Download Collective Reality: Narrative & Mediatized Memory in Eternal Sunshine and more Summaries Voice in PDF only on Docsity!
Narrative and Mediatized Memory in
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Carolyn Jess-Cooke, University of Sunderland, UK
A recent surge of films depicting memory have indicated the increasing prominence of memory narratives in the public sphere. [1] Although memory has occupied film as a major thematic interest since modernity, the cinematic treatment of memory and amnesia has altered significantly throughout the course of the last few years, particularly in terms of memory's operation in media spaces. The focus of this essay is therefore on "mediatized" memory, or the notion of a collective, mediated memory narrative through which the past can be re-experienced, and by which processes of memorialization can be socially organized as visual events. Mediatized memories are filmed, televised, or digitally-rendered reproductions of the past which create a collective mnemic reality that reproduces the past to the extent that the "real" event is displaced from public memory. Consequently, a mediatized memory re- constructs a past that is "deprived of its substance" (?i?ek, 2002: 11). As Slavoj ?i?ek puts it, [t]he authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate "effect", sought after from digitalized special effects, through reality TV and amateur photography, up to snuff movies (?i?ek, 2002: 12). Speaking of 9/11 -- the most mediatized tragedy in history -- ?i?ek identifies confusing similarities between the "real" event of 9/11 and previous Hollywood portraits of disaster, and between its memorials and replays across mass media. In addition, the "cobweb of semblances" surrounding 9/11 indicated increasingly ruptured temporalities inherent in media practices and memory processes. For whereas memorialization normally requires distance from the event, the proximity of 9/11, or its function as both a recently traumatic occurrence and an archived memory, pointed towards a shattered temporality inherent in its attendant memory processes. 9/11's double occupation of "live-ness" -- or live footage which was replayed almost constantly on multiple news stations for weeks afterwards -- and "past-ness" created subjects and spectators who experienced the event without being present, and who were subsequently interpellated by memory practices in its wake. In short, media activities confined 9/11 to memory almost as soon as it transpired. Set in the geographical and ideological aftermath of 9/11, Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) comments upon media's acceleration of memory by showing that the absence of temporal distance, as well as the absence of a symbolic and temporal framework, blurs boundaries between the past and present and risks repetition-compulsion at the level of both individual and collective memory processes. This essay uses Eternal Sunshine to examine the impact of mass media upon memory in contemporary popular culture as a "narrativizing" agent, or as a means by which history is rendered accessible as a mediated narrative to be spectated and publicly remembered (see also Grainge, 2003). Others have shown that mediatized memory shatters the boundaries between personal and collective
memory, causing, to some degree, the "prosthetic" effect of memory and, in the case of cinema, mimicking the sensuous affective-ness of memory (Burgoyne, 2003; Landsberg, 2004; Sturken 1997). To this I would add that the present "state" of popular cultural memory is defined by its reproducibility within media spaces. Cultural memory as a signifier of a signified "real" at the current historical juncture was suggested by the fall of and subsequent rush to memorialise the twin towers, which, as Andreas Huyssen has observed, were already a "monument to corporate modernism" (Huyssen, 2003: 159). The memorialization of memory inherent in this global trauma indicated a shift in contemporary memory discourses towards the remembering of memory itself. This is exactly what happens in Eternal Sunshine. Featuring a fictional company called Lacuna Inc. which erases the memories of traumatised customers, the film depicts the subconscious efforts of Joel Barish to preserve his memories of his ex-love, Clementine, during an operation by Lacuna Inc. to erase those memories. Joel's attempt to preserve his memories in the event of losing Clementine is used here to investigate the "double-ness" of mediatized memory, as well as the difficulties of remembering or indeed retrieving -- by media or otherwise -- that which has been lost. What happens in the course of mediatized memory is that a memory of a memory is created. This re-memory involves specific narrative processes with which "spectators" are called upon to interact and fashion personal "memories", which can lead to their displacement and possible erasure. That Joel's post- erasure actions are geared towards a deeply subconscious re-enactment of his lost memories also suggests a remnant of memory which cannot be erased, and must be framed within a narrative structure. My primary attention is therefore directed toward the processes and methods of re-remembering demonstrated in Eternal Sunshine , which in turn reflect, to an extent, the media's transmission and reception of memories in popular culture. In terms of its narrative strategies -- which involve devising a "double" film narrative and website to feed into our interpretation of the film as memory consumers -- Eternal Sunshine also suggests that media memory practices are complicit with commercialism and with moves towards redefined models of interactivity. The interactive modes showcased in the film offer progressive redefinitions of the relationship between subjective and objective memory, yet there is a suggestion that they can also be regarded as invasive, hegemonic, and violent, hacking into and re-writing the unconscious. To explore these notions of mediatized memory to greater extent, I begin by examining the notion of narrativization, which can be considered primarily as re-remembering. Michael Schudson outlines narrativization as an important feature of "socially structured patterns of recall" (Schudson, 1997: 347). Whereas memory provides the past with meaning, narrativization describes the process of rewriting memory. Narrativization is charged in Schudson's analysis with the social imperative to transmit ideologically-charged memories to other collectives and generations which "distort" an original memory by offering boiled- down narratives of a subjective past. Here I depart from Schudson's reading to explore factors beyond the ideas of distortion and social transmission inherent in narrativization, and, in particular, to reconsider the latent passivity imposed upon subjects in this reading. The revisionary activities inherent in narrativization seem to suggest the opposite, and transmission is regarded in terms of a constructed interactivity. Narrativization underlines mediatized memory's construction of a double subjectivity. Eternal Sunshine figures memory as filmic, with superimpositions, overlapping voices from the past and present, and an editing process that reflects the invasive technologies of mnemonic erasure. In this kind of memory, the subject is also the spectator, both participating
or an "original" memory that is revised by each subsequent relational memory. The process of re-remembering, then, is suggested as the continual revision or re-telling of a core memory. The revisionary logic of the primary and secondary narratives is suggested by Joel's reprisal of his relationship with Clementine immediately after their erasure operations. As Freud implies in his discussion of nachträglichkeit ("afterwardsness"), the revision of memories as the subject matures is necessary "to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development" (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988: 112). In the absence of these memories -- and, additionally, the symbolic grammar with which to revise them -- the subconscious repetition of the past seems inevitable. This is evident in Eternal Sunshine by the portrait of psychic trauma and its effects. After their respective erasure procedures, Joel and Clementine simultaneously re-visit sites of particular importance to their relationship -- Montauk beach, the frozen Charles River in Boston, and each other's homes -- ostensibly prompted by a psychic impulse that could not be erased; a mnemic compulsion that urges repetition instead of re-remembering. The return to these "memory spaces" is a subconscious effort to re-create the "gaps" from the remembered past which, although traumatic, are crucial for psychic development and continuity. These traumatic side-effects notwithstanding, the company that performs the memory erasure procedure, Lacuna Inc., sells memory "gaps" precisely to provide memory continuity without the bad bits of the past. With the emphasis on spectatorship -- showing a patient weeping at footage of a basketball game, for instance, and creating a "cognitive map" of patients' memories before erasing them -- Lacuna represents media's effect on individual memory processes. Whereas this effect has previously been identified in terms of the commodification of media images and narratives of memory, Lacuna commodifies the erasure of psychic memories -- or selective amnesia -- as a necessary social healing procedure (see Landsberg, 2004: 18-21). By involving its own spectatorship in its commodifying discourse, moreover, Lacuna implies cinema's role in fashioning memory narratives as contributing to a cultural "forgetting". This implication occurred before the film hit cinema screens. Stating the "marketing of memory" that is complicit with contemporary memory's collective narrative regimes, Eternal Sunshine 's advertising campaign involved a trailer "commercial" for Lacuna, featuring Dr. Howard Mierzwiak who addressed cinema audiences as potential Lacuna customers: "Why remember a destructive love affair? Here at Lacuna, we have perfected a safe, effective technique for the focused erasure of troubling memories" (Huyssen, 2003: 3). From the outset, the film pointed towards the idea of a dichotomous spectator/consumer of memory: the spectator who pays to forget. Accordingly, the film's website (www.lacunainc.com) stages the Lacuna company as a "real" entity with which the film's spectators can engage and -- like the film's characters -- erase unwanted memories. Containing concealed links to various promotional paraphernalia for the film (such as a link to "experience the procedure" which takes the viewer to another browser with links to purchase the DVD), www.lacunainc.com invites the film's spectator to participate in a fictional testimonial network that in turn promises personal happy endings, or closure, as per the dimensions of classical film narrative. We are invited, like Joel, to erase our traumatic memories. The website presents photographs of fictional satisfied Lacuna customers, testimonials, sound-bites ("'I got my confidence back!' [Edward from New York]"), several polls, an online contact page, a commercial, cut-out coupons, register-for- updates links, and a "friendly postcard" one can send to friends and family to advertise the company. Mimicking (or mocking) other websites such as Weight Watchers TM and
Slimfast.com, which in turn sell personal "narratives" to consumers, promising the close of one life chapter and the beginning of "a new slimmer you", the Lacuna website posits memory as by no means a personal experience, but as a site of interactivity that, in the dawn of new technologies and virtual subjectivities, is a collective hypernarrative -- or "interactive narrative" -- that can be commodified and sold to consumers as a way of making meaning and re-experiencing the past (Manovich, 2002: 227). The hypernarrative framework of the Lacuna website continues within the film. Joel's interaction with his memories -- evidenced by his direction and disturbance of the memory mise-en-scène, re-casting the characters of his imagination, re-performing his roles and actions of the past, and running from Lacuna's "editing" process -- suggests memory as a malleable narrative that can be retold, remade, and re-edited over and over again. To this extent, Joel's memories of Clementine can be seen as memory narratives. The difference between memory narratives and mediatized memory is largely in terms of their interaction within public and private spheres, yet a similar process of narrativization inhabits each. Interactive by nature, and organized into a montage of selected highlights, memory narratives can be seen as a departure from Freud's discussion of "screen memories" (Freud, 1995: 303). Screen memories involve the projection of "two phantasies on to one another" to make "a childhood memory": they are a conflation of desire and memory, described by Freud as "screen" recollection insofar as they simultaneously project the subject's desire and "screen", or mask, the "real" event (Freud, 1995: 315). Memory narratives often juxtapose and conflate memory and desire to register the psychic forces behind mnemic revision. This combination of desire and memory is evident in Joel's possessions that remind him of Clementine. At the beginning of the film Dr. Mierzwiak instructs his clients to bring in all objects that remind them of the person whom they are trying to erase from their memories. In one scene Joel sits in the Lacuna lab "reacting" to various objects that are reminiscent of Clementine (such as a mug with a photo of her on the front and a Boston snow globe) whilst a technician charts a "map" of Joel's memories. The map is co-ordinated by Joel's "emotional response" to these objects. Faced with the snow globe and with echoes of Clementine's laughter on the soundtrack, Joel tells the technician "there's a good story behind this". It would appear that these objects not only conjure the past but articulate narratives of the remembered past: they are memory narratives in the sense that they contain traces of the past that have, perhaps over and over, been invested with a narrative potency, or a narrativized desire. Joel is instructed by Dr. Mierzwiak to "empty your life of Clementine" by removing these objects from his home precisely because they are signifiers of the memory of Clementine, and because they have been emotionally and mnemonically charged with a narrative of his traumatic past. The interpellative potency, or transferential agency, of these figures, spaces, and scenarios of the past may be identified as sense-based, or imbued with memory traces that both invoke emotional responses of desire, and are "moulded" by an emotionally-constructed narrative of the past. Memory narratives provide a framework within which the "emotional core" of memory can find an interpretive space. The film presents the idea of a core memory as the "root" of trauma and, conversely, the root of trauma as based in inexpressible emotion. This "emotional core" is iterated throughout a number of related memories, and situated within narratives of those memories. The suggestion, therefore, is that an originary memory -- or experience -- exists from which many subsequent memories and their traumatic effects derive. The film's originary memory is Joel's mother. [2] Figured as a kind of metanarrative -- or a narrative about a narrative -- from which the scope of linearities and memory traces derive, Joel's mother is representative of a
the narrative of Joel's relationship with Clementine -- is played out in continuity with repressed childhood memories and desire. A parallel can also be found between Pat and the aptly-named Patrick, who is present at Joel's erasure procedure and who is also Clementine's new boyfriend. Like Pat, Patrick robs Joel of the object of his desire. More significant is the fact that Patrick later imitates Joel when he accompanies Clementine to the Charles River and reads aloud from Joel's diary the exact words spoken by Joel to Clementine at the Charles River two years previously, suggesting that Patrick is Joel's psychic replacement, as well as part of Clementine's narrativization of her relationship with Joel. This pattern of mimesis and copying throughout the film's narrative positions Joel's mother as the "original" signifier of loss, with each of the subsequent figures in his memory -- Clementine, Pat, and Patrick -- operating to signify revisions of that loss. Joel's loss of Clementine to the affections of Patrick signifies his repressed feelings of losing his mother's attention as a four-year-old to Pat. The moment of Joel's "original" loss created a memory lacuna within which similar experiences were interpreted as subconscious revisions and traces of that event. The film constructs the mother as a type of metanarrative to signify and capture a particular approach to the past that narrates the subject as part of the past. Likewise, by re-constructing a common point of origin, collective memories may be seen not only to proffer the experience of the past to those who have not lived that past -- like Landsberg's prosthetic memories -- but to offer specific ways of accessing, remembering, and re-telling that past (Landsberg, 2004: 23-24). The pattern of mimesis and copying that underlines the construction of Joel's memory extends to Joel's "mediatization" as both a spectator of and object within his memories, or as a secondary subject. In his revisited memories Joel not only directs the mise-en-scène like a director, but rehearses lines and mimics his previous actions like an actor -- for example, crying as a four-year-old under the kitchen table, crooning in the sink whilst being bathed as a "baby". Occasionally, he appears as three figures in his memories, as a director, actor, and spectator. All of Joel's revisionary activities suggest memory narratives as reconnecting with the past self as an object. This reconnection is not totally premised upon visualizing the self as "other", but upon a re-engagement with a psychic "copy" of the past self in much the same manner as a spectator identifies with the mimetic reality of the cinema screen. This process can be argued as a bodily identification, or what Michael Taussig describes as "a palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived" (Taussig, 1993: 21). The importance of the senses in this reading suggests that representing, telling a story of or re-engaging with the past involves a synthesis of the senses. Joel's secondary subjectivity, in other words, is not simply a discrete mnemic "copy", but a filmically constructed part of his narrativized past through which sense-based memories -- from childhood, for instance -- may be re-remembered and re-interpreted. Re-experiencing the past therefore involves a narrative system that privileges not only the subjectivity but also the body of the spectator in order to re-narrativize the past. Proceeding from J. J. Gibson's theory of ecological perception, Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity deconstructs the divide between subjectivity and otherness by suggesting that human behaviour adapts to and mimics its environment (see Gibson, 1979; Taussig, 1993). Gibson's theory posits seeing as an activity that prompted response, movement, and action on the part of the perceiver. To Taussig, this action is mimicry. The "sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived" observed by Taussig indicates, first of all, the mimetic properties of memory narratives, which invoke the emotional roots of memory. Memory narratives may therefore be perceived as affective, as not only "hacking into" the
body of the spectator but as entering the senses of the spectator, narrativizing, as it were, the unutterable emotional traces of our memories. This is perhaps the reason why Joel is asked to react to the objects that reminded him of Clementine in order to provide a map of his memories, and why memories of sounds, tastes, and physical sensations lead Joel to visit (other) memories -- such as the song "Row, row, row your boat", which Joel sings to remind him of a "deeper" childhood memory of drinking raindrops beneath a make-shift wooden garden shelter. The song -- like "My Darling Clementine" -- contains this memory, which also contains the remembered taste of the raindrops: it is a memory space. The fact that senses other than sight play a part in Joel's remembering suggest memory as less a cognitive activity than a sensuous one. Memory is not locked in the mind, nor is it specifically cognitive. It is located in the entire body. This is reflected in the ways in which Joel re-experiences his past. Throughout the memory erasure procedure, Joel's process of narrativization, or re-remembering, is a kind of experiential spectatorship. This is the notion of experiencing by perceiving. Joel not only "spectates" his memories, but re-experiences their various sensual processes and emotional contexts. Like Taussig's suggestion of the flexibility of the self, floating easily between the environment and subjectivity, experiential spectatorship can be read as reconciling mutually affective embodiment and disembodiment at the level of mnemonic mimicry. Memory narratives are specifically point-of-view based, yet they may figure the subject as a third party, as present in their own memory (like Joel), as a mimetic double that guides the narrativizing process of the memory. The dialectic of absence-presence at the heart of memory in this context is an important component of narrative memory. The emotional core of a memory retains the "presence" of the subject, and it is essentially this bodily-stored emotional response that ruptures temporalities by re-situating the subject back into the remembered past via his or her senses. This is exactly what happens to Clementine. In the primary narrative, Clementine suffers the emotional aftermath of her break-up with Joel without realizing or remembering why. The suggestion is that Lacuna has erased her psychic memories, not her bodily memories; the emotional, bodily responses to the break-up with Joel therefore do not connect with her psychic memories. She has no narrative framework to make sense of her feelings. Clementine automatically wants to repeat her forgotten experiences by replacing Joel with Patrick, returning to Montauk, and visiting the frozen Charles River. Most telling, however, is Clementine's dialogue with Patrick. During Joel's erasure procedure, Clementine tells Patrick: "I'm lost, I'm scared, I feel like I'm disappearing, my skin is coming off, I'm getting old, nothing makes any sense to me". Lacuna has erased Clementine's narrative memory which makes sense of her emotions. The memory of Joel is contained as a traumatic trace in Clementine's subconscious which manifests itself in various forms of grief and repetition. Clementine's feelings (of disappearing, for instance) correlate with the Clementine of Joel's memory, who continually "disappears" from Joel as he runs from memory to memory, indicating, perhaps, a psychic interactivity. The film additionally raises the issue of mediatized memory as a disembodied spectatorial experience. Joel not only views himself as part of a mental projection, but experiences himself as doubled and virtually disembodied. Because his memories are reproducible and cybernetic, so too is his identity. The difficulty faced by both to distinguish between their corpo(real) selves and their subconscious selves seems to underline a primary spectatorial process. The disembodied effect of spectatorship arises in the event of all spectatorial activity taking place within the realms of the psyche. Yet as recent scholarship qualifies, the body
"original" memory is the sense-based trace of original experience. As LaCapra observes, "memory is always secondary since what occurs is not integrated into experience or directly remembered, and the event must be reconstructed from its effects and traces" (LaCapra, 1998: 21). The juxtaposition and conflation of primary and secondary memory narratives in Eternal Sunshine , as well as the suggestion that the primary memory exists deep inside the body of the subject, demonstrates that memory as a cultural object is always secondary, and is accessible solely "through the reliving or acting-out be supplemented by secondary memory and related processes (for example, narration, analysis, bodily gesture, or song)" (LaCapra, 1998: 21). In terms of mediatized memory, however, memory as "always secondary" is dictated through processes which construct virtual, spectatorial experiences of the past -- which are often deeply engrained in emotion -- but which additionally create false memories that are far removed from the historical event. Methods of re-telling or narrativizing the past are an integral part of maintaining cultural stability, identity, and history, as evidenced by survivor testimonies (captured on film, for instance). Yet, as Eternal Sunshine warns, the impact of mediating technology on memory -- treating it as a public spectacle, available for editing, commodifying, and reproduction -- runs the risk of perpetuating absence and cultural scenarios of re-enactment for the foreseeable (or unforeseeable) future. As long as methods of narrativization function in support of the interactive spectator, it is social responsibility, as opposed to passivity, that will frame public understanding of and response to the past. Notes [1] For example, Memento (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2000), The Man without a Past (Dir. Aki Käurismaki, 2002), 50 First Dates (Dir. Peter Segal, 2004), Overboard (Dir. Garry Marshall, 1987), Men in Black (Dir. Barry Sonnenfield, 1997), Men in Black II (Dir. Barry Sonnenfield, 2002), The Bourne Identity (Dir. Doug Liman, 2002), Mulholland Drive (Dir. David Lynch, 2001), The Bourne Supremacy (Dir. Paul Greengrass, 2004), Dark City (Dir. Alex Proyas, 1998), Code 46 (Dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2003), Vanilla Sky (Dir. Cameron Crowe, 2001), The Manchurian Candidate (Dir. Jonathan Demme, 2004), The Forgotten (Dir. Joseph Ruben, 2004), Finding Nemo (Dir. Andrew Stanton, 2003), Paycheck (Dir. John Woo, 2003), Gothika (Dir. Mathieu Kassovitz and Thom Oliphant, 2003), The Final Cut (Dir. Omar Naim, 2004). Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995) also serves as a compelling example here. [2] Another example of this is found in Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002). Whereas Eternal Sunshine demonstrates revision in terms of Joel's individual memory, Minority Report constructs the mother, or the revised memory of the mother, as a metanarrative that signals social post-genocide trauma. Minority Report portrays a futuristic US federal institution called "Pre-Crime" that uses three human "pre-cognitives" -- Arthur, Dashiell, and Agatha to predict murders which Pre-Crime detectives attempt to prevent. The pre-cogs' psychic activities are recorded, erased, manipulated, and made available for public scrutiny by Pre-Crime. Each of the predicted murders in Minority Report are shown to reflect Agatha's memory of her mother's murder, which repeats at least four times during the film and is dismissed by Pre-Crime officers as "a pre-cog déja-vu". The suggestion is that Agatha's "déja-vu" is not a prediction of murder but the revised memory of her mother, meaning that Pre-Crime convicts innocent men and women on the basis of a false memory. That each of the murders "mimic" the murder of Agatha's mother at the same time as they operate as separate events indicates memory's referentiality, or hypernarrativity, constructing
memory as a narrative that operates within the framework of mutually influential cognitive processes. References Bal, Mieke (1999) Introduction, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, Leo Spitze (eds.), Acts of Memory : Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: UP of New England, pp. vii-xvii. Burgoyne, Robert (2003) Memory, History and Digital Imagery in Contemporary Film, in Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film. Manchester: Manchester UP, pp. 220-36. Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience : Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Casetti, Francesco (1999) Theories of Cinema 1945-1995. Francesca Chiostri and Elizabeth Gard Bartolini-Salimbeni with Thomas Kelso (trans.), Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Chion, Michel (1999) The Voice In Cinema. Claudia Gorbman (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Doane, Mary Ann (1999) The Voice In The Cinema, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings. Fifth edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1995) Screen Memories, in James Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, (3), pp. 301-322. Genette, Gérard (1997) Palimpsests : Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NB and London: University of Nebraska Press. Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hayward, Susan (2000) Cinema Studies : The Key Concepts. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge. Head, Steve (2000) Minority Report Script Review, in Film Force , February 10. http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/035/035103p1.html?fromint=1. Huyssen, Andreas (2003) Present Pasts : Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Janet, Pierre (1925) Psychological Healing. 2 Vols. New York: Macmillan, 1925; Originally (1919 ) Les Médications Psychologiques. 3 Vols. Paris: Félix Alcan. LaCapra, Dominick (1998) History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP. Landsberg, Alison (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP.
