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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Jun. 12th, 2016 07:26 pmCharlie Kaufman, the screenwriter for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, talked about the influence of Lydia Davis’s novel “The End of the Story”, the way she deals with the subtlety of memory and the way it changes as we experience more things over time.
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Davis was talking about the way that memories don’t exist as tape recordings. You have a memory of your first date with this person, and you have a memory of your first date with this person after the relationship is over. Nothing has changed, but your memory of the first date, after the relationship is over, is a completely different memory because it’s infused with what happened between this and the end - and what went wrong, and what you didn’t see at the time, and the end. The end is coloring the beginning, but you still assume it’s the same memory if you don’t think about it. … Memories are re-created. They don’t exist in storage. They’re re-created each time you think of them.
-- Charlie Kaufman, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script”
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Davis was talking about the way that memories don’t exist as tape recordings. You have a memory of your first date with this person, and you have a memory of your first date with this person after the relationship is over. Nothing has changed, but your memory of the first date, after the relationship is over, is a completely different memory because it’s infused with what happened between this and the end - and what went wrong, and what you didn’t see at the time, and the end. The end is coloring the beginning, but you still assume it’s the same memory if you don’t think about it. … Memories are re-created. They don’t exist in storage. They’re re-created each time you think of them.
-- Charlie Kaufman, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script”
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