"Eternal Sunshine": Lo-Fi Memories
On the "flaws" of memory, the grain of film, and what we lose when we entrust too much of ourselves to the digital world.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, dir. Michel Gondry; screenplay Charlie Kaufman (2004)
There’s something overwhelming about the astonishing rapidity with which we’ve moved so much of our lives from the physical to the digital world. As our memories migrate from the mind to the internet, we’re building a Borgesian library of digital family photos, birthday videos, and love letters written in code rather than ink. The cloud is now home to things that once existed in tangible form, perhaps stored in a shoebox or a suitcase under the bed. Transhumanists celebrate the techno-miracle of everlasting digital life; others are wary of what we lose when we transfer these parts of ourselves to technology.
Along with quantifying life into data, we can now “clean up” audio and video. Technophiles are excited about these improvements in quality; purists lament the sapping of life that comes with smoothing out “flaws” in music and film. As we accelerate into the future, certain features of yesteryear take on an appealing nostalgia: the crackle of a record spinning on the turntable; the analogue slowness and smell of a book; the sepia colouring of photographs, caused by chemicals meant to increase the longevity of these finite physical forms.
Film has become an object of cinephilic reverence. Sofia Coppola insisted on shooting Lost in Translation on film because “film gives a little bit of distance, which feels more like memory to me. [Digital] is more present tense”. Film grain also reminds us of a fundamental truth that digital disguises: in the analogue image, we see the particulate dust of creation coalescing into being. Film grain gives texture to the world, the way that atoms and particles come together to build the reality we witness.
All of this is present in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, for my money, captures the mechanics of memory better than any other film. In this genre-folding film, Joel (Jim Carrey) has recently been dumped by Clementine (Kate Winslet). When he learns that she’s paid a company to erase him from her memory, he undergoes the same procedure to forget their relationship. Most of the film takes place within Joel’s mind as he moves physically through the abstract space of his own subconsciousness.
This is the cinematic challenge posed by Charlie Kaufman’s script: can a film intelligibly describe the inherently anti-rational nature of memories?
One of my favourite aspects of Eternal Sunshine is how mundane its sci-fi is. Lacuna Inc. is a company with a ground-breaking procedure for erasing specific memories, yet it’s run out of a shabby downtown office by a team who think a lab coat over their civvies makes them look professional. These employees are bumbling losers who treat their jobs like any other means of making a buck. This is futuristic tech reduced to a second-rate business venture, and it’s far more realistic than the laser-guns and spaceships of other movies.
This lo-fi approach to sci-fi is a joyful feature of director Michel Gondry’s visual ethic, whose special effects seem more wonderfully ordinary than special. We are supposed to see how the film achieves its effects, to glimpse their physicality and construction, so that we feel their reality. When Joel’s mother bathes him in the sink, we aren’t “convinced” by the obviously false arms (designed to make the adult actor appear child-sized). There’s something more compelling about knowing that the actors were actually interacting with the arms we see on-screen, rather than pretending to interact with limbs digitally added later.
Gondry’s deliberately rough-edged aesthetic speaks to the nature of memory: it’s messy, incomplete, and stitched together like a patchwork quilt, yet utterly convincing. We can see the seams and still believe in the fullness of the vision. In this respect, memories are a lot like dreams. We can be entirely convinced of a dream while sleeping, then wake and realise (wondering how we ever forgot) that people don’t fly, Grandma’s been dead a long time, and dogs don’t speak English. The same goes for memory — we aren’t distracted by the fact that they are full of plot-holes, populated by faceless extras, and prone to skipping from one scene to another with no respect for chronology.
There’s a moment in Eternal Sunshine when Joel trips backwards in an empty room and lands on a sofa that’s just appeared, the room suddenly full of props and life. The edit that stitches one shot in the empty room to a separate shot in the full room is relatively inelegant and easily spotted. Perhaps some motion control and post-production CG could have smoothed out the seam, but the resulting effect would be merely to impress the audience with the filmmaker’s ability to trick our eyes.
In allowing us to glimpse the reality of the edit and understand that Joel has moved in a single movement from one shot to another, the rough transition prompts us to consider how this is, in fact, our own experience in dreams and memories. We skip from one moment to another in a way that would disturb us if it happened while awake, yet doesn’t seem at all odd to the remembering or imagining mind.
In another scene from Joel’s memory, he and Clem get into a very public argument. Joel is horrified to be in the spotlight. His experience in reality was one of feeling exposed; his memory, therefore, puts him in full focus while Clem and their surroundings fade into a smoky distance. Gondry achieves this effect in-camera by placing a large sheet of translucent plastic between Joel and his background. One of the producers explains:
“The idea behind that effect was that, in your memory, you remember not the entire frame of the scene, but you remember certain elements ... Joel’s memory of [Clem] is not quite as salient to him as his memory of himself.”
Clem wants to provoke Joel into an argument, so her words become spiteful. In the memory, her voice takes prominence by falling out of synch with the image, her face fading while her words linger. Eventually, though, they fade too.
The fiction of Eternal Sunshine’s science lies in the idea that we could ever have “spotless minds”. We don’t have tidy minds and we don’t have tidy lives. Our obsessive endeavour to organise life is a losing battle, one in which so much is lost whenever we do manage to “clean things up”.
Photos stored in the cloud and accessible through apps are perfectly, computationally sequenced; I no longer stumble across a forgotten image that’s slipped into another collection, which happened all the time when my physical photographs were kept in a small box. With an online photo library, I might look at photos more often, but I look less closely, with less reverence. The act of scrolling through hundreds of thumbnails lacks the ritual of flipping through the pages of a photo album. The slowness and depth (each the result of the other) is gone, replaced with skimming and forgetfulness.
Maybe this is a manifestation of Eternal Sunshine in reality, the Lacuna tech made real. In the film, we see technicians locate a memory on a computer screen, click on it, and press delete. The memory is gone forever. If most of the mnemonic content of my memories has been delegated from my mind to the digital file on my computer, when I hit deleteand a photo is erased, how much of the memory is lost with it?
It’s not only the tactile relationship with memories that’s been lost. As the picture quality of photographs rises (perfectly framed and correctly saturated thanks to autocorrect), their depictions of the world lose fidelity. These photos don’t look the way I saw the same scene with my own imperfect eyes. There are now digitally clean photographs that I took — of sunsets and loved ones, of places I knew and moments I want to remember — that feel less real to me than Michel Gondry’s film does. Eternal Sunshine has a certain truthfulness that is the result of the director’s aesthetic and moral appreciation of life’s disorder.
Shakespeare knew the importance of memory, writing that “nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn the living record of your memory”. Maupassant praised memory for being “a more perfect world than the universe” because “it gives back life to those who no longer exist”. Proust built an entire literary career on his understanding of memory. And Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind elevates memory by getting down in the dirt with it. Gondry’s vision gives us the mess, the squalor, the confusion, and the pain — and in doing so, reminds us of the reality of memory.
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe