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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Philosophers on Film)

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For philosophers, I imagine that "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is an intellectual feast. The central conceit of the film after all is that people can erase painful memories, ranging from the death of a pet to an unhappy love affair, as easily as they now get laser surgery in a shopping mall to permanently correct their vision. This notion --which may become reality in the future-- raises all kinds of fascinating questions of morality and ethics as well as questions about what memory amounts to anyway.

This book --which is somewhat overpriced given it is a paperback and fairly slim-- addresses some of these questions. It is not written by one author but rather is a collection of essays by various philosophers and sundry deep thinkers. As such, it is somewhat of a mixed bag. Some of the essays are very well written and make interesting points. Ones that fall into that category are C.D.C. Reeve's "Two Blue Ruins" which is the essay that most directly focuses its analysis on the film. Another is Julia Driver's "Memory, Desire, and Value in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" which explores the question of whether forgetting someone can be harmful to the person forgotten (given the way the fictional Joel Barish reacts to the news that his lover the tempestuous Clementine Kruczinski has done just that, I think the answer is pretty much yes).

On the other end of the spectrum are the last two essays in the book. The first of these is Stephen White's "Michel Gondry and the Phenomenology of Visual Perception" really doesn't belong in this volume in my opinion since it talks about the myriad tricks that Gondry, the filmmaker of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," uses in his film making projects instead of philosophical issues. Also, White seems to be one of those writers who can take fairly straightforward concepts and ideas and make them hopelessly arcane and inaccessible. As for the last essay, George Toles' evocatively named "Trying to Remember Clementine," the author simply does not talk enough about the film and problems and questions that it raised, preferring to gallop off on tangents.

The rest of the essays are in the middle. One thing that I found somewhat annoying was that a couple of the authors made factual errors about events in the film, which made me wonder whether they had watched it recently before they started writing about it. The editors of the volume also did not have their contributors read from one standardized script, so they sometimes draw out inferences and meaning from things that weren't in the movie or which their fellow contributors did not refer to.

The main knock against this collection is that it didn't have essays that address other questions raised by the movie's concept of memory erasure. For example, it would have been interesting had neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks (of "Awakenings" and "the Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" fame) weighed in about what really might be possible in terms of memory erasure and what forms amnesia takes. Similarly, I would have liked to have seen an essay from some psychiatrist or relationship specialist in which the idea of whether Joel and Clementine having lost their bitter memories of their breakup would have been able to have made another go of things. Still another welcome essay would have been from someone who specializes in medical ethics about the morality of the service offered by the fictional Doctor Howard Mierzwiak of Lacuna Inc.

But I did find the essays enlightening and thought provoking for the most part (with the exceptions noted above).