University of Cape Town – FAM3003S

Jacques De Villiers

23 August 2016

‘Spotlessness is Close to Timelessness’:

How Time stacks up like a coastal shelf in Michel Gondry & Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

We can’t talk about ‘Cinematic Time’ without talking about a kind of ‘Cinematic Memory’. Charlie Kaufman seems to get this. Of course, we can’t talk about Time at all without some reference to its grounding in human memory. It’s no coincidence that Einstein and Henri Bergson were contemporaries; the former discovered relative time in the ‘objective’ universe, the other described it in ourselves.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is perhaps the default example of (comparatively) low-budget, high-concept 21^st-century independent American filmmaking. It belongs to the same mellifluous, uncanny near-present as Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and Kaufman’s own later Synecdoche, New York. These are all the works of white male solipsists; they are concerned, foremost, with what is being lost, with what Cinema can attempt to regain of the past and the present, even as the future gets waylaid in the process. Joel’s erasure of Clementine is not misguided for being reactionary or thoughtless. It just leaves a blank space – or lacuna – where something should be, like the AWOL opening credits that take 18 minutes to show up for the party.

The awareness of that absence, the sense that the individual is incomplete and something or someone used to be here to complement them – if not completely then at least enough to make them feel comfortable – is the very condition of heartbreak, whose metaphor in the movie is therapy via techno-repression. Cinema has always been best at ‘What If’ fantasies, but the answer to this low-key sci-fi gimmick’s inquiry is all but self-evident: you can’t erase a person’s absence without destroying time itself.  What remains of the people we love, besides all those free-floating remnants of the real (photographs, mugs, costumed potatoes), is a kind of spattered residue on the brain’s territory, which has to be “mapped”, fumigated and scrubbed clean to ensure the closure of all associations. Joel’s head, like seemingly everyone’s, is a badly-filed archive: you look for one thing and you stumble over 14 other more interesting ‘scenes’ to keep you occupied. Hence the brilliance of the film’s possibly unique non-linearity, which allows us to simultaneously feel like everything has already happened to both characters – their love is over, two years of journal entries are gone – as well as that they’re meeting cute for the first time proper, that now that they know they can drive each other insane they can finally begin their relationship in earnest. It isn’t a question of whether they’re meant to be together, it’s just the little hope that break-ups can be mistakes too, that some people need just an accidental opportunity to reconsider things.

Segueing around to Deleuzean theory, the film also seems to have its cake and eat it in the pre-given categories of the Movement- and Time-Image, in that it is, to some extent, an action-thriller – the ‘world’ of Joel’s memories is literally falling apart around the couple as they race to some deep sanctuary in his subconscious – as well as also being, of course, more concerned with a kind of helpless, stupefied grief at the uncontrollability of time (so symptomatic of a time-image film) than almost any other recent feature.  We can see then that, as in Kaufman’s earlier script for Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine carries an implicit critique of the very notion of the narrative arc. The beginning of Joel and Clementine’s relationship is actually just subsequent to its end, none of Joel’s memories are in the ‘right’ order and all of Lacuna Inc.’s office romances are going on simultaneously in their own out-of-joint way too.

 Yes, the plot coheres and one thing leads to another until most of the film’s confusion is laid aside in Mary Svevo’s liberating gesture of returning all the clients’ records but only Clementine’s candy-coloured hair swaps confirm any claims on the past, present and ‘future’ of the central relationship. But what is valuable about the film is its knack for throwing up literally timeless imagery: the bed on the snowy beach, the vanishing crowd in the train station, the dual scenes of childish and adult pillow smothering, and so on. In context, these are beyond being just crystal images – we read them as liminal epiphanies, neither Time nor Movement and neither Present nor Memory. We rewatch the film later to make sure. “Blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders”, but what if the biggest blunder was the act of forgetting itself?