After finishing watching this, "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" fading out over the closing credits, all I wanted to do was lie on the floor, on my back, and feel a bit. So I did, for a while.
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The other night, Swee Leng and I were talking about what we thought/wished Bob said to Charlotte at the end of Lost in Translation. She went for something like "it'll be difficult, but I think that we should try to make this work", while my version was more along the lines of "it's been amazing; have a great life"; of course, each of us thought that our own version was the more romantic. Anyway, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sort of charts a course between those two possibilities; more or less romantic, I don't know - but that I'm even considering the question ought to tell you something.
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Memories are unreliable, and so is perception. The world is (only) that which is present(ed) to us as a stream of intentional objects as synthesised by the mind - or, at any rate, our only access to the world is through our minds, or consciousness. The past is only available to us through memories. Memories are only available to us in the moment. What does this say about the status of the world and our perceptions of it? More phenomenology.
This was kinda like a cinematic version of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - a version which engages the question of where love and other people fit in.
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So, Eternal Sunshine is excellent. The Kaufman/Gondry partnership makes sense, both on paper and in fact - the ruminations on consciousness and mind are complemented and agmented by the visual inventiveness and surreal aspects of the film. The bright colours and dark edges (never mind the sudden shifts and disappearances) 'feel' like the inside of a mind adrift in its own memories and dreams. Jim Carrey makes you forget that he's Jim Carrey and instead sympathise with him; Kate Winslet also plays somewhat against type (but in the opposite direction) and similarly convinces; Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst are kooky and funny and spot-on when they need to be serious; Elijah Wood and Tom Wilkinson are suitably woolly-edged while remaining recognisably real when they need to be.
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Listening to the soundtrack as I write this, before I go to bed (2am). I wonder what dreams will follow.
