Saalon Muyo

There are works that I love.  That I think are perfect and magical and wonderful and move me every time I watch, read or even think about them.  They are the cornerstones of my ideas about art and what it’s supposed to be able to do.

Then there are a few - only a few - works that have completely defined who I am (or at least, who I want to be) as an artist.  They answered some kind of lingering, unspoken question within me about what kind of art I want to create, and the way I want my own works to feel.  If I had to list them right now, I could only think of a half dozen or so.  If I tried harder, I’d be surprised if I broke ten.  They aren’t the best things I’ve ever seen.  They’re just the most important.

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is one of them.

I’m not sure it’s the best comic story ever told.  I’m sure you could end up in a vigorous debate defending it at such, at least, but I could think of a handful of others than deserve the crown just as much.  But there isn’t a single other work in the medium that hit me harder, that defined my view of comics more than Sandman.  When I think about wanting to write comics, I think about Sandman.

What’s most interesting about Sandman to me is that it’s so unsure of itself at its outset.  It’s clear that Gaiman understands his hero, Dream, and the fatal flaw that will be his undoing.  That’s the very core of Sandman, and Gaiman certainly had that down.  As for the texture of the story, it takes most of its first arc - “Preludes and Nocturnes” - to really coalesce.   And it’s the texture that hit me the most.  There’s something extra-magical about that to me; that its greatest success was something it discovered along the way.  If that isn’t the power of telling an episodic tale, I don’t know what is.

Sandman is the story of Dream, one of the Endless.  He doesn’t control dreams so much as personify them; like all of his brothers and sisters, he is a cosmic force that serves as the heart of his domain.  It is a tragedy in the classical sense; we are given a hero who is so hamstrung by a character flaw, and so unable or unwilling to change that he is doomed to fail because of it.  That’s what Sandman is really giving us.  The fall of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams.

When we join Dream, we don’t realize that, though.  Yet the success of “Preludes and Nocturnes” is in the way it carefully gives us a  hero utterly unwilling to allow himself to change who has, without realizing it, begun to change.  Though the Endless are powerful, they are not omnipotent, and Dream accidentally allows himself to be captured by a mortal.  He stays in that captivity for years before finally escaping and taking vengeance upon his captor.  In fact, it is his punishment of Alexander, the mortal who had held him for decades, that gives us a look at the kind of man Morpheus was.  Cold, cruel and unfeeling.  The kind of being that could send a woman to hell for refusing him.  For all eternity.  And never look back.  That is who Dream was, and who he believes himself still to be.

From that point, Sandman meanders through tales both personal and epic.  There are single issue stories on topics as diverse as a sultan of Baghdad who gives his city at its height over to Dream so that it can exist forever in some form to whimsical fluff like the story of the Emperor of America.  Or how about the one where Augustus Caeser goes out dressed as a beggar once a year and muses on how to set the boundaries of his empire for all time in defiance of his uncle’s will?  Or the one where there’s a story of someone telling a story where someone tells a story?  And those are just the one offs, that give us the flavor of what the Lord of Dreams is all about.

Sandman is everything a long-form story should be.  It grows in the telling, becoming something grander and more meaningful as it continues.  What begins as the focused story of Morpheus spreads out into one about his family - the other Endless, like Death and Despair and Delirium who was once Delight - and the mortals his path has crossed - such as Rose Walker and Lyta Hall.  And then it turns into something else entirely.  A story about stories. A tale about the dreams and hopes and desires that make us want to put words down on paper, or paint on canvas. 

Sandman gives us a peek at any angle of stories and dreams Gaiman can think of, even when they seem to have nothing to do with the story or even its main character.  There are large sections of Sandman where Morpheus is barely present or absent altogether.  And it works.  It’s necessary.  It’s the reason the story is so amazingly good.

Then, somewhere about halfway through, it explodes into brilliance.  The sort of brilliance that only exists in stories that are getting published as you go, forcing you to live with decisions you’ve already made and find a way to wave them together into something that works.  I’m not saying Gaiman had no plan.  I’m sure he did.  But the way those plans get executed when half of the ship is already out of port is very different than when you can go back to the beginning and make things line up.

The moment of brilliant explosion is “Brief Lives”, where Dream goes on a reluctant journey to find his brother Destruction who had abdicated his duties long ago.  Destruction is the very opposite of Dream;  even when it would be better for everyone around him, Dream simply cannot turn away from his responsibilities.  Destruction is foreign to him.  The sibling who offended the entire clan by thumbing his nose at the family business.   And yet, in Destruction may lie Morpheus’ only hope for happiness.

And underneath all that?  “Brief Lives” is about death, and how we deal with it and how random and unfeeling it be.  We see human who has been in most respects immortal finally face death and his final thought was something like “Not yet!”  Its musings on death and loss and acceptance and forgiveness hit me in such a personal place that Sandman became more than excellent writing to me.

By the time we reach the story’s climax in “The Kindly Ones” we’ve come to know Morpheus better than we’d expect to know some immortal embodiment of a cosmic force.   We really care about him, and as the choices he’s made since his escape start to close in on him we hope fervently that he can accept the person he’s become and just frakking change.

In fact, “The Kindly Ones” is another one of those things that only happens in really good episodic stories, where all those tangents and digressions that seemed neat but inconsequential can add up to something much more.  Would we accept the odd little side story of the escape of Loki and Dream’s offer to allow him freedom as long as Loki remembered that he owed Morpheus something if this had been a novel?  I don’t know, but in a story broken up into nice chunks we take it in and allow it to pass away, expecting it never to return.  And we’re fine with that.

And then when, as it does in “The Kindly Ones”, it returns full force, we get a chance for that surprise/delight that stories strive desperately for.  When one of the forces arrayed against Morpheus turns out to be Loki, and when his reason is simply that he can’t stand owing anyone anything, we feel like this big tapestry has come together better than it seemed it could.  All of “The Kindly Ones” is like that, pulling together tiny strands that were just thematic grace notes way back when and revealing them to be the point of the whole damn story.

It leads us all to a quiet moment between Dream and Death on a cliff, where Dream accepts that he’s either going to have to change or die.  And he chooses.

There are a thousand other little things in Sandman that I couldn’t possibly cover that made this so important to me.  The way each of the Endless not only embody their domains, but come off as actual characters in the process.  The beautiful relationships you can find in unlikely places, like between Morpheus and his raven Matthew.  The way the mortals are important even after they stopped mattering to the story, like Rose Walker and her tiny moment of heartbreak in the middle of the big honking epic of “The Kindly Ones.”  Or Delirium, who was so genius of a character that she’s tainted comics with pale likenesses ever since.

When I write fantasy, I want it to feel in my readers like Sandman felt to me.  When I write episodic stories, I want to have that planned/unplanned magic that seemed to be the engine of Gaiman’s work.  When I think of comics, I want to feel the way I did when I was reading Sandman, even though I never have since.  Sandman is the very definition of what great storytelling should look like, even if that’s not how it looks to everyone else.

Sandman changed how I look at my own writing.  Kudos, Mr. Gaiman.

You know the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the apes find the towering black monolith and are instantly evolved into violent, tool-and-weapon wielding man-apes?  I’m beginning to believe that at some point in the 1970’s, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and a handful of others wandered into the desert in California and came across one of them.  There, like the apes did with the animal bones, the filmmakers learned the secret art of using a camera to bend entire genres of film to their will.

I can think of no other explanation for what began with The Godfather in 1972 and ended 10 years later with Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, E.T., The Road Warrior, Tron, The Thing and, of course, Blade Runner.  Over the course of 10 years, these hyper-evolved directors set about to remake our entire view of film.  Or maybe they never intended to anything of the sort, but under the power of Kubrik’s strange Jovian artifact, simply had no other choice.  Think of a genre of film.  Any genre.  I bet you can trace its modern inception back to that decade, with little to nothing of note added to it since.

Mob movies?  Space opera?  Cyberpunk?  Post-apocalyptic?  Horror?  Action?  Sword and sorcery?

It’s not that there haven’t been important movies since 1982.  There have been dozens.  But for a decade, giants walked the lands of southern California and gave us images we would be unable to escape even 30 years later.

I watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut last night, which is probably only the third or fourth time I’ve seen the film.  But I could remember almost every major beat of the story as if I had watched it once a year, every year, since I first saw it.  I knew its cityscapes and its sets.  I remembered its origami and its plastic coats and its otherworldly music.

Of all the films that burnt themselves into the minds of moviegoers in those years, only Star Wars was as influencial as Blade Runner, and there’s a part of me that wonders if Blade Runner wasn’t actually the more influencial of the two.  Something about Blade Runner crossed internatial boundries in a way that even Star Wars did not.  Look at anime, where they not only wholeheartedly embraced Blade Runner’s aesthetic, but latched onto its story hooks and thematic conflicts like they had been waiting for this final piece of the puzzle the whole time.  Hell, Bubblegum Crisis not only used the idea of hunting down rogue robot servants, but named one of its main characters after one of Blade Runner’s replicants: Pris.

None of this is the film itself, but its legacy.  But part of what makes a film a classic is the legacy it leaves, and on that bsis alone, Blade Runner is one of the great cinematic classics, the likes of which we rarely see.  Is it a good movie, though?

Thankfully, yes.  It is not only a visionary film but a powerful, emotional one as well.  Stripped of its visuals and its music and its production design, Blade Runner is still classic science fiction.  It tells the story of the consequences of making robots so human the distinction is no longer relevant while treating those creations as slaves.  The humans of the world don’t even bat an eye about the preprogrammed life span limit of four years, even though the reason for it is that they are so human that if they were allowed to live longer they might gain memories and a personality of their own.

In other words, they have to die to keep them from becoming the same as us.  How could you enslave something that you aren’t at least superficially different from?

The plot of Blade Runner is one of those simple science fiction plots meant to give structure to a philosophical conundrum.  The meat of the story is in its questioning of humanity; specifically, what makes something human?  But this is accomplished through a simple, tightly filmed investigation.  Four off-world replicants have escaped and come to Earth, and a Blade Runner named Decker must find them and execute them.

No, I’m sorry, not execute.  Retire.

This is one of Harrison Ford’s classic film performances, though to be fair he carries the least emotional weight of the film.  Decker exists to be changed by the events of the film, to be that unfeeling hunter who finally comes to understand that his prey may be more human than he is.  Because of this, Decker seems to have little emotional range, at least not until the end of the film.  Making a character like this memorable isn’t easy, and Ford’s presence is the difference.

The real star of the show is Rutger Hauer, who plays Roy Batty, the leader of the escaped replicants.  His portrayal gives us a character that changes in our perceptions more than he changes his performance.  Roy seems a borderline psychopath at the film’s onset.  A killing machine built too well to stop, driven mad by his mission.  All of this is true, too, and that Hauer never undercuts the killer within his character but shows us a passion for life that explains it keeps the film from becoming simplictic or trite.  Roy has simply come to the end of a four year lifespan and is desperate to find any way to extend his life.  If he has to kill the humans who created and enslaved his kind to do so, he will.  And if he can show them what it means to live in fear…well, perhaps that’s justice.

Blade Runner is beyond a great film.  It’s a perfect one.  It’s a film so measured, so assured in its construction and intent that it makes the movies around it seem paler by comparison.  There are movies that I love that, when I watch a film like Blade Runner, I’m forced to rethink a bit.  I don’t love those other films less.  I just put them back into perspective.  There are great films and then there are transcendent ones.  Blade Runner is the latter.

See it for the breathtaking visuals, visuals that still look amazing 25 years later.  See it for its characters, for its musings on the nature of humanity and life.  See it for its set design, its sound design, its entire aesthetic.  See it because you’ve probably already seen it, reflected and muted through a hundred other films.  See it because its one of the best films ever made.

See it because you’ll probably love it.

I leave you now with one of the best lines in a film ever.  One of the most heartbreaking and poignient.  The last lines of Roy Batty, spoken to Decker on the roof of a tall building, in the rain:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments will be lost in time, like tears…in the rain. Time to die.

Television gets a bad rap. I can’t say its reputation for superficial stories and sensationalistic plotting is undeserved, either. The problem with television is systemic; television exists to sell ad space, which means the shows broadcast have to be good at keeping viewers in their seats for as long as possible. At best, viewers who turn on a channel should keep watching that channel from show to show. The best way of keeping viewers in their seats is not to present them with challenging art. It’s to put them into a trance. Flip through the dials and you’ll find that most television are carefully crafted to engage just enough of your brain to keep you watching, and no more.

The bad guy in television is not the medium itself, but the economic interests that fund it. Great television is possible, just not regularly profitable. Great art forces its viewers to think. Great art may bother people enough not to watch it. Great art may even cause its supporters to turn off the television when it’s done to give them some space. To let them meditate on what they’ve just seen. Meditation with the television off does not sell Clorox.

Every so often, a great show slips is way onto a fall schedule. Most of the time, it gets canceled before it gets a full season. A lucky few make it beyond that, either due to great ratings or that rarest of factors: a networking executive who appreciates art and is willing to take a hit in the wallet for the boost it gives to the image of his or her network. Homicide: Life on the Street stayed on the second way, lasting seven years despite lackluster ratings.

The West Wing survived the first way. It got great ratings, despite its often challenging subject matter. It did so because it cloaked its ambitions in humor, great direction and compelling characters. Despite all of this, though, the challenging part of the equation eventually got its creator and lead writer, Aaron Sorkin, fired. With him went his co-producer and best director, Thomas Schlamme. The thing with challenging art is that it’s as much of a challenge to create as it is to absorb; Sorkin’s show had budget and deadline problems that became more important to the network than the fact that they were producing one of the best shows on television. After all, the point was to sell ad space. A brain-dead show with the same ratings as a good show made just as much money. Why bother to let a good show be expensive and late when you can make more money by making it cheaper and less good?

What you lose when you sacrifice quality for dollars is the chance to get an episode of television like “Two Cathedrals.” The West Wing was, for all of Sorkin’s tenure as producer, an expertly written show. Sorkin’s dialog was consistently top notch, and the regular use of steadicam “walk and talks” kept things moving even when you had scenes whose sole purpose was to educate on the obscure political topic du jour. The show was also well plotted as a rule, mixing season long arcs with multi-episode and stand-alone stories in such a way that a newcomer has a lot to enjoy while they get up to speed. In fact, I came in mid-season two and, despite not knowing much of anything about the characters who earlier plots, was stuck in my seat nonetheless. What I’m getting at is that it was all really, really good. It was so good that it’s easy to misjudge just how good “Two Cathedrals” really is. It might look like just an exceptional episode of The West Wing. It’s not. It’s one of the best hours of drama ever filmed.

The West Wing followed the presidency of Jed Bartlet. It picked up during his first year as President, introducing us to his staff and the daily problems they faced. In early season 1, something was revealed that would fuel much of the later drama of the series. Bartlet had Multiple Sclerosis and had kept it secret during his campaign. When we learn of it, we also learn that only 14 people have been told. His doctors, his family, and the highest ranking members of his cabinet. For a long time, little attention is given to Bartlet’s MS. It’s relapsing remitting, meaning between attacks he’s fine, and his attacks are rare.

The MS poses a problem, though. When it comes time to reveal it to the public, will they be able to accept it? Were laws broken when it was not disclosed? Will Bartlet run again, despite his own fear and a promise to his wife not to seek reelection? And can he be expected to make this decision when his long time friend and assistant Mrs. Landingham dies just days before he must announce?

“Two Cathedrals” is a dense 42 minutes, and for most of it we’re with Bartlet. While he wants to run again, feels that his work his unfinished, doubts plague him. He’s worried about what this revelation will do to his family and to his staff. He’s worried that the public might not accept his reluctance to disclose a personal health problem. And he’s worried that, even if he does seek reelection, that he might lose. If he doesn’t run, at least his Vice President Hoynes has a shot at winning. And through all of it, Barlett remembers his first meetings with Mrs. Landingham when she is brought in as a secretary at his high school. And he remembers the way she challenged him then.

Two scenes stand out. The first follows Mrs. Landingham’s funeral. Bartlet orders the National Cathedral cleared so he can take a moment alone. Then he turns to the alter and begins an angered speech to God, mixing Latin with his own words. Bartlet is a religious man. He once considered going into the catholic seminary before meeting the woman who would become his wife. Bartlet’s anger at God isn’t borne of a weak, shattered faith, but of a man who’s conviction has left him confused and bitter. Gratias tibi ago, Domine (Thank you, Lord), he says, cursing the will of God that took Mrs. Landingham in an accident on the very day she bought her first new car. Haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito (Am I to believe these things from a righteous God, a just God, a wise God), he asks. Have the things he’d done for people in his country not been enough? Has he not been a good father? Was the assassination attempt just a year before that almost killed a staff member just a warning shot? Furious, he calls God a feckless thug. Then, remembering his father admonishing him for smoking in the cathedral at his school, Bartlet lights a cigarette, takes one pull and stomps it out on the floor. “You get Hoynes,” he says, and leaves.

The second scene takes place hours later, just before he’s due to announce whether he’ll be running for president again. He has a press conference and one of the reporters is bound to ask the question. To make it easier for him, the press secretary tells him to call on a health reporter for his first question, allowing him to answer a different question with some follow-ups, giving him time to get comfortable. Then he’s left alone in the Oval Office to think.

A freak tropical storm is battering Washington, and the door leading outside blows open due to a bad hinge. The storm blows wind and rain into the office. Bartlet shouts for Mrs. Landingham to close it. As he realizes she’s never going to be there again, Bartlet imagines her there. And, as goofy and cliched as it sounds, begins a moving conversation with the vision of his old friend that puts him back on track. “God doesn’t cause car wrecks and you know it,” she says, “Stop using me as an excuse.” They begin to talk about the problems still left to solve, about the things Bartlet is still passionate about. Then she accuses him of something she had accused him of as a child.

“You know, if you don’t want to run again, I respect that. But if you don’t run because you think it’s gonna be too hard or you think you’re gonna lose, well, God, Jed, I don’t even want to know you.”

The conversation ends, and Bartlet walks out into the storm, letting the rain and wind batter him. It’s time to go to the press conference. In two scenes, neither lasting more than 5 minutes, Sorkin gives us the full progression of Bartlet’s doubt and fears without cheapening anything. The speech in the cathedral, I think, should sound familiar to anyone of faith who’s had to face trials that seem to refute their beliefs. And Bartlet’s impassioned conversation with a memory of his friend reminds him and us of how difficult it can be to separate out the good reasons for not doing something from the fear and doubt that usually hangs us up. There’s not a bad moment of writing in the episode, but those scenes are as good as anything I’ve ever seen scripted.

One last thing, to end this article and the episode. In one of his flashbacks, as Mrs. Landingham tries to convince him to help increase the wages of the women at the school, Bartlet puts his hands into his pockets, looks away and smiles. Mrs. Landingham knows the sign. He’s made his decision and he’s going to do it.

When he arrives at the press conference, he takes the stage and looks at the health reporter he can call on first to give himself some breathing room. He doesn’t call on him. The first question comes: “Are you going to run for a second term?” Bartlet puts his hands in his pocket, looks away and smiles. The episode, and the season, comes to a close.

That’s what they call a home run, folks.

Storytelling – especially the kind overseen by large corporate entities – can get stale and rote quickly. When you boil enough of the fat off of them, most stories are revealed to have pretty similar structures and concepts lurking beneath the surface. Man is wronged and seeks revenge. Man experiences loss, but finds love while overcoming that loss. Farmboy is prophesied to save the world. Making these ideas fresh and interesting is a delicate and subtle art. So it’s not surprising that, every once and a while, writers go a little crazy.

This madness often leads to the High Concept story. Eschewing traditional setups, the High Concept story throws a lot of energy into big, flashy up front ideas. Billy Pilgrim is Unstuck In Time. The World Is Ending Tonight. I Shrunk The Kids. An Android Was Sent Back In Time To Kill Me. Some writers, in fits of temporary insanity, produce one or two of these in their career. Some oscillate between more standard storytelling and High Concept regularly. But most of the High Concept stuff out there is created by a handful of writers who specialize in the stuff.

Of the High Concept writers working today, Charlie Kaufman may be the best. The ideas in his stories are so mind bogglingly odd that it’s hard to believe an actual good story can come out of them. Yet, of his 5 produced screenplays, 2 are outright classics and the others are, at worst, ambitious failures. While most High Concept writers get lost amidst their own monolithic ideas, Kaufman consistently finds the quiet and insightful details his concepts reveal.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, to me, his greatest achievement. Like all of his work, the basic concept can be summed up in a few splashy, marketing-friendly sentences: Distraught and angry over their breakup, Joel and his ex-girlfriend Clementine undergo a procedure to have his memory their memories of each other removed. But as the procedure begins and Joel relives his memories with Clementine, he begins to wonder if this is what he really wants.

It’s a big idea. A character takes an extreme action to remove the painful memories that are plaguing him. Like all High Concept stories, Kaufman’s story takes an understandable human problem and increases the scope so far that it can work through it abstractly, avoiding the quagmire that too much reality can sometimes lead to. The problem with big ideas is that they’re often sufficiently large as to distract the writer from grounding it properly. There is a graveyard somewhere full of stories like this: high, interesting concepts without a shred of real human emotion. The danger of an idea like Spotless Mind’s is that the concept can intoxicate you, making you think the idea itself is the story instead of the framework for the story.

Kaufman, though, understands that the way to make a Big Idea work is to explore it from every angle possible. Spotless Mind could have stuck with just Joel and Clementine, exploring his memories as they were erased and letting the possibility of his truly never remembering her be the only tension in the story. With just Joel and Clementine, he could have made some kind of point about our memories being too precious to erase, made us believe that forgetting our mistakes will just lead us to the same mistakes again.

Instead, Spotless Mind juggles about 5 plots at once, all tied into the theme of erasing the memories of our own pain. These stories introduce us to the employees of Laguna, Inc., who have turned memory loss into a business. People whose lives are literally tangled up in the themes of the film. Like Patrick, one of the technicians who do the actual erasing. Part of the procedure of memory erasure involves learning as much as possible about the memories being erased, so that those memories can be easily located and eliminated. While Clementine was being wiped, Patrick was doing the wiping. And learning all about the things Joel had done to make Clementine fall for him. The thing about memory erasure is that it only really works if you don’t remember that you had the procedure done at all. So, when Patrick comes calling and pushing the exact same buttons Joel did, Clementine can’t help but fall for him.

Or what about Mary, one of Laguna, Inc.’s nurses? She’s fooling around with Stan, another technician, at the same time that she’s harboring a crush on Dr. Mierzwiak, the inventory of the procedure. But what neither Stan nor Mary remember is that Mary’s gone down this road with Dr. Mierzwiak once before…

Every turn the story takes shows us another way of thinking about the theme. Saying that wiping the memories of your pain away is easy. Obviously we’re going to get behind that. But to really make us feel it, not just from one angle but many, is a true accomplishment. Joel is the central figure in the story; our point of view as we experience the slow-building horror of having your past taken from you. Without Joel, the issue is intellectual. Distant. Joel lets us feel it. But the other characters make us believe it.

Beyond Kaufman’s insightful exploration of his own concept, Spotless Mind also supplies us with some truly bizarre and wonderful ideas. High Concept stories often fail here as well, giving us a big idea explored through yawningly mundane moments. Spotless Mind makes our trip through Joel’s memories as strange and off-putting as it should be. Touching scenes of Joel and Clementine’s past are broken up with trips into his deep past as Joel tries to hide his memories of his lover amidst unrelated memories.

An example, you say? Very well. At one point Joel tries to hide Clementine in a memory of himself as a child, hiding under the kitchen table. Adult Joel is dressed in his little-boy pajamas, acting like a little kid, while Clementine finds herself in the roll of Joel’s mother. Clementine’s reaction says it best: “This is a little warped.”

Warped, yes. Also wonderfully rooted in psychology that makes sense and tied to memorable images. Kaufman gives us literally everything we need from a story with a concept this big. He gives us everything from inventive set pieces to painful character moments, and every one of them ties right back into his High Concept. This is how it’s supposed to work. This is the kind of story that makes us want to like High Concept stories when they come out, even when most of them can’t get past their own marketing pitch.

It’s not just Kaufman who makes this story succeed. Spotless Mind is definitely a writer’s film in a lot of important ways, but it would fall flat on its face without the right director actors. Michel Gondry’s direction is somehow minimalist and extravagant at the same time. His lighting and color palette seem almost documentary for much of the movie, yet he mixes in surreal visuals throughout that remind us that this is certainly not reality. And he pulls performances out of his actors that are both subtle and surprising.

Jim Carrey is understated in a way that I’ve never seen. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’ve known the man can act for a long time. But even in his best roles, Carrey brings an energy that’s his signature. In Spotless Mind, he seems a man who may have never had that energy at all. Even if he had it, though, he’s been broken of it. And Kate Winslet, who plays Clementine, maintains a balance of cruel selfishness and alluring beauty that is so true to the kind of people Clementine is based on that the skill it took to pull off is easy to miss. It’s no secret I’m madly in love with Kate Winslet, but even as a fan I can say I haven’t been this impressed by her in a long time.

Gondry also pulls surprising performances out of his supporting cast. Kirsten Dunst, an actress capable of some really banal performances, has a delicacy here I wish she could bring to all of her rolls. Elijah Wood plays Nice Seeming Creep well enough to make you forget how cuddly he was as Frodo, and if you didn’t notice Mark Ruffalo before seeing this movie, you’ll be seeking him out after. As for Tom Wilkinson…well, the guy is always amazing, so he’s just as great here.

Spotless Mind is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It’s heartbreaking and hopeful. It’s more terrifying than most horror films. It tells a love story that is so un-Hollywood that you may not even like the idea of Joel and Clementine together. Which is the point, isn’t it? These two were poisonous for each other, but something attracted them enough to let them get hurt. If they don’t remember each other, and don’t remember what went wrong, what’s to stop that from happening all over when they meet again?

There are things out there that move us deeply.  Films and books and poetry and music that stick with us longer than all the others.  Some of them are considered classics by almost everyone, and some are so obscure that we feel a rush when someone else has even heard of them.  We all have our own reasons for why something matters to us.  It may be because of how it made us feel,  it may be because of what it meant to an art form that we loved, or it could be a mix of both.

I want to talk about the things that matter to me.  Art is a very special illusion, created both by the author and by the audience.  They show, and we take what they’ve given us and translate it as best we can.  Sometimes we fail to figure out what the artist is trying to show us, but occasionally their work becomes larger and more important because how we, personally, view it.

This is a space for me to discuss the illusions that matter most to me.  If I’m lucky, maybe I can show you something new, or maybe show you something old through new eyes.  But mostly, I’ll get to revisit those grand illusions that make me who I am.  That would be enough.