wildcat

So, after I identified to Michael that what I was feeling was ennui, which is half existential dread and half boredom, and it was peculiarly French and peculiarly prevalent amongst twentysomething artists with too much time on their hands, we brainstormed things to help me deal. I want to do more things, like going to the beach on Saturday (which will require the likes of Joy, Matt, Michelle, Jonas, Paton, et cetera - only beautiful people allowed on our island, and I want to build a mandala and a sand castle), and I actually want to write successfully for a while. I have this new story in my head, which has been in my head for a while. I also want to write poems again - I haven't been, and I'm happy to report I just had an idea for a poem, vague as it is now, and I'm going to write that down before I get to work on the story.

I have to print out copies of stories to take to Colette at work to read. She did, after all, give me the idea for the nex story and it's from her dreams.

I feel better now. We watched The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and I was blown away by it. It had all these levels to it, like the serene tragedy of Mary's discovering of her own mindwipe - played very well by Kirsten Dunst. Elijah Wood as a creepy pantie-stealing slacker. I liked the fact that the entire thing is about memory and specifically memory of relationships, but it doesn't sugar-coat Joel and Clementine's relationship as this perfect bubble of happiness; they aren't soulmates in the conventional sense, they aren't living in some big budget magical relationship. We're shown the relationship from multiple angles, from all the points of happiness, content, dissatisfaction, hatred - and the opportunity to remove all of that from your brain. The visuals and transitions from memory to memory were beautifully done and with enough humour to fight against sentimentality. One belief is that we choose to reincarnate and in a way this movie works as a metaphor for that - Joel goes through the Bardo experience of seeing his life and all his mistakes while waiting for reincarnation, and starts to wonder if he's made a mistake. Wiping away Clementine eradicates good memories as well as bad, the pain of the relationship is just as much a thing he needs as the good times are. But in being reincarnated, we often end up around the same souls from previous lives, and old spirit-habits repeat. No memory of the bad shit but a faint deja vu drives people back together to reiterate the patterns. And when made aware of that bad shit, being made aware of the previous existence - do you halt the pattern? Does it matter, in the end, how it ends? You still need to try again - with or without knowledge - to do it better if you can.

Otherwise, you'd just end up allergic to the world and confined to the house you call self, like Julianne Moore in Safe.

Anyway; brilliant use of the handicam mode rather than tripods to give everything the shakey look of a bad dream. Kirsten Dunst stoned off her tree and dancing in her underwear with Mark Ruffalo. Kate Winslet building a beautiful character. "Oola" from Wonder Boys, who was also in Todd Solondz's Happiness - one of the most terrifyingly sad movies I've ever seen. Those transitions. The visual effects of melted faces and shape-shifting between six-year-old Joel and adult-Jim-Carrey Joel. The grainy and washed out colour scheme. The scene in the Japanese restaurant where Joel realizes they've joined the "Dining Dead" of bored couples who stare off into space while they eat.