Internal Sunshine

I started to do a conference rundown post, but had to interrupt so that we could leave in time to make it to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Those of you who hang on every word I have to say about CCCC may resent the delay, but not me. ESSM was well worth it. Well worth it.

Like Derek, I'm not sure why I was supposed to be disappointed in the ending--in fact, I thought the ending itself was crucial. Reviewers are making some deal out of the Alexander Pope reference in the title, but I thought that the quote from Nietzsche was key (and repeated twice, just in case you didn't hear it the first time):

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders

I have seen at least a couple of critiques of the bleak relativism of the ending--I won't be too specific (in honor of those of you who might not have seen it)--but it's pure Nietzsche, pure amor fati and eternal recurrence. Again, without giving too much away, there's a shift that occurs throughout the movie, where Carrey's attitude towards what's happening changes. Memory becomes less a matter of storage (for more on this and its consistency with contemporary brain science, check Steven Johnson's Slate piece) and more about the production of our selves. In the process of having his memory erased, Carrey re-produces a better version of himself in my reading. I think that Kaufman manages to tap into Nietzschean optimism here in a way I'm not sure I've seen before.

Kirsten Dunst's character is named Mary Svevo (I think I'm right about this odd last name), and there's a whole separate subplot (again, one I won't divulge). Suffice to say that I think that both she and Carrey end up making decisions to forget their forgetting. The best reference I've been able to find is to Italo Svevo, an Italian writer who was a contemporary of James Joyce and wrote about psychoanalysis. In a book called The Confessions of Zeno, Svevo's main character "realizes that there is no cure for life, except a catastrophe." My first reaction to her character was that she was peripheral, a plot device. The more I've thought about it, the more crucial she's become for me, to the point where she ends up providing some important resonances for the main characters--she's the only character in the movie who genuinely recognizes the catastrophe for us.

(Lori's currently making fun of me for trying to be clever, so I'll stop now...)

ESSM was a careful, intricate (both in its writing and its visuals) movie, one that doesn't take the crappy shortcuts so prevalent in Hollowood these days. It's witty and maybe even brilliant. Go see it, and that way I can stop being oblique about what I liked about it...