Although some of the essays offer perceptive and thoughtful observations about the film and its workings, the project as a whole tends to discuss Eternal Sunshine as a kind of Platonic form, in which the film's characters and ideas exist in a transparent and temporally fixed world, rather than having emerged through the encounter of a viewer with a sensual and temporally unfolding, historically situated work of art. Thus it is fair to say that although some of the essays in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the book, helpfully examine some of the philosophical issues raised by the film, most of the essays and certainly the book as a whole fail to pay much attention to the film as a film, nor do they exhibit even a cursory familiarity with academic film theory and criticism. While it would probably be right to say that the narrative and stylistic qualities of Gondry's film would be less interesting had they not worked together to raise interesting philosophical questions, it is equally true that those questions emerge in all of their particularity through the structure and style of the film. My response to the book might be different from that of a reader interested in films primarily or solely as prompts to engage in speculative philosophy.
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that although a philosopher at heart, I suffer from cinephilia and am a film and media studies scholar by profession. This book adequately deals with this last aspect of the film it barely touches on the structure and style of Eternal Sunshine. Finally, Eternal Sunshine offers a surprisingly cogent thought experiment that raises fascinating questions about memory, romantic relationships and the nature of attraction, and other issues. Then there is Gondry's imaginative visual style as he represents both memory and its disappearance, making use of elaborate set pieces and lighting changes. The film mixes the temporal progression of Lacuna's erasure of Joel's memory and Joel's attempts to fight it, the meandering through Joel's memories in reverse chronological order from bitter fighting with Clementine in the near past to the first glorious weeks of his relationship with Clementine (with a detour to Joel's childhood), and various other plot manipulations such as the pretitle sequence presenting Joel and Clementine's second introduction in Montauk in such a way that the viewer initially assumes it is their first meeting.
One reason for this is the screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, which develops a complex and engaging temporal structure, a kind of puzzle narrative. New York: Routledge, 2009, xv + 160 pp., 7 b&w illus., $90.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.Īlthough it may be too early to tell, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will likely occupy a special niche in the canon of great narrative films.