ABSTRACT
IN A 2 0 0 4 I N T E R V I E W about his screenplay for Eternal Sunshine ofthe Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman discusses his intention of persuading viewers early on that Clementine Kruczynski is, all things considered, a “horrible” person, and then shifting by slow degrees their conception of her so that by the end they “think otherwise.”2 He also declares how important it is to remember that the audience rarely experiences Clementine as a person in her own right. What we see instead are Joel’s projections and memory constructions of her. Since we view events for most of the film from inside Joel Barish’s head, we are obliged to work with his necessarily partial and skewed version of her. “Almost everything [we] see about Clementine is Joel, really.”3 Kaufman’s skepticism about Joel’s and the viewer’s ability to know Clementine as she “really” is conceals a strange faith that knowability is somehow more easily attainable when a different, more “objective” mode of character observation is employed. On the one hand, Kaufman would have us believe that when memory, intuition, and longing (those woefully subjective variables!) come into play in assessing another human being’s attributes, the complex otherness of the person is hopelessly distorted and fictionalized. On the other hand, Kaufman implies that were he to privilege more often Clementine’s autonomous point of view or simply to show situations in a manner that is not confined within Joel’s consciousness (say, cinéma vérité, real time transcriptions of Joel and Clementine interacting in a balanced two-shot) we would have a much better sense of Clementine’s, for lack of a smarter phrase, true nature. I am troubled by Kaufman’s almost knee-jerk appeal here to the fashionable idea that our capacity to imagine those we most care about isn’t worth very much. The imagination, far from being a creative means to higher insight into a fellow being’s qualities, potential, and behavioral nuances, is treated as a mechanism for mainly delusive projections. Because the literal accuracy of even our most recent memories is immediately suspect, what imagination does with memory-whether through selective deletions or wholesale reinvention-is to diminish, and perhaps impoverish, memory’s connections to the real.
