The Rabbit Hole

I liked her for being Kate Winslet, and that was about it. The film was too light-heartedly cute, what with Jim Carrey playing his baby self in footy PJs to look at the seriously sketchy/horrid behavior of all the people in this. Clementine's horrid me-first action of literally cutting out Jim Carrey's character so she won't feel a second of sympathy, regret, or even embarrassment over her behavior toward him is sociopathic. His desire to remove her from his memory as revenge is equally so. These are not sympathetic people! Don't try to sell me the pixie love story when that is the background.

And I haven't even gotten into the other pixie in the movie: Kirsten Dunst. She's a perennial movie pixie (which is why she sucked as Mary-Jane). And her character is not only immorally in love with her boss (who's old enough to be her grandfather and is married), but she's having sex while Jim Carrey is being lobotomized in the same room and getting the operator (and herself) drunk at the same time. And then there's Elijah Wood who basically raped Clementine while she was out of it during the procedure and then, knowing his abuse was unremembered, started stalk-dating her. And Tom Wilkinson's character had his lover's--Kirsten Dunst's--memories erased so she wouldn't remember their affair and maybe he could be not-tempted/not awkward with her. Against her will. (More rape! YAY!) And then her boyfriend knew about it and didn't tell her...

These things are all interesting, if you're studying the abuse of this system once it's a possibility. However, they spent the movie examining the other questions--does love survive without memories? Are personal connections more than the sums of experiences?--and let this creepy shit just float around in the background. It's...unsettling.

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Clementine was, as I say above, a tad sociopathic. The point of our sympathy is that everyone wishes there were some memories they could just erase from their heads. Everyone does. But wishing and actually doing are different things. We're more than the sum of our experiences because we use those experiences to form an outlook to the future. Removing the experiences means not adapting or changing. Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, one way or another.

The movie made that point that the erasing didn't stop some less memory-driven notion of connection from bringing people back together--Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst and Tom Wilkinson. No matter what was done to the literal memories, these people returned to old habits of love/attraction/addiction/etc.

The thing about the Clementines of the world is that they are utterly lacking in responsibility. They seem to have jobs or houses or other identifiable forms of commitments and money, yet they never do anything to show how they get it. In the magical pixie dream land, you just have the things that real men and women have to work for. And I'm annoyed at the idea that Kate Winslet, for example, can just kidnap Jim Carrey off a train platform and neither will suffer any consequences in the real world.

This is not to say dream-world movies can't work. I didn't have a problem with the escapism of, say, Mirrormask (even though I didn't love the movie) or things like that. My problem is the idea that this free-spirit naif can survive without any tangible means of support in a decidedly money-driven world. And survive well. It's the extreme version of the ridiculously sized apartments that poor characters occupy in TV shows only the Magic Pixie Dream Girls don't ever seem to have jobs. (Or, if they do, that they shouldn't be able to cover half the expenses these pixies have.)

It's okay to identify with them--they're a fantasy. I identify with kick-ass ninja chicks. Doesn't mean I realistically expect to ever be one. What I bemoan is that these are the images we present instead of recognizing the fun and beauty in women who are more grounded. (And less in need of a Prozac chaser.)

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jethrien.livejournal.com

It makes me so happy to have a phrase to yell accusingly at the screen now!

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viridian.livejournal.com

I think the only thing that annoys me about the Clementines is that you can't actually have a personality like that and get away with it without consequence in the real world. Nobody actually likes you if you behave that way. At the most harmless, you're a flake, and at worst, you're unstable.

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REPRESENT!!!

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That's exactly why they aggravate me to pieces--because these women would be schizophrenic in real life and you'd want to stay as far as possible from them. Granted, in real life, I wouldn't cozy up to half of the serial killers I regularly fantasize about, but they at least get to have their own lives and be pro-active. Manic Pixie Dream Girls only exist to give their men a kick in the ass. There's a strong sense that without that magical, one-of-a-kind connection to the protagonist, they'd spend their lives miserable, too.

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Yeah, but, in defense of the MPDG, she does have "dream" built into her name. The idea is that the MPDG has magical powers that will prevent you from getting into trouble, and she will never be a self-obsessed nutball in need of more medication. As your article notes, you would also never want to meet Jason Segel's Forgetting Sarah Marshall character in reality, but for the sake of the movie, he's pleasant enough.

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Also, Clementine's character in Eternal Sunshine is more of a deconstruction of that character (not that you were attacking her so much). First off, the real character in the movie, which you mainly see with Elijah Wood, is practically on the verge of a mental breakdown, and when you see her on the train with Carrey, she's clearly "putting on the role" and it's having no effect on him.

But let's not forget -- mainly, during Eternal Sunshine, the character Winslet is playing is NOT Clementine, but Joel's mental image of Clementine. When she's playing along with him near middle to end of the movie and she keeps disappearing (and she's at her most MPDGish), it's all in Joel's head, and not really happening.

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gryphonrose.livejournal.com

Oh, they exist in real life. And yes, you're right about them. I'm not as against them onscreen as you are, but I consider them the romantic equivalent of popcorn. :)

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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.

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You're also talking about a character who appears 99% in the head of someone else. So this isn't necessarily the person Clementine is, but is instead a very slanted representation of what Joel needs her to be when he's going through this process.

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The other person who replied to this comment addressed the first thing. In short, a lot of people do stupid, impulsive things when they get overwhelmed. Clementine is too afraid to live with her pain, and Joel is too afraid to live without Clementine. Neither decision was thought out, which is why Carrey's character regrets it almost immediately, and at the end of the movie, you see that Clementine understands it was a bad decision as well.

Elijah Wood did not do anything to Clementine during their procedure. He took her panties, but there's nothing that suggests they were the ones she was wearing, he stole them out of a dresser or something. He DOES stalk-date her, but I don't know where you got the idea that he rapes her or even touches her during the erasing.

Tom Wilkinson's character is less defensible. He did NOT erase her memory against her will, but he did basically talk her into it (that'd be the "Firefly"/Joss Whedon-hater's version of rape), and I believe he probably promised her he'd get the operation done himself and didn't do it. On the tape she finds, she sounds reluctant, but it's not like he tricked her or forced her into the chair or drugged her or something.

As for Mark Ruffalo, you're reading into something that is in the movie as literal. He says "Maybe once, I saw you smile like you had a secret" and he clearly means it. He DIDN'T know, not enough to say something. There's no reason for the Ruffalo character to lie, and no other examples during the movie where he lies to anyone. If the question is who did the erasing, it's mentioned that Wilkinson did the procedure on Dunst himself, although, again, Dunst, although reluctantly, did agree to have it done.

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Again, in defense of the movie, Eternal Sunshine shows Clementine at her job at Barnes & Noble several times, and Carrey calls in sick to work. I can certainly buy a Clementine working at a bookstore.

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If it's not clear, in paragraph 3 I am referring to her having the procedure done, not having an affair.

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She's supposed to be what he remembers of her. His memory, in the midst of passionate turmoil is, granted, faulty. But even after, when they meet and they've both erased each other, she's still a where-the-wind-takes-her girl.

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And owning a house? She had a place that was fairly large for what bookstore people would make. She certainly wasn't management.

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And they're a mirror of the bad-boy, which is okay except that the bad boy has things going on when not in pursuit of making the good girl flip her shit and go wild. Whereas the MPDG really is either eternally upsetting lives--thus being a possibly psychotic acquaintance--or just waits to unload the crazy onto the first receptive person she finds--thus being a needy, leech...

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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.

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I agree rape was too strong a word, but when you're pairing his violation of her privacy with his taking--permanently--something intimately belonging to her, it does have serious sexual abuse overtones not unlike rape. Not rape, but the overtones are there. This creepy twerp takes her panties to jack off to (probably) while stealing memories from her. Just because she doesn't remember doesn't make it NOT violation. (This is the "there is no such thing as 'gray rape'" argument. Because there really, really isn't. All abuse is still abuse whether or not the victim remembers.)

With Tom Wilkinson, you assume that because he didn't chain her to a table, he didn't make her do anything she didn't want. Sorry, but I call bullshit. Feeding someone drinks to loosen their resolve isn't forcing them, but it is stacking the deck. Responsibility ultimately lies with Dunst's character, but it seemed pretty clear that she didn't want to do it and only caved to him because she was emotional and the promise of removing the embarrassment and humiliation of being trapped as the other woman seemed appealing. Not to mention that she probably would have lost her job because she couldn't continue as she was. These are all weighing down on her such that her personal terror was overridden by her smooth-talking lover who did it for himself more than she did it for herself. (I'd say she did it for his ease entirely because that's what it seems like.) Again, this is all my read on it, and it's supported by what's in the movie. You can read the same clues a different way, but once you have Wilkinson's age in there and the fact that he goes back for more, caving to a kiss when he knows what a relationship with this woman has already cost her? It's sketch-city, and it casts his previous actions--like badgering her into the procedure--in a very dim light.

Ruffalo's character doesn't give enough clues to be certain, sure, but there's so much shame in his meeting with her. Part of this is the Pandora's Box--if you start this, where do you stop and do you say something if you know something is missing? By not telling her--someone he supposedly cared about--it's a seriously questionable act on his part. Also, when they're screwing around while working on Carrey, he gives her a lot of side-long glances whenever she mentions Wilkinson that it's clear he's at least sure of his suspicion even if he has no proof. Do you just drop it as the people who weren't Jim Carrey did? If you do, are you amoral--deciding not to engage--or immoral--deciding to deceive? I would argue that by not telling a person you care about something as serious as that, you're being immoral. The procedure is; hiding it must be.

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she will never be a self-obsessed nutball in need of more medication.

...she is a self-obsessed nutball in need of more medication. She is. It's just that the hero finds her charming and decides he needs more carefreeness in his life and adapts to her style. Her antics get him in trouble to make him a better person, but most of the time she's behaving like the evil Willow vampire--"Bored now, gonna make some trouble."

I didn't see Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The description of Segel's character is that he's a weepy, mopey mess. Yeah, sounds like my dream dude all right. Actually, what he sounds like is what a bunch of dudes who don't know how to write women assume is a woman's dream dude. If he's crying over the ex all the time, he must be "in touch with his feelings" and that's what chicks like, right?

A closer analogue to the MPDG would be the cinematic bad boy. Whether he's an anti-hero or just the villain, there's a long tradition of attraction (male and female) to male characters who, like the MPDG, act on impulse and damn the consequences. However, his behavior is usually shown to be morally questionable if not downright reprehensible; the anti-hero represents the former, the villain the latter, and the space between them is determined only by that one thing, that one line that the hero won't cross that the villain does. But we are given to understand that if we all behaved like Dirty Harry, there would be chaos (doubly so if we all acted on our impulses like, say, the Joker). Absolute freedom is anarchy. So films with these bad boys usually make the consequences of their actions part of the tension of the film.

With the MPDG, there's no sense that her actions have consequences. We recognize that the women wouldn't really be great to know in real life, but the films never do. She climbs flagpoles, pulls fire alarms, 'liberates' rats from pet store, flashes cops, smokes dope in front of kids, etc etc etc? Wow! What a gal! I'm so glad that she never suffers for doing any of that or has to prove that she does something really selfless (besides being a hollow archetype meant to fluff the male protagonist's ego) to make up for her anti-social behavior.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Well, Elijah steals the memories from Joel, not Clementine. That's why he has the little present that Joel buys but fails to give to Clementine because she's already had the procedure done. I wouldn't want to defend Elijah, but for me his creepiness is lowered some by the fact that he's a gigantic idiot. His memory-stealing scheme doesn't even work in the end, anyway.

I wasn't making any assumptions about Wilkinson, I was saying exactly what you said. I just don't think it was intentionally malicious on the part of Wilkinson. I'd say both parties fooled themselves, in their own ways, into thinking that the options they chose would put things back to normal, but the procedure inherently prevents that.

Ruffalo just doesn't have enough backbone to act. I'm sure he could have found Mary's file just like Mary does, but he doesn't. It's almost both. He decides not to engage Mary, and decides to deceive himself.

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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.

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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.

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I don't think it was a house. It was an apartment. I think really she has the kitchen and the room with the couch where they have the drink and the bedroom and that's it. You see her getting her mail, like Carrey does, from a community mailbox at the front door, unless that was a deleted scene.

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she is a self-obsessed nutball in need of more medication.

The point I was making is that she is a type of character in a movie, where psychology, consequence and reasoning do not apply. She will never have to deal with those things because she isn't part of the real world.

Segel's character is a weepy, mopey mess BEFORE he meets the MPDG, who tells him to stop being those things because nobody likes a whiner, and he's in Hawaii, where he should be enjoying himself (which probably makes her the most reasonable MPDG yet listed, because unlike breaking the law for no reason, he is indeed on vacation already in Hawaii -- AND she's a tour guide, so her suggestions on what to do are written into the character!). But I haven't actually seen the film either, so she might still trick him into doing some wacky, on-the-edge-of-life things I don't know about.

I would say I feel no more tension to see Dirty Harry gunning down the Scorpio killer in cold blood on a football field than I do the MPDG doing something illegal and/or sociopathic I can't think of. I guess these movies are too clearly a heightened reality for me that I can't be bothered to apply real-world constraints on people's actions. But I do see why the MPDG is an annoying, tired and uninteresting character type.

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When she starts playing along, she's no longer strictly memory.

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gryphonrose.livejournal.com

Oh, definitely on the Bad Boy/MPDG parallel. I've seen way too many cases where a woman falls for a BB and then realizes, "Oh, wait--he isn't just 'bad' in that edgy-Hollywood way, he really is BAD!"

And yeah, psychotic acquaintance and/or needy leech.

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negativeq.livejournal.com

Here is the other thing that disturbs me - I don't know if anyone mentioned it yet:
If the Clementine we see for most of the film is what Joel REMEMBERS her as, or PERCEIVES her as, then what he (and the viewer) see of her is abhorrent. Why does he even want her back?
How much of his perception is true? Maybe she is not really a manic pixie? If not, what does it say about Joel that he views her as such?
The mind boggles.

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See, people keep defending "the real Clementine." That's besides the point in terms of how she is loved. Carrey loves--apparently--this manic version in his brain. That's the one we're supposed to believe is so magnetically charming that the loss of her is so devastating he lobotomizes himself.

The point is that the film gives us a Manic Pixie that the person loves. Whether she's that way outside of his head or no, that's what he wants! What he seems to love! What!?

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chuckro.livejournal.com

I realize I'm late to the party, but tangentially, this was one of the things I thought was brilliant about Juno. The classic Hollywood love story is the stodgy businessguy and the manic pixie dream girl, who fall in love and live happily ever after. The adult couple (Vanessa and Marc, I believe) in Juno is a typical Hollywood couple, with the genders swapped--and happily ever after isn't so happily. He resents being forced to settle down. She's grown tired of his flightiness. This is a BIG SHOCK, of course, only if you believe everything Hollywood tells you and ignore reality.

I've seen an awful lot of criticism of Juno from both sides of the political/ideological spectrum, but I think it was a fantastic movie if only for that grounding in reality. That, and the witty banter.

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Of course Juno herself is dangerously close to being another MPDG. But it's a fair read on Marc and Vanessa. She's clearly more grounded than he, though his problem seems less mania and more insecurity/immaturity.

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chuckro.livejournal.com

I don't think Juno herself is a MPDG. The MPDG is an adult (old enough to know better) and her magical flightiness is presented as a wonderful thing that brings joy into boring lives. Juno gets pregnant by being a dumbass teenager, deals with it, fucks up her relationship through flightiness and gets it back through responsibility, and "grows up" to some degree during the film.

(For the record, my mother hated Juno. She felt Juno got off far too easily and everything ended far too happily given the other events of the film. My mother has some interesting double standards, at times.)

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I said "close to." She gets the leeway and the escape by virtue of being a teenager. The fact that she's written as 30 year old is what creates the illusion of her being an MPDG. Because, clearly, she is the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, only she's supposed to be a teenager because a comedy about a plucky 30 year old having to deal with the adversity of being unexpectedly pregnant...would have be Knocked Up, I guess.

I actually didn't like Juno, the person. I totally agreed with her little boyfriend when he was all agape at her going, "Wow, you'd be the meanest wife ever." Because she was just too cool for school unless she was demanding sympathy she didn't extend to others. The parts of the movie I liked were the genuinely sweet boyfriend and the awesome parents. God bless her step-mom, she was the most awesome thing that happened to that movie. (The dad was funny, but his "I thought you were smarter than this" talk when he found out his daughter was pregnant? Yeah, way to be a douche when making sure your kid knows her birds and bees is YOUR job.)

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chuckro.livejournal.com

The fact that she's written as 30 year old is what creates the illusion of her being an MPDG.

I'd say she was written as what a 30-year-old wishes she had been like in high school. Which is not quite the same animal.

I agree, the boyfriend was adorable (and the movie presented his feelings and actions as totally justified! Is that not awesome? Guys with feelings!) and the parents were great. But I also give the father some slack: Any good father (or mother) would be disappointed with their kid, and with themselves, in such a situation. No one wants to deal with being disappointed by themself in the heat of the moment. I thought his reaction was entirely realistic.

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