fears and insecurities of a nerd in love

Part of the mission of this website (its raison d'être? Oh God, is there any word that's not pretentious? You know what I mean: its point) is to write about movies, not as an object, but as an experience. In this sense, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the second collaboration between music-video director Michel Gondry and Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, is a High Sign movie par excellence. It's a film that operates on the viewer intrapsychically, like a drug experience, a dream, or a kiss; when it's over, you look to the person next to you and ask with real curiosity, not "What did you think?" but "How was that for you?" You can't be sure the two of you saw the same film. People will respond to this movie with whatever they bring into it, which is why, although he's smart and handsome and has a soothing voice on the radio, I'm not sure Elvis Mitchell is meant to be my own true man. (I know, I know: another heart rent asunder, right?) I just don't recognize anything from my experience of Eternal Sunshine in Mr. Mitchell's pronouncement that, "Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love." First off, I'm not sure there's an honest out-and-out laugh in this movie. There are smiles of recognition, tears of grief, and open-mouthed "O"'s of pure mind-fucked amazement, but not a lot of knee-slapping yuks. Second, during the movie's brief-seeming 108 minutes, I never felt a moment of anything detached and abstract enough to be called admiration. I'm not sure you could say I "loved" the movie either, though I certainly swooned in its general vicinity. Rather than offering itself up as an object to be loved (like, say, Sherlock Jr.—now that's a lovable movie) Eternal Sunshine is a movie that (again, almost psychotropically) causes you to experience, to remember, what love itself feels like ...