Oh good it's not just me and jethrien

[trinityvixen]

Some way while back, I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and liked it, with the reservation that I'm constantly annoyed by the free-spirit wild-child romantic interest character as played (excellently, don't get me wrong) by Kate Winslet in that movie. I'm sick of near-schizophrenic free-thinkers "saving" people--sorry, not people, men--with their cah-ray-zee antics that would more likely get the fellow on the receiving end fired, arrested, or killed, depending on the severity of the life-saving method.

Well, thank god, the AV Club agrees with me. DOWN WITH THE MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL. (In all of her incarnations!)

An article commenting on the AV Club article over at Salon has this great addition:

I would suggest that women like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl do exist; it's just that, when I've known them, they've mostly been self-obsessed nutballs.

And this is precisely what jethrien and I were griping together about. It's really an insult to the smart, together, fun girls out there that this MPDG archetype is "the dream." Personally, I find that person to be unstable, and while that's fun for the occasional romp and perhaps easy to fall in love with, you don't have a future with this person. Because if they were on the meds they're supposed to be on, they wouldn't be fun. They'd just be self-obsessed instead of being self-obsessed muse-gurus meant to free penises from the chokeholds of dress pants.

Comments

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

Whoa whoa whoa. First of all, sociopathy is (to quote Merriam-Webster) "pervasive disregard for and violation of the rights, feelings, and safety of others starting in childhood or the early teenage years and continuing into adulthood." That is NOT Clementine. She may do one very selfish action (erasing Jim Carrey), but it's not a pervasive personality trait. You see how caring and sensitive she can be. And yes, their respective desires to erase each other aren't all pure and selfless, but they are EMINENTLY sympathetic. We're talking about wanting to numb the pain of a break-up, not molest children or some shit. Have a heart.

WTF is with this claim of Tom Wilkinson erasing her memory against her will?!?! He tells her that SHE asked HIM to do it, because she hated how awkward it was.

I also hate this character type. SOOO MUCH. But Clementine didn't bother me the way the others did, because you see how insecure she is, and how much pain she has. That scene where she talks about wanting her doll to be pretty always makes me cry. And she knows she's putting on the face she shows, and the reason she likes Joel is because he sees through it (see: train scene).

The point isn't that love is happy sunshine rainbow unicorns. It's that it's hard, and it's complicated, and it is incredibly painful. But that relationships are worth having despite all that, because the joy and the pleasure are worth it. And only once he risks losing the good memories does Joel realize how important they are, even with the bad ones all mixed in.

And that's the lesson that Kirsten Dunst hadn't learned, and why she winds up reliving all that pain. And that's the lesson that Elijah Wood will never learn. He goes out of his way to be perfect, so that it IS only good and happiness and sunshine, and that kind of relationship doesn't work because it's not genuine.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't perhaps have been so forceful given that I've seen the movie once, but I stand by most of what I said. Yes, Clementine is not the worst of these, but she is one of these Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Were Dunst to have played the character, no one would argue with me if I called her that.

I honestly don't remember too many scenes where Clementine demonstrated any depth of humanity. If they were there, they obviously seemed so tacked on to me that it was like they were just window dressing on the MPDG. Again, I don't hate the movie, I even like Kate Winslet's character a little, but that doesn't change the fact that she makes a decision whose pain we don't see well enough to see it as anything less than a cold disconnect from Jim Carrey. We see that she totally doesn't remember him and doesn't have any sympathy when he shows up at her job all distressed because she doesn't know him. She gives him a brush off. And the way the company operates, they don't even try to reach out to Carrey, and she made no effort to consider that, on the other side, her actions will really hurt Jim Carrey's character. That's a cruel disconnect from basic humanity, and I find it sociopathic. Whether or not she's a sociopath, that blatant lack of sympathy strikes me as inhuman. But that was the point of the movie, far as I saw--the idea that you should just take away memories to make yourself feel better is A Very Bad Idea.

As for Tom Wilkinson, it seemed pretty clear on the tape that he talked Dunst into the procedure. She works there, so she knows how thoroughly it succeeds in cleaning the slate of the brain (if not the heart) and she sounded extremely ambivalent, even afraid of doing it. Talking her into disregarding her own sense of self-preservation is, to my mind, virtually akin to forcing it on her. Especially as the one who had the most to gain was Wilkinson--he got his dalliance and got rid of the evidence and can go back to using her without the complications of regret, remorse, et al. I don't think it is at all clear that she was 100% behind this, and it's clear that she felt violated by it when she learned it had happened. Between that and her weepy hemming and hawing on the tape, I'd say it's not entirely clear that he's even telling the truth about her wanting it.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

Re: Clementine, I still think you're nuts. Wanting to erase Jim Carrey was not "inhuman." It was ENTIRELY HUMAN. Wanting to erase the painful parts of romantic experiences? HUMAN. It was selfish, yes, but not monstrous.

And you're reaaaaally stretching with Tom Wilkinson. He tells her flat out that SHE asked for the procedure, that she was the one who was majorly uncomfortable, and and he was SUPER hesitant to actually go through with it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I just got the impression that Wilkinson's character isn't a reliable one. His job choice pretty much leans heavily into suggesting that he's not a man to trust only because he's the keeper of the keys when it comes to data--people tell him all their secrets and he erases that information from their brain. The power-tripping of that really doesn't lead me to trust that he's telling the truth.

This was my major problem with the movie. You read it as he was benevolent in his mastery, essentially. I see this kind of control of information as a step short of tyranny. Power corrupts, especially if you keep telling yourself you're doing it for others and it's not your fault, and you're not to blame...

The movie? Didn't address any of this abuse. It just brought it up and willed it not to be as creepy as it could be. It opened this can of worms, not me.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

I didn't think he was benevolent at all. I think he was a selfish, selfish man, obsessed with his own accomplishments to the exclusion of caring about others.

And like I said, "people being creepy" really wasn't the point of the movie.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

No, it wasn't, but the element was introduced with the numerous abuses and rampant immaturity. You can't just consider "oh, what if a boss pushed his subordinate lover to wipe her memory of their affair" and not go "he's taking her memory but keeping his, so it's sorta like he used her for his own porno and drugged her through it." It really, really is a dark hole they glanced at, skimmed for content, and didn't explore. That's a weakness. The Clementine-Carrey thing was interesting enough on its own without that element.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I think you can, because the movie doesn't draw the characters as so twisted. As far as a movie goes, I'd say the characters define the actions, and not vice versa.

And some people can make really big mistakes without considering the consequences. It's possible to fuck up and be innocent other than that you did in fact fuck up and I think there's not enough of that acknowledgment here. Not every kid who takes a candy bar ends up robbing banks, not everybody who tries some pot ends up dead in a crack den, not every little boy who chases a girl around the playground ends up a serial rapist.

I mean, it's certainly not wrong to extrapolate ideas from the movie. These are pertinent questions if you were theorizing what a device like this could do to the real world. But the movie is the movie, and it's self-contained. The characters' actions are defined within the boundaries of the picture.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Carrey does not come to her job distressed that she doesn't remember him. It is because of that visit to her job and his complaining to his friends that causes David Cross to give him the letter revealing that she erased him.