Slate’s rave notice for
“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” makes me cringe with disbelief. “This is the best movie
I’ve seen in a decade,” David Edelstein wrote, and he had lots of company from
critics across the spectrum. There’s no accounting for taste and all that. But it reminds me of a
recent conversation I had while standing on line in the men’s room waiting for a urinal, having
just seen a special theatrical screening of “Ripley’s Game” (with John
Malkovich as Ripley).
Guy on line asks me, “Like it?”
“Loved it.”
Guy next to me says,
“I didn’t like it at all.”
“Why not?”
“Badly directed. No suspense. I didn’t care about the
characters.”
“That’s three strikes. What films have you liked?”
It takes him a while.
“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”
“That’s 40 years ago. Nothing more recent?”
Guy
stares at me. He’s still thinking when it’s my turn at the urinal. End of conversation.
In the scheme of things, neither Edelstein’s rave in Slate nor my conversation
in the men’s room means much. (“Ripley’s Game” hasn’t even had a commercial release.) But the
critical hype for “Spotless Mind” has led to some peculiar conclusions, like the one that
sums up a lengthy disquisition on the science of memory
erasure, which is the key to that flick:
While the culture frets over the perils of high-tech erasure,
we should really be worrying about the opposite: what will happen when we remember too
much.
Until I read that, I hadn’t realize the culture was fretting about such
perils. I thought it was fretting about the perils of Iraq, the economy, gay marriage, bared breasts,
corporate corruption and the W Ltd. gang. I guess I’ll have to add high-tech
memory erasure to the list. If you want to know the truth, I thought my
problem was plain, low-tech forgetting. Like what did I do with my glasses? Oh, there they are,
on the bridge of my nose.
