Recommended with caution. Charlie Kaufman, who wrote this movie, also wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and I must say, he is probably the most interesting and unique writer in Hollywood. Though I disagree with his worldview, his stories are very thought-provoking and stimulating. Years ago, Francis Schaeffer opened the eyes of the Faith Community to see that Art movements are driven, not merely by aesthetics and style, but by philosophy and worldviews for changing culture. Well, I’m here to say that modern movies (along with TV) is the new dominant art form that is driven by philosophy and worldviews. And this movie proves the point loudly. The power of movies is the ability to incarnate a worldview into the story such that it fleshes out what is otherwise considered an ivory tower philosophizing. Case in point: Eternal Sunshine, which deliberately proposes the Nietzschean philosophical notion of the “eternal return” or “eternal recurrence.” Bizarre brain hurting stuff that would otherwise be limited to pointy-headed academics arguing in a classroom is now popularized for the culture to consume, and 99 percent of the viewers won’t have a clue that they are ingesting and synthesizing the philosophy of the Grandfather of Postmodernism himself, “The Antichrist,” Friedrich Nietzsche. The story is a romance between Joel (Jim Carrey), a nerdish boring nobody, and Clementine (Kate Winslet), a wacky impulsive girl who fall in love and out of love because they end up getting on each other’s nerves. Clementine goes to a special doctor who can erase memories in order to purge herself of all the memories of Joel, who ended up making her miserable. When Joel discovers this, he goes to purge his memories of her as well. Unfortunately, in the middle of the erasing, we are in Joel’s mind, and he decides he doesn’t want to erase her because there was so much good that he experienced because of her. So he seeks to try to save some of those memories by harboring them in secret recesses of his mind. It’s all very clever and interesting, and the movie is cut non-linear, so it reinforces the confusion Joel is experiencing as he discovers his blunder. Well, what happens is that they end up together again, without knowing who each other is, and start a romance all over. When one of the employees loses faith in the company and reveals to the two lovers that they have been together in the past and erased their memories, the two of them get depressed and consider breaking up to avoid the inevitable misery. Clementine says, they haven’t changed. They are the same people, and they will end up doing the same thing to each other. But Joel ends up telling Clementine, “So what.” So what if that happens. There is so much fun along the way before they get there. They decide to just go for it anyway. This is a very interesting proposition that our memories, (another postmodern discussion) are not mere reminiscences floating around in our brains, but substantively change who we are. Trying to get rid of bad memories will not redeem us. They change us permanently, and are inescapably a part of who we are. And here’s where Nietzsche comes in. Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence or eternal return was another logical result of the “death of God” philosophy. He understood that linear history, with its beginning, middle and end, reflected a Christian worldview of origins and purpose, so he tried to replace that linearity with a cyclical view he called “eternal recurrence.” This view posited that the universe, being eternal, had no beginning but was eternally changing. Since the universe is finite, it will ultimately keep changing through every possible change, recycling all possible states, over and over, throughout all eternity. There is no heaven, no eternal reward and punishment; there is simply the eternal return of everything. Essentially, this is a rather pessimistic worldview about the nature of man. But so what? Says Nietzsche. So then we should embrace this fact that man is “eternally the same,” he doesn’t change, and is destined to repeat himself, winding up in the same place he started. We should accept this and “be who we are,” rather than try to change ourselves according someone else’s morality (read: Christianity). Lest anyone think I am reading too much into the film: A big worldview clue for the viewer of movies is that when a character in a movie quotes someone like a famous person, that is more than likely a reference from the writer to the influence of the theme. And Kaufman has the Kirsten Dunst character in Eternal Sunshine quote Nietzsche from Bartlett’s quotations, not once, but twice, just to make sure we get it. She quotes, “Blessed are the forgetful: for they “get the better” even of their blunders.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #217). Kaufman mocks traditional story structure and along with it, traditional morality, by having protagonists NOT learn and NOT change for the better. In other words, we are redeemed not by repenting or changing but by recognizing that we don’t change, and just enjoy the ride of life. Experience without morality. This nihilistic worldview scorns redemption, and condescends to traditional story structure. But of course, in a twist of self-contradiction, it ultimately supports traditional notions of redemption because proposing that we need to stop seeking redemption and embrace who we are is in fact a proposition of a kind of redemption. It’s just a different kind of redemption. But it is still saying we are doing something wrong and need to change how we are dealing with it. Instead of realizing our faults and changing them according to a moral standard, this is a redemption from morality and goodness into the selfish embracing of ourselves without repentance. By the way, the movie is edited non-linearly, which also reinforces the Nietzschean contempt for linear history. A brilliant script and movie with a diabolically egocentric worldview. By the way, in case you are interested, I write all about this and how Nietzsche has influenced other films in my book, Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment.

Not Recommended. This is a story about a neurotic control clean freak, played by Ben Stiller who falls for loosey goosey freebird Polly, played by Jennifer Anniston, after his new wife leaves him on the first day of their honeymoon for a scuba diving instructor. This Farrelly Brothers wannabe is loaded with a lot of very interesting quirky characters with a lot of laughs, but never quite measures up to the masters of quirk. Ben is obsessed with hygiene, Polly is so absent-minded, she forgets why she calls Ben in the middle of discussions. Ben’s boss, played with a hearty humor by Alex Baldwin, is a crude yet lovable no-nonsense New Yorker. And Ben’s friend, played hilariously by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a self-obsessed has-been actor. Some funny moments in this pic, but there are some major problems with it. First, the movie is set up as a typical romantic comedy, so the excessive potty humor jars it out of its genre. It’s sortofa confusion between gross out and traditional romance. But that could be simply my personal taste. The major problem with the movie is in the character. Polly, the love interest in Ben’s story, is not ultimately a desirable catch. The storytellers give us no depth or complexity to her character other than one small reference to the fact that her father lived a double life with a second family in another city. But she has no character arc, she learns nothing in the process, she is commitment-phobic and ends commitment phobic, without any personal growth. She has no real special traits that make her sympathetic or desirable. Her dominant trait is her wild risk-taking, which considering the source of it, is not really a virtue, though it is portrayed as such. In short, she is really an uninteresting person and an undesirable partner to pursue, which makes the film unsatisfying.

Not Recommended. This movie is mostly about lust, actually. It’s central themes are that love is all around us, and that we must communicate to one another our love or suffer in uneccessary misery. I think the reason why it is an ensemble piece is precisely to convey this idea that there is a lot of love going on and we need to see it (a positive note in a post-911 world. The narrator even mentions 911 in the Voiceover). Unfortunately, there are so many stories going on that it is rather unsatisfying and confusing at times. Now I don’t disagree with the themes, I just think that the stories they chose to communicate these themes reveal a rather shallow understanding of love as, yet again a Romantic idolatry of passion over purity. Here they are:
1. Alan Rickman plays a business man who is tempted by his seductress secretary, while his wife, played brilliantly (as always) by Emma Thompson, deals with discovering it. The interesting thing about this story is that he never gets to the infidelity, he merely begins flirting with it and takes a first step. Emma discovers the first step and they have to struggle with this in their marriage. Actually, a good story, and it ends a bit open-ended which is not bad in and of itself, except that most of the marriage stories in this tale do not have the happy endings, thus giving a subversive negative feeling about marriage itself. Would have been a great opportunity of having a man choosing the right thing and growing in his love. But there is a sense of the reality of such struggles that I think was good. It’s just that movies ARE NOT REALITY, they are about how reality SHOULD BE. SO, it would have been better to show the guy struggling, making a bad choice, but then making the right choice and being better for it. Nothing wrong with temptation and even failure in movies, just show us redemption or what good choices can accomplish. Reinforce good values, not negative ones.
2. Colin Firth plays a married man who discovers his wife is committing adultery with his brother, so he moves out and gets a place in the country where he can write a book. He ends up falling in love with his Portugese cleaning woman, in one of the only good stories here. They do not speak a common language, but through subtitles we discover that they think about and talk about the very same things to each other without knowing about it. In other words, they are of the same mind and heart, and are therefore made for each other and don’t know it. Great and good old fashioned love story.
3. Another unknown-to-me actor, Billy Nighy, plays an aged grandfather of rock and roll who has a comeback with a remake of his Christmas hit, “Love is all around.” It is a very relevant and original story in that he is the only one who really speaks the truth about his façade life of lonely selfishness to radio DJs and television shows, and gets rich over it, and no one even cares about the fact that he is speaking the truth about the emptiness of it all. In fact, people get embarrassed and try to ignore it, another clever and original way of showing how we do not face our need for real love. What is great about his story is that it is the realization that he was unaware of the true friendship that he had with his manager while being immersed in so much “Hollywood” fake love. At the end he makes the right choice to express his loving friendship (not homosexuality) with his abused manager and is a better man for it. Great story, great moral.
4. Two actors who I do not know play a couple of stand-ins for porn movies. They fall in “love” with each other while standing in on set faking sex acts for the lighting and camera men to get their equipment set for the real stars. This story alone, while highly original, is entirely inappropriate and worth scrapping the movie because of it’s gratuitous eye-closing scenes. In a way, it shows the dehumanization of sexuality in porn, and how sex can be separated from love, but in another way, it actually devalues the sacredness of sexuality by having fun with it.
5. High Grant plays the newly instituted Prime Minister who falls in love with one of his low class maids who lives in a “dingey” part of London, and who has a fowl mouth that illustrates that lack of upbringing. Well, this is supposed to be a Cinderella story, but in fact, it was also unsatisfying because quite frankly, I considered the maid as unworthy of the pursuit, not because she was low class, but because she showed no character quality that transcended her low class and made her worthy. Beauty alone is a shallow and immature understanding of love which made this story unappealing.
6. Liam Neeson plays the widowed dad of a 9 year old who discovers his son is struggling under the misery of first love himself. Well, this is all rather cute in placing the existential angst of love into the mouth of a child, but again it was a rather unfulfilling story because 9 year olds cannot truly understand love and it is quite inappropriate to encourage this idea, which continues to push the inevitable sexuality of relationships to younger and younger ages. The father is shown connecting with his son and helping him to overcome his shyness, but again this otherwise good attempt to show father/son relationship is actually subversive because it creates the illusion of maturity in youth that simply does not exist, which fosters the lie that kids are their own people who have the right to make their own decisions in life, you know, “rights of the child” and all that agenda that is the attempt to overthrow the authority of parents over their children by making kids out to be “little adults.”
7. Keira Knightly plays a newly married woman who discovers her husband’s best friend does not actually hate her, as she supposes, but is in love with her and therefore too ashamed to face her and tell her. A good premise with a bad conclusion. He finally has the “guts” to reveal to her his undying love under the nose of her husband and she kisses him, leaving us with another ambiguous ending. This was entirely inappropriate and left me with another dissatisfied feeling, making the movie 4 to 3 in favor of bad love stories. I have no problem with having some divergent conclusions to show the negative and positive responses to truth, but if the positive does not outweigh the negative by enough, the resultant feeling one leaves with is not positive, but negative.
8. Laura Linney plays a woman who is so obsessed with taking care of her mentally handicapped brother in a hospital that it gets in the way of her finding her own love. She is always loving and giving to her brother who calls her all the time, and when she finally finds a guy who likes her and goes to bed with her, she is interrupted by yet another meaningless phone call by her brother with an imaginary problem. She chooses to fly to the immediate aid of her brother again rather than give the love interest attention, and thereby loses the relationship. I think this might be interpreted one of two ways: either you see it as a subversive anti-family story that shows that when you make your family the most important, regardless of their dysfunction, then you ruin your own chances at life and love. Or secondly, that sometimes familial love is just as powerful and legitimate as romantic love. Considering the context of the entire movie, I think it is the former, and therefore a negative love story.