Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Saw this film last night with Eliza and it was great!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Lacuna Inc.

The first time I saw this title, I knew I wanted to see it. (I have a very spotty mind, see.) There was something very tantalizing about the premise:

From Yahoo Movies:
From the twisted mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ('Adaptation,' 'Being John Malkovich'). 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' features Jim Carrey as a man who undergoes a process to remove all memories of his ex-girlfriend, played by Kate Winslet. The film also stars Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson and Elijah Wood.

This film is for anyone who's ever been in a relationship consisting of two very different personalities trying to make a go of it. I don't want to spoil the film for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but speaking as a self-admitted sentimental old fool, a memory junkie who organizes her photo albums not by chronology but by subject, who takes her camera around with her everywhere, and keeps boxes of journals and little scraps of paper with notes in friends' handwriting for so long the paper has yellowed, this movie validates my otherwise unpractical behaviour of hoarding my memories. What are we but a walking microprocessor with a massive memory cache? OK, don't answer that. But, biology aside, aren't we very much shaped by our experiences?

I have an above-average memory. It's not quite as good as it used to be -- I never used to write much down, I memorized all the phone numbers I used often, and I had a pretty good recall for addresses, too. These days I have the stuff I use regularly stored in memory, like driver's license, SIN, credit card numbers and expiry dates, Aeroplan number, that kind of thing. I wouldn't care if someone erased those -- as long as I can still read, I can read those numbers off slips of paper. But quite often I can't recall certain details, trivial stuff I used to rattle off easily, and it bugs me. It's as if the memory cache is filling up, and something's got to be erased before I can store more. Now here I am, blogging stories and posting photos, putting my thoughts out for all to see... if one day I had Alzheimer's, would I read this blog and have some kind of cognitive spark? Or will the undocumented memories be lost forever?

It occurred to me one day, after someone commented on my memory (usually prefaced by "I have such a crappy memory"), that part of me doesn't believe that a having a good memory is a gift at all. I feel that my memory is as it is because I feel it's important. Just like other things that we feel are important, like keeping a tidy house, or exercising, we engage in these activities not out of discipline but a deep-seated regard for its value to ourselves. So, I make a point of remembering things of no material consequence, such as whether a person likes a particular Jamaican rum, because it makes that person much more real to me -- in my mind. They're not just a walking microprocessor wrapped in biology, as I said before, they're a flesh-and-blood unique creature with a predilection for Appleton rather than Captain Morgan. Sounds like a paperweight example, but when you think of 5 billion or so people on this planet, and no two people born the same, it's these little details that begin to distinguish people apart from physical characteristics... in addition to their tastes for spirits, there are preferences for food, fashion, structures, climate, cars, and even each other's company. (My little segue back to the film, you could see that coming.)

The two characters in the film are so different, and I can relate to that. Or, maybe I dated someone so like me I had to break up with him because of a hidden self-loathing... Ha! -- I think not, he was really just a pompous bastard... anyway... I won't say too much more, other than mention a hilarious but apt reference to the "dining dead" -- couples having dinner and being so bored with each other that they just focus on their food -- and a line from the film that had me laughing: "Just because you talk constantly doesn't mean you're communicating," says Joel.