Top 10 Movies: #7 – Eternal Sunshine (Reconstructivist Art)

I’m re-running my post on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to commemorate the fact that it’s not only an exemplar of  Reconstructivist Art, it is also movie #7 on my personal top 10 movies list.

In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the aggressively intellectual, post-modernist and experimental inclinations of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman were synthesized with the dream-drenched classic humanism of director Michel Gondry to create a remarkable piece of cinema. The film dramatizes the reconstructivist process of deconstruction followed by rebuilding, in the form of a romantic drama about an embittered couple who elect to undergo a medical procedure to erase all memories of their relationship.

(1) Nod to Artifice: Nearly the entire movie is presented as taking place within the brain/memory/imagination of the main character, although this fact is initially not clear to either him or the audience. Since the character’s memories are being deliberately dismantled, many of the film’s most striking images are different visual representations of a world being unmade –buildings crumbling, objects falling from the sky, people vanishing, things going dark and blurry, colors disappearing, and so forth. The audio of the film also features a reoccurring sound motif, a computerized beep similar to a filmstrip advance noise, that represents the completion of the erasure of a memory.

(2) Classic Structure: The plot of the movie follows what is often called the “oldest of all plotlines”: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl. The movie presents the events in reverse chronology, but (interestingly enough), this does not alter the overall structure.

(3) Iconic and Transcontextual Elements: The most important set of icons and transcontextual elements in the movie are not imported from external sources, as is more typical of reconstructivist art, but are iconicized and transcontextualized within the continuity of movie itself. They are a set of subjectively objects and personal effects, gathered by the main character as an aid to the memory-erasure process, that appear both within his mental reveries, and externally, as misappropriated by the main character’s romantic rival.

(4) Moments of Genuine Depth and Emotion: The crux of the movie is the moment at the very end when the main characters, their affections for each other having literally been disassembled and deconstructed,, make the decision, even in the face of evidence of their essential incompatibility, to believe in the Reality of their love.

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Reconstructivist Art: Eternal Sunshine

[NOTE: We’ll take a break from our current series for the next couple of weeks until the holiday season is over]

Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” considered as an example of Reconstructivist Art

The aggressively intellectual, modernist and experimental inclinations of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman were synthesized with the dream-drenched classic humanism of director Michel Gondry to create a remarkable piece of cinema that dramatizes and reifies the entire Reconstructivist process of deconstruction followed by rebuilding.

Nod to Artifice: Nearly the entire move is presented as taking place within the brain/memory/imagination of the main character, although this fact is not clear to either him or the audience until late in the movie. Since the character’s memories are being deliberately dismantled, many of the films’ most memorable images are different visual representations of a world being unmade –buildings crumbling, objects falling from the sky, people vanishing, things going dark and blurry, colors disappearing, and so forth. The audio of the film also features a re-occurring sound motif, a computerized beep similar to a filmstrip advance noise, that represents the completion of the erasure of a memory.

Classic Structure: The plot of the movie follows what is often called the “oldest of all plotlines”: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl, although the classicism is subverted by the fact that the audience experiences the major events in reverse order.

Iconic and Transcontextual Elements: The most important set of icons and transcontextual elements in the movie are not imported from external sources, as is more typical of reconstructivist art, but are iconicized and transcontextualized within the continuity of movie itself. They are a set of subjectively objects and personal effects, gathered by the main character as an aid to the memory-erasure process, that appear both within his mental reveries, and externally, as stolen and malappropriated by the main character’s romantic rival.

Moments of Genuine Depth and Emotion: The crux of the movie is the moment at the very end when the main characters, their affections for each other having literally been disassembled and deconstructed, face unblinkingly the inevitable mortality of their relationship, and take the plunge for Love (representing the Real) regardless.

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