cara Czekanski Gaffer John Nadeau New York Gaffer Joseph Quirk Best Boy Electric Mark Summers Genny Operator Samuel Chase Board Operator Kelly Britt Electrician Andrea Cronin-Souza Rigging Gaffer Paul Daley Best Boy Rigging Electric Martin Nowlan Rigging Electric Raymond Flynn Key Grip Bob Andres Best Boy Grip Chris Skutch Dolly Grip Lamont Crawford Grips Alison Barton, Mel Cannon, Tony Campenni Key Rigging Grip Jack Panuccio

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Best Boy Rigging Grip Richard Yacuk Property Master Kevin Ladson Assistant Property Master R. Vincent Smith Props Morgan Pitts Post-Production Sound Facility C5 Inc Effects Editor Paul Urmson Dialogue Editor Fred Rosenberg ADR Editor Marissa Littlefield Supervising Foley Editor Frank Kern Foley Editor Kam Chan, Steve Visscher Foley Mixer George Lara Foley Artists Marko Constanzo, Jay Peck Assistant Sound Editors Chris Fielder, Larry Wineland Apprentice Sound Editor Alexa Zimmerman Sound Mixing and Transfer Facility Sound One Corp. Music Editor Anastassios Filipos

Assistant Editor David A. Smith Post-Production Assistants Angela Beresford, Katrina Whalen Joel’s Sketchbook Created By Paul Proch Computer Graphics Supervisor Martin Garner Lead Animator Brent Ekstrand Special Effects Coordinator Drew Jiritano Special Effects Mark Bero Thomas L. Viviano Visual Effects Buzz Image Group Inc Visual Effects Supervisor Louis Morin Senior Inferno Artist François Métivier Inferno Flame Artist Ara Khanikian Lead Matte Painter Robin Tremblay Matte Painter Pierre-Simon LebrunChaput 3-D Animators Alexandre Lafortune François Lord Martin Pelletier Glenn Silver Gabriel Tremblay

Coordinators Mélanie Larue Stéphane Loiselle Visual Effects, title and digital opticals Custom Film Effects Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Dornfeld Visual Effects Producer Michele Ferrone Digital Editorial Adam Gass Digital Supervisor Laurie Powers Data Wrangler David Smithson Digital Compositors Tricia Barrett, Steve Caldwell, RJ. Harbour, Mary C. Hoffer, Shaina Holmes, Lori Miller, Amani Williams I/O Ryan Beadle End Titles Title House Digital Assistants to Mr. Gondry Amro Hamzawi, Adrian Scartascini, Arthur Hur Assistant to Mr. Kaufman Oona Overholtzer Assistant to Mr. Golin Chris Prapha Assistant to Mr. Bregman Stefanie Azpiazu

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Assistant to Mr. Bushell Jeff Schlesinger Assistant to Mr. Carrey Stephanie Detiege Second Assistant to Mr. Carrey Taylor Singer Assistant to Ms. Winslet Ruth Pollack Dialect Coach to Ms. Winslet Susan Hegarty Security for Mr. Carrey Dotan Bonen Key Set Production Assistant Patrick McDonald Production Assistants Nick Bell Benjamin Conable Noah Fox Cynthia Kao Matthew G. King Alison Norod David Catalano Tracy Ershow Andrew Goodman Kate Karbowniczek David Koch Gary S. Rake Debbie Stampfle

Interns Sebastián Almeida Fred Berger Liesel Elain Davis Sage Lehman Eugy Septimo Zachary Zoppa Hilary Basing Linda Chen Lindsey Jaffin Valerie Nolan Andrew Zoppa Alex Zoppa LA Casting Blythe Cappello Casting Associate Natasha Cuba LA Casting Assistants John Srednicki Linda Chen NY Casting Assistant Sage Lehman Extras Casting Grant Wilfley Extras Casting Assistant Kristian Sorge Unit Publicist Frances Fiore On-Set Medics Rich Fellegara Kathy Fellegara Construction Coordinators Nicholas R. Miller Brent Haywood

Key Shop Craftsmen Gordon Krause Sean Robinson Foreman Shop Craftsman Robert A. Vaccariello Key Construction Grips Jonathan Graham Zbigniew Kouros James Boniece Key Construction Electrics Miguel Jimenez Roberto Jiminez Shop Craftsmen Andrew M. Velenchenko Paul George Divone Mike Melchiove Ronald Miller Charge Scenic Anne Beiser Haywood Scenic Foreman Patricia Sprott Camera Scenic Hollis James Scenics Julius Kozlowski James Donahue Elizabeth Bonaventura Garf Brown Mark Lane-Davies Emily Gaunt

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Transportation Captain William K. Gaskins Transportation Cocaptain Michael C. Easter Driver for Mr. Carrey Jerry McMullan Driver for Ms. Winslet Herb Lieberz Drivers Edward Battista Theodore A. Brown John Canavan Salvatore Ciccone Charles Clark Peter Clores Thomas Crehanm Jerry Featherstone Moe Fitzgerald Joseph L. Johnson Paul Kane Dennis J. Kelly James F. Kelly Scott Lieberz Robert Marsh Tom Moyer Richard Nelson Jr. David M. Salisbury William T. Stuart Francis Volpe Timothy J. Wood Animals provided by Dawn Animal Agency

Picture Cars provided by Irv Gooch Craft Sevice David Dreishpoon’s Craft Service Caterer For Stars Catering Production Attorneys Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton Robert Darwell Michal Podell Clearances and Product Placement Wendy Cohen Production Resources Insurance Aon/Albert G. Ruben Completion Guarantors Film Finances Maureen Duffy Paula Schmit Gregory Trattner Film Processing Deluxe Film Laboratories Avids Pivotal Post Digital Dailies Streaming Media.net Digital Intermediate Efilm Mike Eaves Mike Kennedy Loan Phan

DeLuxe Color Timer Kenny Becker Music Guru Kathy Nelson Music Clearances Christine Bergren Music Consultant Jennifer Pray Music Conductor and Producer Jon Brion Music Recorded By Tom Biller Music Programming Nick Vidar Assistant to Mr. Brion Bobb Bruno Additional Music Engineers Patrick Spain Chris Holmes Dana Bourke Jason Gossman Steven Rhodes Reed Ruddy Music Orchestrators Steve Bartek Peter Gordon Edgardo Simone Orchestra Contractor Simon James Music, LLC Music Recorded at Cello Studios, The Marc Shaiman Institute, Bastyr University Music Recorded and Mixed at Signet Sound Studios

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Soundtrack ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime’ written by James Warren, performed by Beck; ‘Something’ written by Richie James Eaton, performed by The Willowz; ‘Keep On Looking’ written by Richie James Eaton, performed by The Willowz; ‘Tere Sang Pyar Main’ written by Laxmikant Pyarelal and Varma Malik, performed by Lata Mangeshkar; ‘Mere Man Tera Pyasa’ written by S. D. Burman and Neeraj, performed by Mohd. Rafi; ‘Concerto No. 8 in D Major, Opus 99’, by Charles-Auguste de Beriot; ‘Wada Na Tod’ written by Rajesh Roshan, performed by Lata Mangeshkar; ‘Some Kinda Shuffle’ written

and performed by Don Nelson, ‘Nola’s Bounce’ written and performed by Don Nelson; ‘Light and Day/Reach for the Sun’ written by Timothy DeLaughter, performed by The Polyphonic Spree. Original motion picture soundtrack available on Hollywood Records Read the Newmarket Press Script Book Special Thanks Heidi Bivens, Gerry Robert Byrne, Anne Carey, Kevin Dillon, Cyril Drabinsky, Julie Fong, Ted Hope, Will Keenan, Laura Kightlinger, Drew Kunin, Susan E. Morse, Ellen Pompeo, Victor Rasuk, Amy Rosen, Leon Silverman, John Srednicki, Diana Victor, The Zacks

Sound Mix: DTS Dolby Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Camera: Arricam LT, Zeiss Super Speed and Arri Macro Lenses Premiered in New York on 19 March 2014, MPPA rating R. Premiered in London on 30 April 2014, BBFC rating 15. Running time: 108 mins.

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Bibliography Abraham, Karl, ‘A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders’, in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), pp. 418–501. Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in Aristotle, Horace and Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965), pp. 29–75. Birey, Fikri, ‘Memories Can Be Edited’, Scientific American (2014), http://www.scientificamerican.com/ article/memories-can-be-edited/. Bordwell, David, ‘Film Futures’, SubStance vol. 31 no. 1 (2002), pp. 88–104. ——, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Bradshaw, Peter, ‘The Green Hornet – Review’, Guardian (14 January 2011), www.theguardian.com/film/2011/ jan/13/the–green–hornet–review. Brontë, Charlotte, Villette (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1990), eds Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978). Buckland, Warren (ed.), Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). ——, ‘Introduction: Puzzle Plots’, in Buckland, Puzzle Films, pp. 1–12. Butler, Alison, ‘A Deictic Turn: Space and Location in Contemporary

Gallery Film and Video Installation’ Screen vol. 51 no. 4 (2010), pp. 305–23. Butler, Andrew M., ‘LSD, Lying Ink and Lies, Inc’, Science Fiction Studies vol. 32 no. 2 (July 2005), pp. 265–80. ——, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth: The Messiah and the Amphicatastrophe’, in Michael P. Berman and Rohit Dalvi (eds), Heroes, Monsters and Values: Science Fiction Films of the 1970s (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), pp. 179–96. Butollo, Willi, et al., ‘Feasibility and Outcome of Dialogical Exposure Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Pilot Study with 25 Outpatients’, Psychotherapy Research vol. 24 no. 4 (2014), pp. 514–21. Carel, Havi, ‘The Return of the Erased: Memory and Forgetfulness in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis vol. 88 no. 4 (August 2007), pp. 1071–81. Carroll, Lewis, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London: Nonesuch Press, 1939), pp. 457–674. Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Clark, Donald B., Alexander Pope (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1967). Cline, Rich, ‘The Corners of My Mind: Interview with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’, Shadows on the Wall, shadows.wall.net/features/ sw-eter.htm. Damasio, Antonio R., ‘Time-Locked Multiregional Retroactivation:

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A Systems Level Proposal for the Neural Substrates of Recall and Recognition’, Cognition vol. 33 (1989) pp. 25–62. Day, William, ‘I Don’t Know, Just Wait: Remembering Remarriage in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘, in LaRocca, The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, pp. 132–54. Dick, Philip K., ‘Universe Makers … and Breakers’, in Lawrence Sutin (ed.), The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995), pp. 103–5. Drake, Philip, ‘Low Blows?: Theorizing Performance in Post-Classical Comedian Comedy’, in Krutnik, Hollywood Comedians, pp. 187–98. Driver, Julia, ‘Memory, Desire and Value in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, in Grau, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, pp. 80–93. Dzialo, Chris, ‘ “Frustrated Time” Narration: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman’, in Buckland, Puzzle Films, pp. 107–28. Ebert, Roger, Human Nature (12 April 2002), www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ human–nature–2002. ——, Synecdoche, New York (5 November 2008), www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ synecdoche–new–york–2008. ——, Syriana (8 December 2005), www. rogerebert/reviews/syriana–2005. Edelstein, David, ‘Forget Me Not: The Genius of Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, Slate (18 March 2004), www.slate.com/ articles/arts/movies/2004/03/ forget_me_not.html.

Elsaesser, Thomas, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Buckland, Puzzle Films, pp. 13–41. Feld, Rob, ‘Q & A with Charlie Kaufman’, in Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, pp. 131–45. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), pp. 9–82. ——, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), pp. 243–58. ——, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), pp. 1–64. Frye, Northrop, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Gondry, Michel, ‘Foreword: My Memory Hurts’, in Grau, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, pp. xiii–xv. ——, ‘Introduction’, in Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, pp. vii–viii. Grau, Christopher (ed.), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (London: Routledge, 2009). ——, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory’, Journal

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of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 64 no. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 119–33. ——, ‘Introduction’, in Grau, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, pp. 1–14. Harbidge, Lesley, ‘ “A New Direction in Comedian Comedy?”: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, PunchDrunk Love and the Post-comedian Rom-com’, in Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn (eds), Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 176–89. Henderson, Brian, ‘Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?’, Film Quarterly vol. 31 no. 4 (Summer 1978), pp. 11–23. Jeffers McDonald, Tamar, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (London: Wallflower, 2007). Jenkins, Henry, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Jollimore, Troy, ‘Miserably Ever After: Forgetting, Repeating and Affirming Love in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, in Grau, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, pp. 31–61. Kaufman, Charlie, ‘Interview with Dave Franklin’, Human Nature: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2002), pp. 109–11. ——, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2004). Kawin, Bruce F., ‘Children of the Light’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 236–57.

Kehr, Dave, ‘The Lives of Jim Carrey’, Film Comment vol. 36 no.1 (January–February 2000), pp. 12–16. Keller, Alexandra, “Size Does Matter”: Notes on Titanic and James Cameron as Blockbuster Auteur’, in Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar (eds), Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 132–54. Klein, Melanie, ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in Juliet Mitchell (ed.), The Selected Melanie Klein (London: Peregrine, 1986). ——, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, in Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein (1986), pp. 175–200. Kristeva, Julia, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Krutnik, Frank (ed.), Hollywood Comedians: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). Lambie, Ryan, ‘Exclusive: Michel Gondry “Still Working” on Ubik Adaptation’, Den of Geek, http://www.denofgeek. com/movies/ubik/30379/exclusivemichel-gondry-still-working-onubik-adaptation#ixzz33gxerkI6. LaRocca, David, ‘Introduction: Charlie Kaufman and Philosophy’s Question’, in LaRocca (ed.), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, pp. 1–20. —— (ed.), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). McGowan, Todd, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

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