After his considerable success with Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze arranged a DVD set of his earlier music video and documentary work and that of two other exemplary music video artists. Chris Cunningham was a great video technician and engineer. Michel Gondry had an outstanding set of experimental narratives and visual displays. In several respects, Gondry was the most interesting of the three. He was not only a successful musician, unlike the other two, but his exploration of dream states and wide-ranging experimentation in visualizing music and dreams far exceeded the variety and depth of meaning exhibited by the others. He came from a family of musicians and inventors, and had been making short quality films since he was in high school. While many artists had dabbled in dream narratives, none had experimented anywhere near as much as Gondry had over the years.
Gondry, and his screenwriting collaborator Charlie Kaufman specialize in reordering perception and perspective multiple times over the course of a narrative in order to sift out a meaning or group of meanings for the whole. In their view, consciousness is a perception rather than a concrete truth. People base their beliefs on fears and comfortable assumptions. When abruptly shifted outside their conscious defenses, their free association or dream life may reveal something more central to their being. Joel, an uptight loner, and Clementine, an impulsive experimenter, drive each other crazy. The story takes them and us on a torturous journey through time and memory. In the process, it reveals something profound about what we need to know, what has real value in our awareness of life and each other.
Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry first began pitching the film in 1998 and perfected what they wanted to accomplish over the following six years, with plenty of room left over for improvisation and spontaneity. Gondry went out of his way to keep Jim Carrey buttoned down and off guard by arranging for others to ignore cues or make sudden unexpected moves. Winslet was encouraged to improvise and came through magnificently. Only Gondry knew how he was going to use the disparate scenes he shot to make a coherent film. They used music while the characters were talking and silence when they stopped to emphasize that talking was the lie and sifting out what was meant was where it was all processed. Several happy accidents, such as the circus with elephants and the snow on the beach were exploited in key scenes.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes the audience on a fascinating journey into the meaning of consciousness and love. Where each of the other films in this series acknowledged the groping for what the main characters really wanted out of life, only Gondry’s film made the interior journey the centerpiece of the story. Of all the things humans fall into, love is one of the biggest wildcards, especially in an age where every aspect of pleasure has been thoroughly commercialized. Gondry’s film suggests that commercializing the elimination of pain may destroy everything that makes life worth living