Eternally Underrated Movie Of The Spotless Mind in anticlimatic

Or something like that.

Giving it a re-watch after many a year, and I find myself obsessed. I think this happened the first time. There is just something exquisitely otherworldly about this movie. It exists in a subgenre that as far as I can tell has no name or following exactly (though I wish it did), but what I might describe as a kind of first-person adventure beyond the boundaries of time and space.

I didn’t realize the ultimate point of the movie, after Kirsten Dunst mails everyone their forgotten file, until just now:

Erasing memories of a person might erase the pain of having those memories, but it doesn’t change who you are, and if you don’t remember walking naturally into a situation that causes you pain, you’re just going to keep doing it forever. Memory is what prevents us from being further victimized by our own vulnerabilities.

Quite poignant.

And it almost has nothing to do with the journey we go on with Joel through his relationship, in reverse order, trapped in a dream. When he gets back just far enough to where the memories get fond again, before things soured between them, and remembers the love he had for her, and regrets what is happening, but becomes mostly powerless to stop it- the film gets very dark for me. Even the comic relief bits don’t put a dent in it.

The way it’s shot does such a great job of simulating memory. The scene where she crashes his car, I believe, and storms off into the night. Where every time he chases her he catches a phantom, turns, and once again sees her stomping off into the darkness in the other direction. Only to chase, and repeat. It’s such a great film simulation of those pivotal moments in life, perhaps filled with regret, where all we have is this image of a look, perhaps, and the back of someone as they depart.

The way the mind can take a memory saturated with emotion and loop it indefinitely…it’s one of those things I didn’t realize I hoped wasn’t just me. Which I suppose is the purpose of Art itself, really.