Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MindI saw
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind two days ago and am now starting to think that Charlie Kaufman is the next
something. His films have such interesting twists, subtle sci-fi devices, cool perspectives and character arches. Freaky, cool stuff.
Most often movies are released in Israel within a month of American release dates. However, IMDB tell me that the movie came out in the States
about four months ago. This makes it very hard to write about on the blog since most people are probably done with talking about the movie and have moved on.
It sort of sucks but so far the worst case I've seen is Woody Allen's most recent film,
Anything Else, which I saw in NY upon its release in August, 2003 and has only come out in Israel last week. It took the movie
11 months to get to Israel!
These sorts of screw-ups make it hard for me to convince people that Israel is not a third world country. At least the movie is only being released in Germany in September - a whole 13 months after the original release in America. Somehow that makes it all better.
Anyway, back to
Eternal Sunshine.
I am really enjoying the recent trend in which "straight" dramas integrate some science fiction elements. Usually sci-fi is thought of only in the context of space movies, aliens, futuristic worlds, etc. Movies like
Eternal Sunshine and
Vanilla Sky are cool because they only rely on sci-fi to introduce an interesting twist or device through which, or in the presence of which, the drama unfolds in a way that it couldn't have otherwise done.
From advanced cryogenics in
Vanilla Sky to single-person memory erasure in
Eternal Sunshine and even Kaufman's other instant-classic of portal's to people's minds in
Being John Malkovich, the sci-fi is limited, completely integrated with the otherwise "real, contemporary world as we know it" and merely acts as an interesting plot device. I think that's pretty cool.
I won't bother mentioning the other similarities between the movies - such as the bulk of them happening within a person's mind. I also won't bother mentioning the interesting twists between the movies - such as one living in a dream world created to be perfect and shield him from reality while the other living through real memories that he is being forced to forget, ultimately against his will.
Eternal Sunshine also includes another interesting and traditional sci-fi device. This one is a kicker and something I've been pondering for years.
Any sci-fi viewer knows that knowledge of future events doesn't necessarily give us the ability to prevent them. Attempts to prevent those events fail and are usually exactly what bring about those events. We can't prevent the future from happening and are bound by fate or, as the
Matrix says, our previous decisions (so we should focus on understanding our actions, not trying to prevent the future we have
created for ourselves).
All attempts in
Eternal Sunshine to erase peoples' memories fail. Maybe the second time around isn't exactly as the first, but the same thing eventually happens. Kirsten Dunst still falls in love with the professor and Jim and Kate still find each other. I like that. It's a clever and unobtrusive melding together of basic sci-fi with good, contemporary-world drama.
And that's all I have to say about that, except for this though:
Would you continue dating the person you're dating (or are married to) if you knew when, how and why it would eventually fail??? On one hand, life's too short, so enjoy the present. On the other, do you really want to compromise with and settle for Mr./Ms. Right Now and not hold out for Mr./Ms. Right?
