Mental hygiene
Mark Steyn
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 15, selected cinemas rternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
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takes its title from Alexander Pope — or Pope Alexander, as daffy Kirsten Dunst calls him here. But I found myself thinking of a more recent English versifier, Neil Innes, writing for the Bonzo Dog Band 35 years ago:
In the Canyons Of Your Mind
I will wander through your brain To the ventricles of your heart, my dear I'm in love with you again.
That's pretty much the gist of Eternal Sunshine. The movie is mostly a night in the life of a slumbering Jim Carrey, in the course of which a sort of 'operation' is performed on the canyons of his mind only to find the heart mounting a desperate insurgency, as they say in Fallujah.
The story begins (or appears to) on the morning of Valentine's Day at a Long Island Railroad station. Joel (Carrey) gets a sudden impulse to skip the train to work and instead ride out to the end of the line, to the beach at Montauk where, midst snow and sand, this socially inept, shambling introvert encounters a coarse bluehaired larky extrovert. This is Clementine (Kate Winslet). So far, so conventional. Boy meets girl, opposites attract — like a drab, grungy, public-transit version of Grant and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or O'Neal and Streisand in What's Up, Doc? It's movie romance, movie destiny.
Then things get weird. The opening titles roll and, by the time they're over and we get reacquainted with Joel and Clem, they're not a couple. If! sound like I'm tiptoeing around the plot a little, that's because this is one of those puzzle pies that spools back and forth around itself until the pieces fall into place and you realise a line in the fourth minute refers to an incident in hour three which actually takes place two years before the opening scene, etc. Anyway, in this case, Clem doesn't want to see Joel. She so doesn't want to see him that she goes to a company called Lacuna to get all of her memories of him erased.
Lacuna sounds rather fancy and state-ofthe-art, but when we get into the joint it's more like a poky neighbourhood dentist's surgery, where the guy in the white coat (Tom Wilkinson), a couple of geeky technicians (Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood) and a cute receptionist (Miss Dunst) preside over a truly mind-blowing concept — that's to say, a concept that blows your mind, at least partially. Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Wilkinson) has developed a system that maps out the points in the brain at which all the baggage of your failed romance is stored and then systematically erases it. Hey, presto! No more pain, delusion, hostility, ache. All gone! A clean slate. A spotless mind — though not quite as of' Pope Alexander had it. Pope meant morally unblemished, whereas the cranial scan on Dr Mierzwiak's computer screen takes it rather more literally, locating little computer dots of malign relationship residue and scrubbing them out: mental hygiene, brainwashing.
The trailers played up the Lacuna concept to the point where you'd be forgiven for thinking that's what the movie's 'about'. Memory erasure isn't such a stretch in a society where mood management — via Prozac, Ritalin or both — begins almost in the cradle. But the film's writer Charlie Kaufman and his director Michel Gondry aren't interested in general societal critique and use the faux-science mainly as a pretext to get inside Jim Carrey's head. For Joel, upon hearing of Clem's memory-hosing, decides to get it done himself.
The procedure is as simple as deleting files from your computer. You lie down in your bed, stick your head in a hairdryer and, while you sleep, the two geeks remove your love affair in reverse chronological order. This is where the movie starts to have fun with the secondary characters: one uses his memory-washing of female clients as an opportunity to bone up on what they dig and hit on them afterwards; another has the hots for Kirsten Dunst, reasonably enough. Unfortunately, this leads to both getting somewhat distracted from the task in hand, and they don't notice that somewhere deep inside Joel he's starting to fight back. He's discovered that, even with a lost love, there are some memories you want to keep. And so, as he relives his relationship with Clem one last time, he struggles to take her off to other memories — his mom's kitchen, the street he grew up on — places far off the mental roadmap the techies are following, where he can hide his love before they finally destroy it: Oh my darling Clementine, you are lost and gone for ever. ... Not if Joel can help it.
What I like about Gondry's direction is his restraint with the old computer-generated flim-flam. Before the show, a trailer turned up for the eco-doom blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, ending with the supposed money shot of Manhattan's skyscrapers half buried in snow. And you could all but hear everyone in the theatre stifling their yawns. In this film, Gondry figures out how to keep the special effects special. He shows Joel's memories vanishing around him — the spines in the bookstore where Clementine works suddenly turn blank and then the shelves disappear; in one magical sequence, the house they're in starts to disintegrate. But because these effects occur within Gondry's overall scheme — a scuffy, hand-held camera roaming a prosaic suburban landscape — they don't overpower the story.
Carrey and Winslet are important, too. Most of the film takes place in that stage of a dream where reality is beginning to intrude — you're having tea with the Queen, but your cat keeps scratching at the door; you wake up and the Queen's gone but your cat's there. That's how Joel feels. And, as he attempts to snap himself out of it. the assumption of a bond between the two principals becomes the only real constant in the picture. Carrey's emotional defeatism and Winslet's neurotic loudness are both forms of desperation: we understand that to someone as bland and lonely as Carrey a blousy, insecurely assertive old slapper can seem the height of romantic possibility — and vice-versa, too. Kaufman seems to want to show us love's victory not in two matinee idols but in a sadder, shopworn pair.
But, even if you accept that premise, you can't help feeling that the film needs to show us some kind of manifestation of their love — a kiss, a hug; along with all those dissolving bookcases and collapsing timbers, how about Clem slipping through his arms into nothing in mid-embrace? Kaufman's getting awfully good at tricksy films that chase themselves round in circles (Adaptation) but something's slipped through the cracks here — a film about the triumph of the heart over the mind seems in the end to have more of the latter than the former: an argument about love, rather than an expression of it.
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