Today I read Kelvin’s review of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, loved chunks of it, admired the rest, and left feeling warm and happy inside – so I don’t know if Kelvin saw the same film.
It wallowed in its cleverness, it wasn’t nearly as funny as it thought it was, and like so many films today (especially of the “independent” sort) it quite obviously subscribed to the Happy Endings Are Bad school of thought as it dragged the plot kicking and screaming not to its logical end, but to a more cynical climax more acceptable to goatee-stroking film students.
Now, I’ll concede that I am/was a goatee-stroking film student (but without the goatee), and offer a justification for films that don’t end happily. Gus Van Sant, who has at times made baffling choices (shot-by-shot remake of Psycho? Finding Forrester?), was interviewed about his latest movie, Elephant, in Sight and Sound the other month, and a lot of what he said made sense, including this, which seemed so pertinent I wrote it down in my little blue book.
In daily life in America there is always discontinuity. If you wander around or even go to a cohesive interaction like a party everything is made up of non-sequitirs. Things don’t have beginnings and endings in our lives, and if you want to make storytelling lifelike, you have to play by the rules of reality, which is that nothing is connecting, nothing is making sense. It’s like a Hobbesian world of people striving to get their next meal.
I’ve never subscribed to the Happy Endings Are Bad school of thought any more than I’ve subscribed to the diktat Films Must End Happily Because First And Foremost They’re Entertainment. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that what are generally held to be the most unmuddied of happy endings are much less stable than we think. And there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind didn’t end sadly.
If you’ve not seen the film and want to keep the ending a surprise, read no further.
If the “logical end” that Kelvin claims the plot was dragged past is Joel and Clementine’s meeting at Montauk Point, then I’d like to suggest that ending the film at that point would be cheating. When both Joel and Clementine’s friends eventually see them together the business of the memory erasure would be mentioned to one or the other, and their unfortunate discovery would still occur. Their ignorance would not be any kind of defence against tragedy. The way the film progresses beyond this point is not cheating, and it thankfully doesn’t waste time putting the audience through a soap opera style exposure of the truth.
It’s only logical that after a process that is “essentially brain-damage” the participants should be frightened and scared. People suffering from concussion often cry because they’re disoriented. Now imagine that someone you’ve just met, and are falling in love with, exposes you to a taped interview in which they are telling a stranger just how terrible a person you are. You’re not likely to leap into their arms declaiming “Oh darling, you’re so funny!” Of course you’d fall out, just like Joel and Clementine do. But The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn’t end there. The film stops awkwardly outside Joel’s apartment where he and Clementine could either get back together and make new memories of each other or go their separate ways. It’s an Italian Job ending where everything hangs (figuratively rather than literally in this case) in the balance.
Of course, given what we’ve just seen there’s no guarantee that the “Happy Ending” promised by their reunion would be happy at all. It could be miserable: their relationship has already failed once. But this “ending” isn’t forced upon us. The film stops before the story ends and the viewer is left to decide how she wants everything to wind up. It’s a happy film or a sad film depending solely on your outlook.
While we all like to imagine that Michael Caine’s idea to right the bus works, and the lads get away with the gold, somewhere in our hearts we know it’s impossible; and that doesn’t make the Italian Job a sad film.
