Spotless

The ha-ha, very funny joke in these parts lately is that, "It's okay, it's not like anyone ever died from pneumonia." Fact is I'm too bored to be dying. Watching the washing machine go round and round and round. Watching the soup simmer. Watching the bubbles on the bottle of ginger ale. Watching too many DVDs even to keep track. Watching so many DVDs I make a list so I don't lose track. Probably thirty movies in the last ten days.

Figuring an average of ninety minutes each, that's 45 hours . A whole heckload of time. Not only are the movies starting to blend together, but the boundaries between the movies and my own brain are getting a little sloppy. I've been witness and voyeur to so many intense, dramatic, revelatory conversations, and now I'm starting to think some of them are mine. I quote passages without knowing I'm doing it: "What are you, twelve?" "Good things come to obsessive-compulsives who fixate." "I'm here for the gangbang."

But I quickly start to "fixate" on my own ability to forget, not just the movies I've seen, but ... everything. It's horrifying. Books I've read, meals I've eaten, family vacations, conversations with people I really care about, the name of that cute girl I went out with for a few weeks back in ... what year was that, anyway?

Is this why people keep journals and photo albums—not to keep them from forgetting, but because they've already given over to the inevitability of forgetting?

Is this why people write blogs?

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"The struggle of mankind against the powerful is the struggle of the mind against forgetting."

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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I "fixate" on a few of the films I've seen recently. They're an unlikely set: Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the romantic comedy 50 First Dates, the metaphysical classic Groundhog Day, and the original Resident Evil. They're all about forgetting. In each film, people have had their memories erased, sometimes by accident and sometimes by intent, in favor of a clean slate.

But the action of each movie is a struggle against the forgetting: Jim Carrey hops from one memory to another, trying to salvage each one before it gets erased; Adam Sandler woos Drew Barrymore each day, convinced he's making some impression on the forgetful Drew Barrymore; Bill Murray lives the same day over and over and over, getting to know the goings-on of an entire town, only to have all of his actions reset at 6am each morning; and Milla Jovovich wakes up in the middle of a zombie-filled "apocalypse" she may have helped cause, but can't even remember her own name.

Eternal Sunshine is a heart-wrenching reminder that memories are beautiful and cruel, and that forgetting is bland, and crueler. (I agree with David Edelstein, "a little dismayed that not everyone shares my conviction that [Eternal Sunshine] is an inexhaustible masterpiece and, by a wide margin, the best film in many years.") And it is a champion among these recent films that choose cruel beauty over bland forgetfulness.

Why so many recent films about memory? Is our cultural zeitgeist one of growing forgetfulness? And if that's the case, what is the lesson we're to learn from these movies? There's an obvious moral to the story, one which tells us that of course it's better to remember, even the most painful details, because they are ours. But what makes these movies more remarkable and more ominous is the suggestion that maybe what we really want is to forget. Maybe what we really want is a clean slate. Maybe what we really want is spotlessness.