Black Beard Reviews the Best of the Naughts: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I’m not a moralist, and I know I’m risking my reputation on some level by saying the following, but I will argue with anyone that the kind of graphic, gratuitous violence that has become common place in R rated movies should be relegated to films rated in the same manner as pornography.  I’m not a prude (my favorite television show is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia after all).  I’m just disturbed by blood lust.  That being said, I do believe there is a place for violence in art.  But there is a very clear distinction between violence that serves a purpose (The Way of the Gun comes to mind) versus violence that exists for its own sake (there are many obvious examples, but for this posting I will single out Kill Bill).

The Way of the Gun is a bloody shoot ‘em up (and also one of my favorite movies of the decade), but the violence it presents is a necessity of the plot.  It’s a kidnapping film, but the story is focused on the relationship between the kidnappers, the victim, and the people trying to get her back, and violence is an aspect of those relationships which each side engages reluctantly.  I can’t say whether it was intended by the filmmaker or if this is a level of meaning that I’m ascribing to the film, but it’s interesting to me that the only two characters you root against—the two bodyguards protecting the kidnapped woman—are also the two characters who are the most willing to fight and the most cold-blooded about the lives of the people around.

Conversely, Kill Bill is a film in which the plot exists merely as a device to link one brutal fight to the death with the next. What’s worse, the extent of the “story” that is built around the violence is little more than a series of inanities that have little bearing on the development of the characters or action.[i] Pornography is a film that exists solely to depict a series of sex scenes with only an afterthought of a story in place to move things along.  Substitute “gory” for sex in the previous sentence, and how are Kill Bill and its ilk any different?

From these observation, I believe one can probably draw a few conclusions about the biases that led me to name Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as my favorite film[ii] of the first decade of the 21^st Century: I’m not impressed by movies based on spectacles like violence, sexuality, or special effects; I gravitate towards well constructed plots; I’m most interested in stories that are built on relationships between characters.

True, Eternal Sunshine relies on special effects, but they are used as a tool to enhance the storytelling of the filmmakers and do not distract from the action. The effects are also necessary in order to execute the spectacularly plotted shifts forwards and backwards through time. Eternal Sunshine is the only film I can think of from the previous ten years that utilized a non-linear narrative in a way that propelled the story forward, as opposed to the more common usage of a disjointed chronology, which is to inject energy into what would otherwise be a plodding narrative (i.e. 500 Days of Summer).

But my favorite aspect of the film is the handling of the nuance and complexity of Joel and Clementine’s relationship: good and bad times are juxtaposed and a complete arc of their lives together is presented.  The result is that the audience is left with a complete understanding of what the characters have been through, which is what in turn gives the remarkable ending so much impact.  Given everything I know about Joel and Clementine, every time I watch the film I’m moved by their decision to begin a new relationship despite the bitter testimonies they discover about how unhappy they were before their memories were erased. It’s the most romantic thing that I can think of—giving into your feelings for someone knowing full well how miserable you became, and likely will become again—and although I’m a cynic, the ending never fails to convince me of the need to take chances to expose myself to suffering if it means having a chance at happiness.

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[i] A quick tangent: After Pulp Fiction no one became a bigger believer of the brilliance of Tarantino’s dialogue than Tarantino himself, and we have all been subjected to the exercise in ego that is the “Tarantino style” of dialogue ever since. Despite my opposition to the celebration of violence on screen, I tried to watch Death Proof, only to give up on the film after sitting through ten minutes of girl talk on the ride from the convenience store to wherever they were off to next. I’ve seen home movies that were more tightly scripted than that.

[ii] I’m not claiming it’s the best film—I believe the idea that we can identify the best of anything in the Arts is a fallacy—it’s just my personal favorite.