Michel Gondry’s masterpiece The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, following Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece script, is one of the most top to bottom brilliant achievements in film I have ever seen.

Taken as a science fiction film, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ranks as a model for the genre. The film takes a fascinating concept—the ability to erase one’s painful memories—and rather than using it only as a pretext for exploring its other thematic concerns, the film explores the fascinating what if incredibly thoroughly, exploring the technological ins and outs of the procedure and, much more importantly, exploring in depth the direct psychological implications for those who would undergo the procedure. We see the effects of such a procedure both through the perspectives of one character as the procedure is unfolding and another character who is dealing with the effects several days after having received the procedure. The film also roots itself in, incorporates, and brings to life a wide range of scientific insights into dream psychology, keeping a wildly surreal and fantastic dream storyline feeling simultaneously realistic.

The film also explores a huge host of insights into memory and perspective. As we learn about Joel’s life through his dreams and watch as he actively shapes his memories and watch them change and emphasize various things right before our eyes. We hear the Clementine of his dream world inauspiciously say things that echo what we know to be his own thoughts about her or those of other characters rather than exactly her own words or perspectives—-the subtlest of reminders that the Clementine we’re seeing in his dream is not actually the real Clementine. There is a fascinating interplay of memory and dream creation as the Clementine we experience in the dream world is a mixture of idealization, villainization, authentic memory and new dream actor.

Looked at in terms of narrative structure, the film is a masterpiece of coherent, non-linear chronology. Like a great Tarantino film, we see various sequences not in the order off their occurence but rather in the order best for their experiential and narrative value. The film jumps back and forth in time and then, tells a relationship in reverse, capturing the feelings and frustrations of an end of a relationship in which everything looks just terrible and there’s little conscious awareness of how things fell apart as only the end is fresh in the mind.

The journey backwards through Joel and Clem’s relationship in his mind gives a great journey through a relationship with the romantic beginnings being the climax of a long relationship instead of simply the ignorant infatuated starting point that is lost as time goes on. By the time we reach the beginning of their relationship in his dream, we see characters who have traversed a whole relationship of ups and downs and who have traversed the trip back through it in the dream world and have all this connection. And we see them reenacting in dream form their initial meeting in such a way that retains its freshness and romance and wonder of two people meeting for the first time while commenting on what’s ahead. It’s an amazing combination of perspectives loaded into one scene before yet another time jump forward in time outside of the dream world.

(Don’t watch if you’ve not seen the film)

What makes the narrative structure so staggering and amazing is that it manages to play tricks on you, not letting you know exactly what’s going on for a solid half an hour into the film—-not even making clear when you have entered the dream world until Joel himself becomes aware of it despite confusing and bizarre scene transitions that precede the awareness—-but then sorts itself out and becomes completely intelligible. The film, without resorting to talky explanations, manages to utterly confuse and disorient for experiential effect and then to explain itself in such a way that having had the disorienting experience you can follow things out the rest of the way and not stay lost for the sake of the writer’s ego. The structure is disorienting when that’s best for the experience and then clear and masterfully ordered and balanced so that the surreality does not lose the audience or dwarf the emotional narrative that is of the primary importance.

And let’s not forget the narrative structure of the story running outside of Joel’s head that keeps returning the film to reality and giving a parallel commentary on the same themes running in the dream world. It also gives information insightful for interpreting the meanings and inspirations of Joel’s dreams. Even the subplot, involving the wonderfully underrated performances of Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Mark Ruffalo, wonderfully leads to a narratively perfect and poignant heartbreaking twist. Dunst is perfect as the young woman with a crush on her boss, while screwing around with Ruffalo. Wilkinson perfectly plays an ostensibly caring and level headed doctor with questionable ethics and disappointingly passive justification for them. Elijah Wood also gives one of his best performances as a clueless, unscrupulous loser exploiting illicitly gained information to get a woman way out of his league. It’s hysterical to listen to his pathetic cliches as he refers to his brand new “girlfriend” as “the old lady” and tells her on her answering machine that he “loves her so much.” He’s written as a scathingly comic and pathetic satirical character.

He’s one of many great comedic elements not to be lost in the film, including a great comic variation on the classic existentialist anxiety of seeing God as an “absentee landlord” as Joel cries out to the heavens in his dream, “Is there anybody out there? Can anybody hear me?!” and we cut to those responsible for him dancing stoned in their underwear on his bed to goofy music. It’s God as absentee partiers. While not an overall comedy, the script is sprinkled with great one liners, great irony, black comedy, sight gags, romantic silliness, and scenes that are simultaneously eerie and funny.

Of course, though, as good as these performances and characters are, it’s not their movie—-Kate Winslet was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Clementine Kruczynski with her mixture of impetuous free-spiritedness, anxious vulnerability, hot temper, alcoholism, and earnest openness. She is written and performed to be so authentically, realistically charming and so authentically, realistically flawed that the romance around which this high concept science fiction film actually revolves works. Winslet is amazing, exuding magnetism, energy, geeky hipsterness, and yearning insecurity.

Jim Carrey as Joel Barish completely loses himself in the role. I’m a huge Jim Carrey fan and I don’t even think of him when I think of this, my favorite movie. I just think of Joel Barish, a man subdued, introspectively thoughtful, and pessimistic, desperately fighting his dreams to keep his memories. His dramatic prowess betters even that which he showed in his superb performances in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon.

As a romance the film is one of my favorites. Carrey and Winslet have a special chemistry as a genuine pair of opposites attracting. Normally films with opposites attracting play off of less particularly and skillfully drawn characters. This film is like a romance within a character study within a sci fi movie. The romance is incredibly real. The dialogue doesn’t sound written by some geniusly witty playwright—-the flirting is not witty and snappy but awkward and earnest, the acrimonious arguments are raw, the lovers’ affirmations of each other are sweet in their banal sincerity. They capture perfectly the powerful chemistry that leads to explosions rather than peace. They’re people who can’t let go of each other even as much as they drive each other crazy to be together. Not since Sam and Diane have I seen authentic portrayal of lovers who are together out of a visceral need for each other, completely in defiance of their thorough personality clash.

The romance is explored then from an innovative number of angles—-we see a sequence of their meeting and flirting awkwardly SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
though, we do not know at the time that this is not really their first meeting END OF SPOILER END OF SPOILER END OF SPOILER
, we see the major events of their relationship in reverse, and we see them take the journey together of fighting the erasure process, following them as a team that we root for, establishing them as people who get along, work together, care about the relationship, and, so, a couple we want to see “make it.”

HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

In the end, the film gives a completely unique paradox, [spoiler]people who, in their immediate experience feel like they have just met and yet, subconsciously feel completely bound to one another, and they are given tapes in which, in their own words they hear exactly how they miserably they will feel towards each other. Two characters, in the throes of both infatuation and the bonds that take years to create, are given information about how much they would hate each other and need to choose whether or not to go forward or to get out and not risk ruining everything again. This creates a fascinating and unique variation on the whole romance genre. It infuses knowledge from the end of a relationship into the euphoria of the beginning and asks whether the characters will respond prudently or romantically. It also serves as a beautiful metaphor of the romantic challenge of monogamy with the need to make decisions ever anew to start it all over with ever increased knowledge of what’s ahead.

In the end, the question is whether or not Joel and Clementine will make it, whether they can learn from mistakes having erased them. They embody a paradox of human nature in which moving on from mistakes means being able to forget them and not be trapped in the past (Nietzsche’s real meaning in the quote misused in the movie) while at the same time, we need our memories as warnings to keep us from rehearsing the same mistakes all over again. Can Clementine and Joel benefit from the immediate forgetfulness of their mistakes that repairs their feelings towards one another? Or will forgetting their mistakes only doom them to repeat them again? The metaphor for, and commentary on, our own struggles to both put the past behind us with optimism and to learn how not to repeat it, is simply perfect. And all is left ambiguous, with no easy answers on silver platters, just a great conversation starter.

END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

END OF HEAVY SPOILER SECTION

The romance is also beautifully evolved in numerous nonverbal ways as these characters connect not through words but through play and through sharing intimate memories. In the dream, their journey to Joel’s childhood is one of the most romantic sequences I’ve ever seen. One sequence oscillates between ugliness and comedy, and romantic poignancy as we see Clementine and Joel as little kids together sharing an ugly, traumatizing moment from his childhood. The vision of a romantic couple who met as adults sharing the intimacy of being able to be kids together, to be able to know each other in ages that they didn’t get to have together in actuality, is as romantic a picture as I’ve ever seen. The way she supports him in that scene, the way the music tracks the scene, the way she cheers him up through playfulness and the scene transitions back to their adult playfulness—-one of the ways they actually played out their child selves with each other as adults—-it’s all so brilliant and heartbreakingly beautiful. And the fun, playful moments of their playing as adults that end with Clementine vanishing—-sucking you into the romance of their enjoyment and then pulling it away hauntingly and suddenly, a reminder of the ominous threat to their relationship.

And on the subject of the scene transitions—-this film is the best edited film I’ve ever seen. The transitions through the dream world are so fluid. Constantly scenes transition with several props or people staying the same and the settings transforming around them, objects vanish from rooms, a car falls out of the sky, hallways connect radically different rooms, the background objects of the world blur and vanish as memory loses them. Changes in lighting, changes in foci, changes in the way the sound connects to the image, film reels played backwards, film reels sped up—-the number of inventive “in-camera” tricks used to create a dream world out of real world elements instead of animation are amazing and endlessly exciting. It is believable but surreal as a result. The lo-fi special effects are simply as good as they get. The dream world is made to feel like the real world, as it feels when you’re dreaming, while exploring all the incoherency and surreality of what dreams are like. Unlike Gondry’s Science of Sleep that for portions makes the dream world patently false with claymation, here he makes it both as real and surreal as it really is.

Like a dream, the film follows an emotional thread around Joel’s mind, switching between times and places and events with a perfect emulation of the dream world’s logic. The visual flourishes are too many to enumerate or list with any justice but they are spectacular. This is the only film outside of a Star Wars or Spider-Man film that I went to the theater six times to see and each time I got more out of it and found new things to marvel at visually. It was simply that mesmerizing. It captures the feel of so many things—-that feeling as a kid of riding in the back seat of a car at night, tired from a long day at a family gathering and watching the street lights and store lights fly by with the memories of the day and the week, etc. zooming by—even that life experience is captured.

And the climax of his dream, a house crumbling around him, the seashore running up under his feet, the wind howling—-the fantastic of a dream, the thematic and emotional resonance of depicting what he’s feeling (the collapse of a relationship, the overwhelming of the tide of circumstance) in symbolic form, the dialogue expressing regret and longing, despair and nostalgia. It’s the end of the relationship through a revisit of the first meeting.

And the musical scoring by Jon Brion is brilliantly resonant. The emotions are underscored perfectly, the zaniness is matched with zany music that’s not obnoxious but perfectly pitched to the scenes. The main themes are haunting and beautiful. Even the erasures of memories are signaled through great musical cues. The movie is unimaginable without its thoroughly unique and perfectly attuned musical signatures. And it’s all not much more than maybe 30 minutes of musical writing, a lot of which repeats but it feels just right rather than like a cop out. The repetition of musical cues signals parallel times, emotions, themes being explored. It serves as a thematic aid more than just an underscore for scenes.

And finally the cinematography is wonderful. Grainy and dark (at Gondry’s insistence over that of the cinematographer herself) when it needs to be, the bright room with Clementine going crazy at the end, there’s just so much thought into the look of so many scenes.

And the credits don’t happen until 17 minutes into the film and Beck’s melancholy cover for the closing credits ends the film with a perfect musical finish, seamlessly fitting with the musical and narrative themes of the entire film. On a personal note, as a native Long Islander, I love the comfortable familiarity of the unmistakable interiors of the Long Island Railroad train cars and seeing them immortalized in an all-time masterpiece like this.

Bah, I can write all these paragraphs and still leave so much out. Oh well, that should suffice to at least give an idea as to why this is my favorite movie of all time. Just watch the this video of the film to a Bob Dylan song I love:

And be sure not to miss all these reporters gone wild, they’re hilarious (if you find people losing their temper over petty things hilarious)

And at least O’Reilly has a sense of humor about it http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/14/oreilly-tries-to-laugh-of_n_101832.html

Andrew Sullivan posts an e-mail from one of his readers:

I live in SD and I am a candidate for the State House. I was out walking my district last month and spoke to a woman about the primary. She has a statue of the Virgin Mary in her front yard and was wearing several crosses around her neck. Here is our conversation:

Woman: “I don’t know about that Obama guy.”

Me: “I’m an Obama supporter, do you mind if I ask what you’re unsure about.”

Woman: “He’s a muslim and there is a biblical prophecy that a muslim will take over our country and destroy the world.”

Me: “You’re aware he is not a Muslim.”

Woman: “He can say anything he wants.”

A prophecy in the Christian Bible about a Muslim? And it mentions America? And she thinks that she can prevent a prophecy from happening by voting against it?

Has this woman ever read the Bible? She can say anything she wants.

Yesterday I talked to the local convenience store owner with whom I’ve long been friendly. He’s from Kosovo and he’s so anti-Muslim that as far as he’s concerned Obama is a Muslim because “it’s in his blood.” Last night in order to emphasize how anti-Obama he is, he explained that, “I hate work. I hate it. But if you told me, if I vote for Obama, I never have to work again, I still won’t vote for him.”

We’ve already seeing the beginning of 6 months-8 years worth of pushing away the giant rock of public political correctness to see the slime and maggots that normally hide in the dark.

Well, now it turns out that anyone that Barack Obama endorses is magically endorsed by Jeremiah Wright. By November’s time it is the Republican party’s wish that not only Barack Obama is equated with any one he’s ever been associated with in any capacity but that pretty much every Democrat who aligns him or herself with Obama or whom Obama aligns himself with is magically converted into a member of Jeremiah Wright’s fold.

By November, the Republicans are going to want Jeremiah Wright to be perceived as the pope of Democrats essentially.

Thankfully, this hilarious ad with all its baseless character assassination and insult to intelligence failed and Childers was elected. The Republican party is horrified.

As the Democratic primary season is winding down, Barack Obama has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates.  Because of the nature of this lead the race is being declared over and done with in his favor.  It makes a lot of sense to think that if the superdelegates were to overturn a clear mandate for the first African American nominee they would devestatingly alienate the incredibly enthusiastic African American and youth voters who have been galvanized by Obama’s candidacy.  A figure that left wing idealists of many ethnicities and colors see as potentially embodying in his nomination a landmark of social progress cannot be denied such a nomination by the will of party bosses without causing deeply bitter feelings and accusations that the Democratic party thereby takes a deeply undemocratic turn.

Now, in this brief essay, I want to ask whether the superdelegates voting in a way contrary to the pledged delegates really would be an undemocratic gesture.  Why should the pledged delegate count be taken as the truest measure of the will of the people?  A couple of days ago there was an excellent profile in the politico  of the lawyer Obama’s employed to master the delegate rules and maximize his campaign’s delegate total. Delegates in the Democratic primaries do not exactly represent raw vote totals. Sometimes districts get disproportionately more delegates than neighboring districts in their own states because in those districts the Democrats have in the past turned voted more heavily Democratic in previous elections. Sometimes quirks of math make for uneven delegate distribution. For example, in a district with only 4 delegates, a 59%-41% margin in favor of one candidate over the other results not in 3 delegates for the winner but a tie in which both candidates get 2 delegates. I think in general proportional delegation is a far fairer and more representative way to allocate delegates than winner take all set ups like the electoral college because proportional delegation more accurately tracks the will of the people in a state. Why should a candidate who gets only 60% of a state’s votes get 100% of its delegates? The problem with our general presidential elections is not the use of the delegates in the electoral college—its that the electors in almost all the states do not proportion their delegates in a way representative of their outcomes. Lately Hillary Rodham Clinton has noted that with Republican rules, she would have already won this primary battle. That does not mean however that that would have been a fairer measure than proportional delegation is giving us now. I think it would be a worse one, frankly.

But, proportional delegation as presently set up comes with these quirks in which quite unfairly a 59-41% split in some districts yields a decidedly unrepresentative 2-2 tie in delegates. Now it is to Obama’s credit as a politician (or to his team’s credit anyway) that his campaign was shrewd enough and gifted in foresight and calculation enough to run up the maximum delegate totals it could by pouring its resources as efficiently as possible into the regions where delegate rules meant that a lost district could be turned into a tie or a big win meant more delegates than a big win elsewhere in the state. But does this shrewdness translate into legitimacy as “the people’s choice?” Not necessarily at all.

David Plouffe recently stressed that even though Obama is winning the popular vote contest that superdelegates should not take that into account but only take into account the pledged delegate score since those were the rules the campaigns campaigned under. Their campaigns were designed to rack up pledged delegate totals and not popular votes. But why should the superdelegates care about campaign strategies? Just because the Obama campaign sought to rack up the most pledged delegates it could by gaming the system as well as it could does not mean that they couldn’t also put efforts into genuinely being the candidate chosen by the most people. And it doesn’t mean that a superdelegate should see their victories tallied up in delegate rich pockets as necessarily indicative of the will of the people. By the rules, their shrewdness in attaining pledged delegates is already rewarded in pledged delegates. Superdelegates are free to take in other considerations with respect to what legitimately represents the will of the people and what legitimately represents the good of the party. When the superdelegates see that the popular vote totals are far narrower than the pledged delegate race—which was essentially over before March 4 even—-why shouldn’t they take that to mean that the will of the democratic party is split, regardless of how that is reflected in the pledged delegate count?

One reason to think the superdelegates should just endorse the pledged delegate results is that it is unfair to caucus states which take a smaller sample of the population to determine delegates. Since caucuses occur in a narrower time-window and require a greater time commitment proportionally fewer people show up. In this respect, Obama’s campaign has a solid case to make that it put resources into caucus states expecting their delegates to be proportional to those in popular vote states. If the popular vote was the primary metric under consideration and not delegates then the caucus states wouldn’t even have caucuses since such would lead to under-representation of their state in the total popular tally. Caucus states and the Obama campaign which put great resources and strategy into them deserve to be given the equal consideration that primary states did. It is reasonable to assume, without doing the numbers, that were we to extrapolate the caucus vote totals to a more equivalent representation of total voters in those states to the representation in other states, then Obama’s popular vote lead would increase significantly.

So even though I don’t think it’s any more legitimate or democratic to consider sacrosanct the results of districts where mathematical idiosyncracies misrepresent the will of the people of a given district, I do think superdelegates should pay more attention to the pledged delegates to the popular vote. But three further challenges must be considered before settling on the opinion that the superdelegate ratification of Obama as Democratic nominee is sufficiently democratic to be considered fair. Are caucuses sufficiently representative of the people’s will? Caucuses favor party activists more willing to commit time, more willing to proclaim openly their support, and less susceptible to peer pressure in standing by their decision. Would primaries in states with caucuses really produce popular vote verdicts of similar percentages to caucuses? If Texas is any indication, a state where they prominently held both a primary and a caucus, the answer is no. Obama lost the popular vote in the state but dominated in the caucus percentages enough to net more delegates total from the state. Take out the caucuses and replace them with primaries and do more of his wins turn to losses? Does more of his popular vote total move into Clinton’s column instead? We don’t know definitively, but I’m afraid that would likely happen.

So, is this democratic? Is it fair? I think it is an acceptable situation because a political party in the United States is in some sense a “private” institution. The selection of a nominee is different than the selection of an office holder. If we are to be truly democratic in our elections, selecting office holders our government must be as democratic as possible, showing no favoritism to party activists or traditionally active voters over casual ones, etc. There should be no party bosses reaching in to decide elections to offices. But a party is a party and not a government institution. The Democratic party has every right to maintain a little hierarchy within its structure and reward those who are more committed to their party with opportunities like caucuses to show their commitment and have it count more. They are open in allowing any one to caucus. That the greater commitment involved requires a little more from their voters only allows those more committed to the party to have a greater say. Similarly all districts in any state are welcome to vote democratic. Rewarding party loyalty with greater say in future nominees to those districts is similarly fair and so I say, “more power” to those districts with a little extra representation in pledged delegates. And since the superdelegates are only superdelegates because along the way they’ve been voted into leadership roles by other members of the party, again the Democratic party is remaining at its core democratic even though it is introducing hierarchical structures that allow a little more say to those who are a little (or, in the case of many superdelegates, a whole lot) more committed to the cause of their party.

I think that the introduction of these hierarchical dimensions is fair for parties. In general elections, every vote should count the same and the voting procedures should be far more normalized. But the party seems legitimate in its weighting pledged delegates to reflect party loyalty and its use of caucuses for party building and for giving special say to the most committed party members. I also think though that along this same logic, the superdelegates have every right to break with the pledged delegates and favor popular vote totals with their votes if they disagree with their judgment. The more committed activists have had their extra say with their extra proportion of pledged delegates. If the total pledged delegates are not enough to seal a nomination and a superdelegate wants to use his or her extra say to vote against that nomination, that’s as fair as the caucuses and disproportionate delegation that went in to creating the initial pledged delegate total. And if enough superdelegates are willing to overrule the pledged delegates, then that means there is a solid enough agreement to overcome the pledged delegates’ current advantage, and so that’s an accomplishment of great support in favor of the candidate who lost the pledged delegates.

So, even though if I were a superdelegate, I would not overrule the nomination of Barack Obama personally, I think they’re entitled to. Fortunately, enough of them will accept the judgment of the pledged delegates (and, incidentally, the legitimate current popular vote total taken from the officially sanctioned contests) and informally ratify Obama’s nomination in a matter of weeks. But, I don’t begrudge Hillary at all her appeal (in general) to the closeness of the popular vote as a justification to be reconsidered by the superdelegates. I don’t think it’s just games with math. Yes, her campaign only emphasizes the math that favors her. But any campaign would do this and it’s unnecessary to demand her to do otherwise. There is a legit way to read the math that says the superdelegates are legit in using their superifluence to overturn the superinfluence of party activists in caucuses. It’s also a legit reading of the math to say, the pledged delegates and the actual popular vote lead in legitimate contests (i.e. contests not in Michigan or Florida this year) should be ultimate.

Both campaigns have a defensible case. There’s not a simple answer to what the superdelegates should do and there’s no rule that tells them to favor one metric over another.

Your thoughts?