When it comes to writing papers for school, people fall into two different camps – those who finish early and those who procrastinate until the last possible moment. I am most decidedly in the second camp, because I enjoy the excitement of running from the tigers and finishing an assignment just as the front tire of the motorcycle is at the edge of the cliff so to speak. I always think cinematically and everything in my mind is a production. I used to set a timer in the morning before school on my watch and imagined that if I did not get home before the clock ran out that my house would explode. While finishing an assignment at the last possible second is thrilling, there is equally no worse feeling than discovering that the words that you frantically scrambled to put down on paper are complete and utter bullshit that you don’t even want to accept that you wrote. At that point of soul crushing defeat, you make the difficult yet necessary choice to delete all of your work and then immediately charge back out onto the field of battle with a new direction in mind. Upon review of your second pass at the paper you pleasantly realize that you are much happier with your work and shockingly you realize that some of the stinky thoughts from your deuce of a first draft have worked their way back into your writing, but now the nuggets of turd have transformed into nuggets of gold. You want to ask yourself how those ideas survived, but there’s no time because you have to haul ass and turn in that paper. So, with this phenomenon in mind we find ourselves with yet another amazing meta layer in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to discuss – invincible thoughts.
Personally, I am the type of writer that just blasts it all out there like a Jackson Pollock painting and then goes back to carefully survey the mess to see if there is the even the slightest vague outline of a story present. Many times during analysis of my work I quite miraculously find a common thread that becomes the thesis for my paper. Now, I don’t always find a diamond in the rough – on some occasions the overpowering stink from my supposed Pollock creation is akin to nothing more than wall splatterings in a funky port-o-potty (Ew! Forgive the imagery). Having the power to eradicate any semblance of my failed work is wonderfully empowering, and I take great pleasure in watching the phoenix rise from the ashes as my unconscious mind creates a story from the wreckage of my first attempt. This style of writing and rewriting is very similar to Joel and Clementine’s relationship – against the utter destruction of their memory with lasers, the pair manage to hold onto their feelings of love for each other and create a new story. Just like the deleted words in the story, their memory of love is such a powerful artifact that it cannot be repressed and this new attempt at a relationship has much better results while somehow unconsciously retaining the best parts of their past relationship.
So why do we have these seemingly invincible memories? Because they are right somehow. Our brains override whatever we do to them to rescue and nurture the orphan ideas that the ideas that they find to be important. Is this to say that all our ideas are winners? Absolutely not. Just like relationships, written stories work when they find the right combination and while we can break down a successful paper in terms of structure, language, etc. there are the choices that we make in writing that “just feel right” because of the way that they sound. When I reflect on all the great many pages of deletions that I have made over the years to my work that have never found a place anywhere I wonder if my mind is storing up this information on a shadow hard drive in my mind and waiting to deploy these ideas sometime in my lifetime. How many of these ideas will find a home in later work and how many are just junk? I guess that I’ll just have to trust my brain’s subconscious judgment and wait and see. Well, one thing’s for sure—you can’t kill invincible.
Comfort Films 20: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Released February 11, 2022)
