Round 4
by Stephen Himes

In Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, memory erasure is performed much like low-rent plastic surgery. Joel asks to have ex-girlfriend Clementine wiped from his consciousness after finding out she has erased him. Like the journey inside John Malkovich's head in Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, the film actually takes us inside Joel's subconscious during the erasing procedure. The machine finds a memory of Joel confronting Clem at her bookstore job, and as they talk, the book titles erase right off the shelves; Clementine opens a book and flips its suddenly blank pages. Joel realizes that soon he won't remember any of this — for better or worse. He begs the engineers to let him keep just one memory of Clementine, but upon realizing they aren't listening, he takes her deeper into his subconscious to hide.

As with most science fiction, the futuristic conceit is merely a method to help us understand the present. The scene is filmed as if illuminated by an off-camera flashlight, a nightmare effect that not only points to the hazy quality of memory, but alludes to the films of French New Wave auteurist Francois Truffaut, such as Shoot the Piano Player. Jon Brion's score sounds hollow, as if the image is echoing inside of the skull. The scene is cut to suggest that the memory is very clear in Joel's mind, and the editing takes on a frantic quality that mirrors Joel's attempt to fight the machine. This is all quite fantastic, yet the invention is treated with such matter-of-factness, introduced to us by connecting it to something familiar, that it doesn't seem that outlandish. And so we are asked a number of questions: At what point does technology sap us of our humanity? What is the nature of memory — do we reconstruct memories differently every time we recall them, based on our emotions at the time? Will Joel wake up with Clementine still embedded in his brain?

How can this not constitute high art? The scene hits all the marks, from classical themes to closely observed personal relationships, alluding to current and classical art along the way. It's composed in layers, like great poetry, reaching its audience on levels of meaning from the entertaining to the metaphysical. The scene stands alone as a work of art, but when viewed in the context of the rest of the film, it fits squarely into the sort of tonal and thematic shifts one associates with the narrative poetry. And, also like poetry, film is condensed into charged bursts of imagery that help explain the unexplainable. Heck, according to Slate, it even gets the science mostly right. How is this scene — indeed, the whole film — "less" than a skillfully crafted novel?

Furthermore, I've had to see the film three times to trap all this in my feeble mind. Movies present all sorts of logistical problems: I've got to find the time to get to the theater, lay down another $8 and find a seat away from talkers. My notes, written in the dark, often end up indecipherable. I can't copy the whole movie down, and if I'm furiously scribbling quotations, I may miss some subtle camera movement or background image that illuminates meaning, as one might skim over some syntactical design of Emily Dickinson or the precise diction of John Donne? And what to say of the score (the diction of film)? Or the editing (film's syntax)? How to record all this?

It's so hard to "re-read" a film — you leave the theater and much of the movie slips the mind. You can take out a book, flip to the page, and bam! — there's specific reference for your argument. With movies, we remember being moved and stimulated, but it's hard to say why without a conscious effort and multiple viewings. This is the nature of memory. We can access our memories of the movie, like Joel accesses his memories of Clementine, and we may only have a vague notion of why we loved it until we see it again. Like Joel and Clem meeting on the train after their procedures, we may not even know why we're drawn to a film, but we are — and for specific emotional and intellectual reasons. Like Joel's nearly erased Clementime, film itself is no less deep, complex or real just because we can't remember it all. "Close reading" a film is a different skill than that of literature, but it's a skill all the same, and not a passive one. Too often, the transient quality of the film experience is mistaken for shallowness of the medium itself.

The literati often lash out at "the movies," complaining about what they've done to books (bastardize) and to people (dumbed us down). Usually a particularly egregious offender is called to the stand (often an Oscar winner, like A Beautiful Mind), and the critic then quickly exposes all the shortcomings of the adaptation, usually with the same condescending tone reserved for sub-Literature authors like Stephen King or Nick Hornby. Then comes the indignation: Look at what they've done to it! Then we're supposed to cry over the defenseless mutilation of the book, like the 4-year-old Joel who submits to peer pressure and smashes a bird with a hammer. How can one defend "the movies" in such a context without seeming like a simpleton — I mean, the book is always better than the movie. And if you don't think so, well, you, my dear moviegoer, can occupy yourself in the sandbox of film while the big boys read literature. But there is error in calling a work "Hollywood" and parlaying that into a critique of the medium. By attacking reductionist adaptations and/or standard multiplex fare, however justly, the critic is — whether he realizes it or not — merely attacking a certain impassive audience, not film itself.

Simply put, this is an example of that most fatal affliction of the literati: snobbery. They insist that reading is more laborious, and thus more noble, than viewing. But the act of reading alone does not imply "close reading." Can one not "passively" read, say, "The DaVinci Code" with the same faux-sophistication by which another is "moved" by, say, A Beautiful Mind? The gnat-attention-spanned, Bruckheimer culture has been cultivated mostly by the film industry, yes, but does this itself exalt the novel over it?

The most general complaint is that visualization somehow cheapens the story, usually accompanied by the self-righteous assertion that "no one should be able to tell me how imaginary characters are supposed to look." But the words an author chooses to describe an object can be as manipulative and emotive as images. Is not every comma employed by John Updike, every dash in a Dickinson verse, every note of a Wagner, every point of a Seurat, every stroke of a Monet, deployed to create a specific effect? Does this compromise the integrity of the prose's "realness," forcing every reader to arrive at exactly the same understanding?

By the same token, visualization does not necessarily devalue an object — or for that matter, a human character — any more than a precise description would. We decide what they look like based upon the description the author constructs. Similarly, an actor shows what the character looks like by constructing him on the screen. But what I read and what you read from this image are not the same. In the same way, the judgments we make about them, based on the information provided to us by the artist, are not necessarily the same. When an author tells us that a character gives a "wry smile," he is telling us exactly what the emotion is, whereas an actor has to show us that emotion. You and I might look at the same smile, and I might read "wry" while you read "conniving" — perhaps there's something in the raise of an eyebrow or wrinkle in the forehead that unconsciously tips us off. Just like words, visual images give us interpretive data that we are free to value and judge as we please. Implicit in the argument against film is the idea that because the image is seen, we see it the same way. By that logic, we would all have the same idea of what the Mona Lisa is thinking. Heck, while we're at it, let's extend that idea and ask why William Shakespeare wrote for the stage instead of the novel? Or, hell, why that DaVinci fellow didn't have the fortitude to devote himself to literature? Or why Donne chose the lyric when a real man would have done the yeoman's work of prose?

Put another way: How would you novelize Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, exactly, without "bastardizing" it? What about the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? The conversational overlaps and roving camera of Robert Altman? The stunts of Harold Lloyd? Or, for that matter, the horrormeisters of the '70s, who captured the look and feel of the Vietnam generation's paranoia and fear?

Those arguing on film's behalf have been abetted by technology. DVDs help correct the inherent obstacles in the academic "close reading" of film, allowing viewers to simply pluck the DVD off the shelf, throw it in the player and click to an exact scene — all in a few more seconds than would be required to take out a book and search and flip to the right page. We must hope that the DVD's "realness" can help dispel this prejudice against film's supposed fleetingness — indeed, one can now even build a DVD "library." Bradford Collins has published a book entitled "12 Views of Manet's Bar," in which different critics discuss a single Manet from perspectives as diverse as "an allegory of nostalgia," to "the dialectics of desire," "privilege and the illusion of the real" and the idea that the painting itself is "a psychoanalytic novel." All this from a single image that you can hang on your wall. Imagine the possibilities of 24 images a second for two hours, ready to be plucked from a "library" again and again.

If we strip away snobbery, we can see that art is art — the depth comes from artist's skill with the brush, not the palette on which he paints.

An alternate version of this article appeared at Cinemarati.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)

More:
Round 1 by James Norton
Round 2 by Joshua Adams
Round 3 by Louis Cooke

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)