While the Ocean Blooms It's What Keeps Me Alive

.

"This is it, Joel. It will be gone soon."

"I know."

 "What do we do? 

"Enjoy it."

I don't know if you guys caught the temporary post I tossed up for a few hours last night bemoaning my broken brain and the fact that I didn't get around to writing anything up for The Film Experience's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" tenth anniversary celebration of Michel Gondry's 2004 masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it feels kind of apt that I'd erase that and try all over again, don't it? Thematic, and stuff. So here we are, our second time through. This is our Montauk.

I try to watch Eternal Sunshine every couple of years - it so emotionally destroys me at the end that I need to step away from it for that long in between, let time wear down the painful memories and turn it into that movie where Kate Winslet has colorful hair and makes Clementine jokes, where she and Jim Carrey wear little kid cowboy hats and fall down a sink... I never entirely convince myself it's that movie, but it makes it easier when the time comes, not being entirely cognizant of how fucked up I will be one-hundred and eight glorious  minutes later.

I picked these shots because I never fully see these shots because I am sobbing while these shots are on-screen. "Come back and make up a goodbye at least." That note right there that Kaufman's script hits - the impossible revisitation of a lost moment and the giving us the chance, however fleeting, to make it right... the way that Winslet plays the moment... the way the dark house fades and the edges blur, the ocean sweeping it away and the dunes are swallowing it up silently, moving along, and this fuzzy orange blossom floats in the center of it all like one memory, one synapse, pulsing, waiting to be remembered or reborn...

.