Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

For this class I read the screenplay for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. It was interesting to read a story in this format, because without visuals it’s really tough to figure out what the mood of the story is. At least, that’s how it for this story. At first the screenplay read as a relatively serious romantic story, aside from a few weird bits (for example, I had trouble picturing the old woman in the commuter tube over New York in any kind of serious way). However, once I got to the scenes where Joel was trying to hide Clementine in his childhood memories, I had a lot of trouble picturing that in a non-comical way.

My point is, I would prefer to push that comical, oddball mood in the film, rather than letting it get serious. Here's how I would achieve that:

- The entire movie is seen in a jumble of out-of-order memories, so the whole thing should feel a bit weird and disjointed. However, in the climax of the film (when Joel and Clementine are trying to escape the disappearing memories), I would like for these different scenes to literally be overlapping. For example, Joel talks to Carrie sitting in a car, then looks out the window and sees himself seated at a kitchen table in the middle of the road. He stands up from the table and walks off the road and onto a beach, where he walks past himself seated by the bonfire.

- Although the screenplay described the scenes with Joel remembering his early childhood with him being shrunken down to an appropriate child-size, I would rather see a full-sized Joel in these scenes. Adult Joel having a bath in the kitchen sink, adult Joel being beaten up by elementary school children, etc. I want to emphasize that he and Clementine are completely out of place in these memories.

- I imagine the use of color being extremely important in depicting a memory being erased. The memory itself will be highly saturated and bright. When it is erased, the color will be drained from it, and then it will become over-exposed so that all details (especially faces) will become blurred, and finally it will fade out to white. I love the image of a grey Joel in an empty, pure white space.

- I think it is important for this color to be apparent whether the scene is a happy or sad one. Whether the memory is good or bad, it should still be more appealing than the greyness of the erased memory. In fact, a high-saturation, high-contrast scene should enhance the anger/discomfort of a scene (for example, the argument in the zoo could feature bright lighting and harsh, contrasting colors, whereas a happier scene would be softly lit). The main emphasis here is that the memory has life to it, and when it is erased it becomes sterilized and dead.

I’m eager (and a bit nervous) to watch this movie, now that I’ve created a pretty clear image in my head of how I’d expect it to look. I did google the film, and was surprised to find that Jim Carrey plays Joel. This makes me suspect that the filmmakers wanted to take the movie in a semi-comical direction just like I did. 

Oh yeah, they totally emphasized the weirdness. Awesome!