So
instructs Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), a memory-erasing specialist,
describing both the process of the procedure and the structure of
Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
itself. Even the “more or less” qualifier lines up with the
occasional digressions from the reverse chronology of the film. The
plot seeks to question our notion of Temporal Direction, as discussed
by Richard Taylor. “We think of time as having a fixed direction,
like … a river that cannot be reversed” (486). The characters in
Eternal
Sunshine appear
to briefly reverse that river, traveling backwards through memory to
a past self. Ultimately, however, the film seems to support that old
adage, “Those
who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”
The fictional technology allows characters to swim against the
chronology of their life, but when they wake up, they are in the same
river, and it is still flowing in the direction of those erased events.
The
premise of the film is largely familiar: Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and
Clementine
Kruczynski
(Kate
Winslet) fall in love, grow unhappy, separate, and wish to forget any
of it ever happened. Of course, the plot hinges on the fact that
they can
forget.
With a relatively painless procedure, those unpleasant bits of the
past are removed. It seems simple enough on the surface, but it
causes a rift between your “personal time,” as David Lewis phrases it, and “external time” – moments that exist for others no
longer exist for you. In the case of Joel, the time he and Clementine
spent with other friends still exist for those friends, but they have
vanished from his (and her) past.
Throughout
the film, I kept being reminded of Locke and his definition of
identity as a continuous string of memories. If this is true, does
Joel change his identity by plucking Clementine out of his life? It's
a tricky question, since he would still have some degree of
continuity; his personal timeline (as
it is perceived by him) would remain seamless – perhaps with minor
questionable details, like the missing pages of his journal – but
it would not line up with external time. Manipulation
of memory is similar to manipulation of the past, if you consider all
your past life experiences to have informed or caused your present to
some degree. Of course, I realize that the events of the past are
separate from an individual's recollection of those events, but there
can be no causality from past to present on an individual scale
without some knowledge of those events. If Joel and Clementine, as a
pair, share a past that neither of them remembers, a past that in no
way informs their present or influences their future, is it really
still their past?
The
resurfacing of the patient files near the close of the film suggests
that it is still their
past, since it has the ability to affect their future. Yet their
re-meeting and re-connecting (unaware of the “re” prefix to
either of the actions) suggests not. To return to Taylor's river metaphor,
Joel and Clementine swam upstream to a time before their
relationship, but when they stop swimming, they glide right back
through it again. They are uninformed of their past and thus doomed
to repeat it. Even after listening to the leaked tape recordings,
they choose to try again. Their repeated relationship begins with the
same speech from Clementine, and they are ultimately the same people that they were
when they began their first go-round. So what is there to assume but
that their relationship will follow the same general trajectory and
end in the same disastrous falling out? Will they be caught in an endless loop of erasing their relationship and then repeating it again? Taylor speaks of our
perception of time's linearity, saying that “the future is
something necessarily lying ahead of us, and the past, behind us”
(486), yet for Joel and Clementine, it appears as if their past and
their future have become largely the same.
It is even more
fascinating to consider this relationship between time and memory on
a larger scale. If the memory technicians were able to wipe the
memory of, say, World War II from every human on the planet and
strike the records from all books, could it still be said to have
happened? Yes, I know this is a very “if a tree fell in the forest
and no one was around to hear it” type of inquiry, but it still
bears consideration. In external time, WWII is a reality. But if the
personal timeline of every thinking, reasoning person on the planet
aligned in such a way that excluded the war, did the memory
technicians responsible for such a drastic act essentially alter
history? And if so, could this be considered a form of time travel? Would the removal of such a monumental event from the collective memory of humankind mean that it is bound to happen again?
This was the movie that I chose to watch and I am happy to read your review; it phrased the complicated plot of the movie nicely and helped bring it into a more solid ground in my mind. The movie does seem to support the idea of time as a linear thing, and a thing with one direction; hence, the river, because of the simple fact that Joel and Clem's meeting at the beginning of the movie is the start of a repetition of events that that each party had gone through a mental operation to forget. It is often the case with movies though, that they set a recurring situation up, it can be a futuristic world, such as in Looper or the Matrix, and the point of the movie is that the main character is different. In this case, assuming that the procedure that Clem and Joel undergo is generally successful (which we can assume, given that the company that administers it seems to have an office and credible employees) perhaps their case is different. If so, the main question that the movie poses is about the erasing of one person from your memory; the action's possibility, morality, and consequences would all be up for debate. I believe that this would have been a likely intention of the filmmaker, and thus I think a comparison with Taylor's work would have been my direction had I been a blogger this week.
ReplyDeleteI thought the question that you posed at the end of your post was very interesting and got me thinking. Think of all of the things that we are not aware of...all of the small wars that have happened, all the illnesses that you and I are not aware of, songs we've never heard. Because they have not made their way into our consciousness, does that mean they do not exist? According to Descartes, all I am fully sure of is that I exist, and that I am a thinking thing. So everything that has not surfaced in my mind could very well not exist. Even forgetting how crazy Descartes' views are, it does kind of make sense to believe that if something has not surfaced in our mind, it does not exist in our experience of the world. This is a very solipsistic belief, but I do believe it to be true. As soon as we are made aware of something we were previously unaware of, it becomes "true" to us.
ReplyDeleteApparently, every time we think of something that happens to us, we channel the memory of that memory. Each time we think about it again, it is believed that you are just thinking about the last memory you had of that event. But, that is the only way we can connect ourselves with our past, which has, for better or worse, shaped who we are in this very moment. We forget memories all the time...I ask you to recall your brother or sister's third birthday...but does this mean we forget the lessons we learned along the way? I don't think so. In ESOTSM, we see an attempt to delete the painful memories of the past....but would the characters lose the lessons they learned along the way?
While the content of your post certainly flexes the cerebral muscles, I find more interesting the way that you wrote you post. In the beginning you talk about the memory and its ability to move for ward and backward in time. Ie moving up the stream of meory and they back down it. Then at the end of your blog you post the question about removing an internal time event from all people, and question if that also means that external time is removed. Essentially this becomes a question of, "is there anything inherent in time that means that events which take place in it can be recognized external to the internal memories of human kind". I would argue that since an event only becomes an event if it is recalled then it does not exist. It is true that evidence of it may exist, bomb sites, but i would argue that this is evidence of its happening that can be observed which makes its presence real. This might come to shape the memory differently but ultimately it would not change the event itself. Regardless, I find it interesting the way that the question essentially becomes the same type of question that we ask of time travel. Again, It seems to me this has its roots in the internal external distinction, but really thats what your blog does a great job of making the reader think about.
ReplyDeleteAnna, brilliant analysis of the film's thematic and structural arrangements that work together to discuss issues in time and memory. Specifically, I think your mention of Taylor's conception of time as a river is a most compelling point, and ought to be taken into further consideration. This idea is even more enhanced by the fact of the film's scientific validity, and the concept of memory as a physical representation in the brain is a crucial feature that defines its outlook. While the selective memories seem to have been erased for the characters in the film, the storytelling evokes the audience to hope for something deeper, something tangible to bring them together. Just as one cannot swim against the current of the river, Joel and Clementine fail to swim against the causal continuity of their lives, subconsciously remembering their own identities in the process.
ReplyDelete