Lacuna Passage Torrent Download [crack]
Arnau Cyr
The film stars Kate Winslet as Clementine and Jim Carrey as Joel, two star-crossed lovers recently broken up and paying for the surreal procedure to erase the other from their minds. The movie asks: If we lose our memories, do we lose parts of our identities? Is it possible two people who are drawn to each other will continue to wind up together, no matter how painful their past may be?
Below is my attempt to reconstruct the fun facts and deeper significance of certain elements of this film, from memory. Eternal Sunshine is a film in part about the limits of technology and science because of human nature, in all its illogical and inconsistent glory. This post is, in part, about the limits of our current content streaming/consuming abilities, and the way content can still slip through the cracks and become lost, even in our era of Big Data, cloud storage, and constant surveillance. Even in the year 2022, there are some things I can only access from my own memory.
Because this film can only grow older (as I can only grow older), here is an annotated guide to the film to highlight its nuanced script and deeper meanings, as well as translation ofcultural artifacts from 2004:
Lacuna: The name of the company that provides the memory-erasure procedure is Lacuna, another word for a gap or missing portion from a manuscript. In the world of Biology, this is a word for a depression or removed bit of bone. The film Eternal Sunshine itself preserves the deleted memories for Joel, filling its own lacuna.
In the previous semester before I watched this film, I reviewed a new album by Italian metal band Lacuna Coil for my college newspaper. Those two instances of the word are tied together forever to me.
When I search the name Mierzwiak on both Google and my university library system, I only get returns that are about the movie Eternal Sunshine. This name is a keyword in papers on medical ethics and philosophy of the mind. I cannot locate a real-life namesake though I am still certain one exists.
Now that my first year of undergrad was half my lifetime ago, I have accepted that the human brain is so complex I may never fully understand mine, and that no matter how faithful I am to a daily journal practice, there are bits of my own life I will forget forever. Things get lost inside my head, and the Internet is not the eternal archive, either.
Thanks for this post. I loved this movie when it came out and instantly bought the DVD when it was released. After reading this, I went to look for it and found it: both discs still there! Wish I could share it somehow.
Mierzwiak? For some reason that brings to mind the trickster character in Superman comics, Mr. Mxyzptlk. Probably has nothing to do with the movie, but does have most of the letters for a kind of ersatz anagram. Screenwriters have been known to do worse.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is many things: a thought experiment about what would happen if one eccentric Long Island doctor invented a procedure to physically remove memories from the human brain at any patient\u2019s discretion, a horror story about the loss of bodily autonomy, or perhaps a meditation on dementia. A movie that illustrates one point made by poet Alexander Pope that it is impossible to truly remove a past love from one\u2019s mind. An experimental and highly stylized sci-fi experience curated by scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry. A companion to a truly wonderful soundtrack. And so much more.
Perhaps the film takes place in an alternate dimension that is just slightly different from our own. And now, looking back, we can see that so much about American life in the early aughts is captured here. No one scrolls on a cell phone, no one appears to use social media. (This premise is impossible in 2022 due to social media alone. It\u2019s hard to image a four-person medical office able to delete every trace of a relationship due to screenshots and the Internet Archive.) Characters call one another on landline phones, and so on.
Much in this film feels timeless and true, but I cannot forget that this film is also a relic from the age of \u201CSpecial Features\u201D on DVD menus. Deleted scenes, original theatrical trailers, cast interviews, tie-in music videos, and other promotional materials were usually available on film DVDs. Before I had a smartphone or social media profiles, this was the content I consumed endlessly, at any time of the day, as constantly as I could.
Once my friends and I could drive, we drove to Blockbuster. We had to fork over at least $5 for a single DVD loan, so we were determined to get our money\u2019s worth. The first viewing was done with purpose and reverence; we paid deep attention. (Eternal Sunshine famously required a few close viewings to \u201Cget\u201D what was happening.) After that, a borrowed DVD was to be played at low volume in the background for the rest of the rental period\u2014three days perhaps, maybe five. Whenever I was alone in the basement of my parents\u2019 house, crashing in the guest room during my first winter break from college, I watched the director\u2019s commentary. This was a convention where the entire movie played but its soundtrack was lowered while the director, screenwriter, and occasionally actors rotated in and out to share perspective on the film. Insights into script changes and deleted scenes, fun facts, and behind-the-scenes insights were shared, and I collected these to wow my friends later with all that insider knowledge. Memories of this director\u2019s commentary seeped into my future viewings of this film, imbuing additional meaning.
I offered to write this post before I\u2019d actually hunted down a way to re-watch the director\u2019s commentary I screened at home several times for myself in 2005. What follows is my attempt to reconstruct from memory what Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry discussed over the film as it played. Much of this is likely inaccurate due to the passage of time (more than 15 years) as well as where I was at when I watched: 18 years old, newly enamored with the freedom of attending college 800 miles away from home in the downtown of a city. And crucially, enamored with getting back together with my high school ex, though many miles separated us now.
I\u2019ll cut to the chase: I cannot find this \u201Cdirector\u2019s commentary,\u201D and was unable to watch this again for the purposes of this writing. My personal DVD copy has been lost for a decade, since someone loaned it to their crush; the crush didn\u2019t reciprocate and also kept my DVD. I can\u2019t pay to stream the director\u2019s commentary on Prime; though I could pay to stream the theatrical cut. (If I \u201Cown\u201D this stream for $14.99 do I get those old Special Features, or are they gone forever, with DVD title menus? No one has been able to tell me.) I can\u2019t find the director\u2019s commentary as clips cut up across YouTube videos. Not even my university library credentials can get me there.
However, I can prove that this director\u2019s commentary does exist: it is cited in a footnote on the movie\u2019s Wikipedia page, though the link has gone dead. Also the very niche website RateThatCommentary.com rates it (rather poorly) so it must be real. That\u2019s the only evidence I can find that this video feature I once watched and tried to memorize even existed at all.
Blue Ruin: Clementine always has brightly dyed hair in unnatural colors like orange or green. During their first (re-)meeting, Joel comments that he likes Clem\u2019s hair, and she tells him the name of the color is \u201CBlue Ruin.\u201D I have a fuzzy memory of Kaufman saying in the lost director\u2019s commentary that this came from a song lyric. I remember thinking at the time that the band was probably too hip or underground for my taste. At 18 years old I felt like a whipper-snapper, and an imposter, at all times.
Today I cannot find \u201Cblue ruin\u201D as a song lyric of any genre; or at least not one that could have made it into a script from 2004. When I Google \u201Cblue ruin,\u201D the top search result is a 2013 movieby that name, followed by a song by a band (?) called \u201CMandolin Orange.\u201D That could make sense! Clem\u2019s hair is orange at one point! But the song is from 2009, too late to have been referenced in Eternal Sunshine. [Editor\u2019s note: the name is actually from a Tom Waits song, but I don\u2019t know how I know that. Another lacuna.]
Bartlett\u2019s Book of Quotations: The cast of Eternal Sunshine includes the scrappy young technician team that does the dirty work of erasing a person\u2019s memories while they sleep. Kirsten Dunst plays Mary, a receptionist at the doctor\u2019s office who is dating Stan, a memory technician (hello, Mark Ruffalo!). Mary travels with a Bartlett\u2019s Book of Quotations, a collection of snappy phrases from noteworthy figures, and tries to memorize quotations related to memory.
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