Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Isaac Richter

One of my favorite films of all time explores what happens inside a person's mind while he's asleep, and the way that director Michel Gondry explores these images is by de-constructing time, distorting images, un-synchronizing sound and taking the characters to places that don't make sense. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the story of Joel Barish (Jim Carrey, at his subdued best), a very reserved man who just broke up with his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet, manic, like we never saw her before). A few days later, he tries to win her back, but he finds out that she had him erased from her memory. Joel finds out about this company called Lacunna Inc, run by Dr. Howard Mirzwieak (Tom Wilkinson). What his procedure does is give people who have gone through bad break-ups a chance to start over by erasing that relationship from their memories, so Joel decides he wants to have it done.
The film plays with time a lot. Before we even hear of Lacunna Inc, we get a scene in which two men, who we later find out are the mechanics from Lacunna Inc, go into Joel's apartment to start the procedure. The next scene involves Joel talking to his friends, Rob and Carrie, and he tells them about how he tried to win Clementine back by going to the bookstore where she works with a gift, but when she saw him, she acted like she didn't know him. The way we cut out of this scene and back to Rob and Carrie's house is very unusual. Joel walks down the aisles of the bookstore, and the lights go out one by one in the bookstore, and then Joel turns around and we realize he's already back with his friends. This trick lets us know that we're already inside his mind. We don't realize it until we learn about Lacunna, but when you think about, you realize that this is a memory that needed to be erased, and Charlie Kaufman (the screenwriter) along with Michel Gondry (the director) included this scene to occur inside his mind, as well as give us information on the plot.
Throughout the film, there are other tricks such as this one that remind us we're inside Joel's mind. There's a scene in which Joel and Clementine are in bed inside Joel's mind, in a memory that Lacunna is not supposed to erase, and then they end up, with the bed, on the beach, which is something unusual. There's also a scene in which they're lying on a frozen lake, Joel is saying how he could die right now, and then Clementine disappears along with the lake, and he's in a street instead. All of these tricks lead Joel from one memory to another, and all of these memories are disappearing.
There are also very interesting tricks done with sound. For example, there's a scene in which Joel and Clementine are walking down the flea market, and they start arguing about having a baby. Joel decides to step away from Clementine while she keeps rambling about whether she would be a good mother or not, and we realize that what Clementine is saying is not in synch with her lip movements. This trick is employed, right before the scene turns to a different scene, telling us that this memory is being erased. Other scenes that defy convention are scenes with Joel as a little boy, in which he's still played by Jim Carrey. This one scene in which he supposed to be 4 years old, but he's still this adult in pajamas, hiding under the table. Then there's a scene in which he's pressured by some school bullies to kill a bird, and he gives in. This scene later turns into a long take that follows a little girl and little boy who are supposed to be Joel and Clementine, and we hear their adult voices talking over these images. And then we finally see their faces, we see that they're actually the kids talking with those voices, even though what they say is not in synch with their lip movements, it corresponds with their actions, including a mom watching Joel trying to sophocate Clementine, they tell they're just playing.
This distortion of images, including books disappearing in the bookstore, and sounds being out of sink, is a way to re-create how our memories work. Whenever we look inside our mind, images don't always appear the way real life does, and out memory is not always reliable. Maybe the out-of-synch dialogue is dialogue that Joel remembers in a different way than it actually happened, and it's not in synch with what Clementine said, because she never actually said it. Or maybe he's just filling it in, because he's not watching Clementine while he says it, so he's probably trying to fill in the way Clementine would look saying those words. The memories that are the clearest to him are the good memories, the ones he likes to remember, the ones he wants to remember, and the ones he wants to forget are distorted and out of synch. We don't always see inside our minds the way we see the real world, and because most of this film happens inside a person's mind, it's distorted. It resorts back to a traditional narrative when it's outside Joel's mind, even though in any ocassions, the outside interacts with the inside (when Joel hears that one of the technicians is now dating Clementine for example). It's avant-garde in the way it assembles it' camera-tricks, special effects and images to create a world that we all see, but we don't all share, or can even explain, and in this film, we see a company whose job is to go into this world and manipulate it, so we go into this world as well, and tr to understand it along with the characters, and that's what I feel makes this an avant-garde film. It becomes a surrealist film, since what we see inside our mind is surreal. Charlie Kaufman is a screenwriter who plays with the surreal by bringing audiences into people's minds, including actor John Malkovich's mind and his own, but with this film, we finally get a true feeling of what it is to see someone's thoughts and memories while they're being manipulated.