![]() ![]() ![]() Of course director Michel Gondry also played a big part in the magic of Eternal Sunshine, and he gets a story credit as well. That’s such a Charlie Kaufman thing to do. This leads to an even more chaotic second half as Joel and Clementine zig and zag through his own mind, trying to hide in his childhood and in his deepest humiliation and shame. But as these most recent memories are lost, Joel falls more and more back in love with Clementine until that one perfect moment on the frozen Charles. The neat trick that gets played here is that we see memories as they are erased in reverse chronological order, starting with the most ugly ones of a relationship well into its toxic phase. The second act is the procedure itself, which breaks neatly into two parts at the moment Joel decides he wants to call the whole thing off. The first act begins with a lengthy future-as-prologue segment that chronologically takes place in the aftermath of the procedure, and which is revisited in the third act. The story does give us some natural break points that we can consider as a traditional three-act structure, although the first and especially the third acts are shorter than usual. The nature of this thing is to be a fragmented, non-linear jumble that jumps back and forth between disordered memories and the present, with interventions from Joel's subconscious as it tries to rewrite its world. The bulk of the story takes place within Joel's head as old memories are erased one by one and as Joel changes his mind and starts fighting back against the process. In response to being erased, Joel has the same procedure performed on himself to remove his own memories of Clementine. Nothing you'll miss.Įternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tells the story of Joel Barish, whose girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski has had him erased from her memory. Well, technically, the procedure itself is brain damage, but on a par with a night of heavy drinking. He does it again, or variations of it-whatever it is-in Anomalisa, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and even his novel Antkind. There's the door into Malkovich, the running down of memories in Eternal Sunshine, the replicated lives of Synecdoche, the self-reflective autobiographical fantasy of Adaptation. It's not as if he doesn't continually open it up on the page-literally or metaphorically, I'm honestly not sure which. What's it like inside Charlie Kaufman's head? You have to wonder. ![]()
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