Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

(Paperback)

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Description

Imagine you learn that your lover has had you erased from their memory and, in a moment of despair, you have your lover erased from your memory too. Imagine that as you lose your recollections of the bad times together, you realise that you don't want to forget them after all. That's the premise for Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-winning script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An instant cult classic, the film's distinctive ambiguity and tangled narrative demands audience engagement and repeated watching. Delving into the central themes of the film, Andrew M. Butler foregrounds its play with genre and audience expectations, its psychoanalytic underpinnings and its debt to Philip K. Dick. Also examining its production processes, Butler explores the against-type casting of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in lead roles and the intertwined careers of Kaufman and director Michel Gondry. This special edition features original cover artwork by Patricia Derks.

Reviews

Butler's skilful dissection of Eternal Sunshine confirms the suspicion that it is a film that demands further explanation and contextualisation if it is to be fully appreciated...This is not so much a companion to the nominally SF Charlie Kaufman/Michael Gondry film as a blueprint for unravelling a visual brainteaser. * Good Book Guide *

Author Bio

ANDREW M. BUTLER is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. He is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009), and author of The Pocket Essential Philip K. Dick (2007) and Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (2012).