The technical-instrumental rationality of the capital-centric mode of production is also present in the intricacies of artistic/cultural production, a rationality that represents the very rationality of domination, a repression of a society in the process of self-alienation. Love, like every form of human expression and feeling, is an individual process susceptible to the positivization of productive forces, thus acquiring an even more subjective economic function than in other periods of humanity.
An impulse to run and a train to Montauk. The beach house and the cold waves. On the return express. "What a coincidence." And we don't know if it is, but we imagine it's not.
Joel and Clementine have a beautiful reunion. Only later do we learn about the past. The Lacuna. Lacuna Inc. Forgetting is the business. As we discover what they both did, we uncover what they were, who they are, and what one is and is not based on the people they loved and lived with. The Lacuna that remains, like a column in the room that had no function but made a difference as a presence, with the difference that people have a function; we are social, and function should not be confused with utility.
We discover the cause of Patrick's surprise when he finds Joel in front of Clem's house. And we discover how narrative deconstruction guides us through a relationship that was suffocated.
Spaces and scenes that lose their details as time goes backward. Regression. Whether due to distance or drug use. I remember not remembering, but I never remember to remember.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), direct by Michel Gondry
Hormones activated by synapses and electrical pathways in the brain drawing on a cerebral map what we call "memories," erased like a laser tattoo by electrical cables and their monitors.
The film represents an interesting inversion, not a denial of idealized romantic love, but rather how capitalism reinforces this ideal with the establishment of a market for erasing flawed, human, real love.
Rationalized, measured love as a fetish for science revealing the "secrets" of the soul and spirit. Love is a business. Flowers. Cards. Plush toys. The market exists as an affirmation of romantic love. Love is things. Love is capital. Memories are things. Memories become disposable commodities. The curious thing is the objects themselves that express a representation of love, of "I thought of you," "I remembered you," forming a collection of love inside garbage bags and boxes.
- "This here has a funny story..."
- "Please, don't say anything, just focus on the object."
Objects are the endpoint to the starting point.
The perfection of means becomes the perfection of love. The perfection of technique in creating the illusion of reproducing perfect love. Which, like everything that is perfect, never existed. "Domination" of oneself in a totalitarian character, which, in the stage of capitalist productive forces depicted, with its new love market niche, shows how the rationality of the individual in capitalism requires a certain level of objectification of the other to be translated into desire, to be almost Sartrean. Desire for things = desire for people.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A deluge that sweeps away those restored fragments, symbolized in walls, faces, furniture, and situations, the interactions of the self with the other and with things. The beach house, being devoured by the infestation of an invader in a cathartic scenario.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), direct by Michel Gondry
"Many guys think I'm a concept," the concept as the thing itself and the way of perceiving that thing? "That I complete them," love doesn't complete anyone; love often doesn't live up to its own concept, whatever it may be.
Love, in the contradiction between idealism and praxis, dialectically manifests itself in its opposite: hatred. From one extreme to another, where the result can be observed in mediation. The ontological will be its experience beyond what is technically set and calculable, configurable and delimited, invisible to the eyes by the pixels of the monitor.
Technique connects the lover and the beloved, like the tape of songs, the written letters, the Lacuna Inc. note saying that Clem decided to forget Joel. Things can link point A to point B, but love will never be the thing itself because even when memories are erased, love crosses the administered path.
Love as physiology can be traced, erased, removed, like a useless appendix, this is what is removed by technicality. Love as abstraction becomes everything and nothing. Love, as reality, as "I love you," is the "it's okay" said by Joel at the end, okay with the flaws and imperfections of both.
"Just wait. I don't know. I want you to wait... just a little."
...
"Okay."
"Seriously?"
"I'm not a concept, Jorge, I'm a messed-up girl looking for peace of mind. I'm not perfect."
"I don't see anything I don't like about you."
"But you will."
"But right now, I don't."
"But you will. You'll find things. And I'll get bored and feel trapped. Because that's what happens with me."
"It's okay."
...
"It's okay... it's okay."
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), direct by Michel Gondry
Comments