Strata Lucida

Self-reliance

A.O. Scott has a very interesting short take on Eternal Sunshine today. He uses Stanley Cavell's history of 1930's and '40s marriage comedies to show how Charlie Kaufman weaves dense philosophical strands into Sunshine's script:

How much do we know, Mr. Kaufman asks - about ourselves, about the world we inhabit, and, most crucially, about other people - and when do we know it? What do we do with this knowledge, and what good does it do us? If learning can be dangerous, is unlearning - in this case the literal erasure of memory, as practiced by Tom Wilkinson's ethically compromised Dr. Mierzwiak - any safer?

I felt this way when I saw the film, too -- that it was addressing not just relationships but the nature of the mind, and the self, in general. Many scenes play as concretizations of the unconscious, with all its slippery, associative logic; meanings shift, perspectives skew, contradictions are embraced.

The film drives toward a moral conclusion that it is possible to weave a peculiar kind of "stability" out of this chaos -- a stability that is not metaphysical and monolithic, but temporary and provisional. Clementine tells Joel, "I'm going to get bored and freak out, that's just me" to which he replies, simply, "Okay". He doesn't need to spin grand protestations of his love here; he merely responds with a pragmatic, workaday affirmation. His acceptance of her faults does not occur on a cosmic plane, grounded in abstract, glowing, eternal love; it is practical, local, specific. Scott:

[Joel and Clementine] are profoundly imperfect, possessed of a prickly individuality that leaves him or her often out of sorts with the rest of the world. (This restless, nonconforming urge, the true meaning of Emersonian self-reliance, is evoked by her ever-changing hair and his feverish notebook jottings.) The only cure is for them to become more themselves, which they can accomplish only in each other's company.

For a film so sensitive to the vagaries of memory and the mind, I don't think "Emersonian self-reliance" is quite the optimal framework. Maybe, rather, a postmodern self-reliance, one which brackets the notion of self within the idea that it is shifty, dependent, interwoven with the other; a concept of self that does not try to trap the other, or itself, in a permanent or isolated definition. Yes, become more yourself, but do it with the recognition that your self is constantly changing, and that it is bound up with the selves of others.

Posted by Chris at April 3, 2004 09:53 AM