Total Recall Revoked

Rating: Null/10 (15 October 2010)

"Although retaining the terms 'schizoid' and 'schizophrenic' for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially." - R. D. Laing
Though praised for its "complex plot", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" serves up a rather simple tale about a once romantically linked couple who are inexorably drawn back together despite having their memories wiped by Lacuna Inc, a company which specialises in "targeted memory erasure".
Most interesting about the film is the fact that it was directed by Michel Gondry. Gondry is a corporate advertisement (Levi Jeans, Smirnoff Vodka, Air France etc) and music video director, both of which are professions which require him to master short form rather than long form film-making, constantly shift aesthetic strategies without perfecting a singular style, bow to the fact that his TV work is caught in the blip-time perishability of consumer capitalism, and capture, hold and release his audience in as little time as possible.
In other words, music videos and advertising not only epitomise the schizophrenia of the postmodern aesthetic, but require the artist himself to be schizoid - akin to the characters of this film - his identity in flux. No surprise then that Gondry's subsequent films ("Be Kind Rewind", "The Science Of Sleep" etc) all spend their running times jumping from one half-finished reconstruction of a previous film/thought/memory/image to the next, their narratives all splintered or fractured. Like Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind", a film in which a duo recreate scenes from their memories of past movies, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is itself a series of short-form "music videos" or "advertisement-like" memory fragments, quirkily strung together.
Indeed, philosophers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard have long characterized postmodernity in terms of "amnesia" or "memory loss", aligning its ripples with clinical Schizophrenia, split personalities, temporal discontinuity and bipolar like emotional ground tones.
But "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is not only about science and society accelerating forgetfulness in a kind of Alzheimer's ward for young adults, but the desire to preserve remembrances of events, or rather, re-engineer memories to conform them to one's world-view, which of course is the clinical description of the narcissist. Where the film differs from most postmodern films about "memory" is that it couples its nostalgia to the understanding that memory is rarely about the past and always about the present.
Beyond Gondry's TV commercial aesthetic you have Charlie Kaufman's screenplay. All of Kaufman's films revolve around a neurotic artist or self-pitying depressive who is undergoing some existential despair whilst being trapped in a narrative which takes the shape of a formalist game (often a self-referential meta-story or quirky surrealist fantasy in which the neurotic hero desires to obliterate himself). Here our hero is played by Jim Carrey, but his intellectual sad sack routine is identical to that of John Cusack in "Being John Malkovich" and Nicholas Cage in "Adaptation", two other films by Kaufman.
Of course Kaufman's "postmodern angst" is not unique to cinema. In the world of twentieth century paintings, for example, we have Pablo Picasso's fractured world of vacant-eyed, disjointed beings, Edward Hopper's flat landscapes populated by emotionally out-of-tune men and women, the predatory horror of Willem de Kooning, Salvador Dali's obliteration of objective reality, Warhol's smirking trivialisation of mechanical reproductions and Edvard Munch's "The Scream", which seems to capture the horror of being a cipher in a world of hideously swirling near-formless shapes.
The anxieties of all these artists stem from, or coincide with, the rise of philosophical theories of scepticism and irrationalism, a growing distrust in the cognitive faculties of perception and reason, the development of scientific theories such as evolution, entropy and uncertainty, the technological revolutions spurred by the combination of science and capitalism (which led to fears of dehumanisation) and the spread of liberalism and free markets (which in turn caused the political left and members of the artistic avant garde to view political development as a series of deep disappointments).
Gradually these anxieties expanded such that art-work seemed to be about its own self-elimination, those who followed Picasso and Munch obsessed with reporting their depressed observations, retreating from the world and proceeding to strip away from art anything that they could. Many eliminated as much content as they could from their works, art becoming a self-contained study of dimension, colour, and composition or a game of self-reference and self-annihilation.
This is the kind of cultural nihilism which many postmodernist film directors find themselves in today. Unlike existential directors of the past, everyone from art house folk (Dreyer, Bergman, Herzog, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Antioni, Wenders etc) to humble noir or Hollywood directors of the 40s and 50s (Nicholas Ray, John Huston etc), all of whom used the assumption of nihilism as the basis for the revaluation of all social values, postmodernists like Kaufman instead find themselves wallowing in the dead ends of their intellectual limits, locked into finding new and clever ways to playfully soliloquise over the vacuity of existence. Kaufman states this himself in "Adaptation", likening this very artistic movement to an Ouroboros snake consuming its own head.
7.9/10 – A trial run for Gondry's "The Science Of Sleep", a more interesting film. Still, despite it's hackneyed message ("It's better to lose a lover than to have never loved at all"), some severe overacting by Jim Carey and Kate Winslet, and Gondry assaulting us with every annoying gimmick he picked up making corporate videos, this is a very likable film. Worth two viewings. Once for pleasure, once for pain.